Edwiser RemUI vs. Adaptable Moodle Theme: Which Moodle Theme To Choose in 2023

Tejas Patil

Are you confused between the two popular Moodle themes, Edwiser RemUI and Adaptable, for your e-learning website? 

Choosing one of them can be a tough call since both themes offer their users diverse features, and both have built a reputation for themselves.

However, by the end of this post, it won’t be too difficult for you to choose between these themes. That’s because here we will compare Edwiser RemUI and Adaptable themes and determine which one can be the best choice for your e-Learning site. Let’s begin! 

Edwiser RemUI vs. Adaptable Moodle Theme Comparison 

There are several factors that must be kept in mind while comparing the themes, such as UI, customization capabilities, reliability, support, etc. So, in the following sections, we’ll deal with all these criteria and helps you choose the best one among the two: 

#1. Layout and UI

Layout and UI play a great role when choosing a theme for your website, as it is the first thing that catches the eyes of your visitors. So, let us see how these two themes fair on the following criteria: 

User Interface

One look at the UI of both Edwiser RemUI and Adaptable, and it becomes clear that the UI of Edwiser RemUI has a more polished and well-designed look than the Adaptable theme. It offers a much better view in terms of typography, color schemes, demos, and everything. 

Edwiser RemUI demo

Adaptable, on the other hand, has a much simpler UI. It is a perfect choice for those who want to have a classic and minimalist UI. Since it’s a fork of the BCU (Birmingham City University) theme, it’s capable of being used for setting up even sophisticated university sites despite its simple UI. 

Adaptable theme demo

However, Adaptable comes with a single pre-built demo, while Edwiser RemUI includes multiple demos. All the pre-built demos offered by both themes can be imported using a demo importer in both themes. 

Number of layouts 

Even though you can build a new layout from scratch in both themes, it is pretty much time-consuming. Therefore, pre-designed layouts are always handy when starting your Moodle site. This is the reason why pre-designed layouts also become an important aspect of a theme’s functionality.

Here are the number of layouts provided by both themes: 

Edwiser RemUI

• 7 homepage layouts 
• 6 course page layouts 
• Single course enrollment page layout 
• Single course index page layout
• Single login page layout.

Adaptable

• Single homepage layout 
• 6 course page layouts 
• Single course enrollment page layout 
• Single course index page layout
• Single login page layout.

Long story short, Edwiser RemUI has a more polished UI and more layout options on offer compared to Academic. 

#2. Navigation

The navigation functionality of an eLearning site affects the whole learning experience. If a site is difficult to navigate, no one would want to learn through it. 

The navigation has two parts: Navigation inside courses and Switching between courses. 

Navigation inside courses 

The course navigation panel in Edwiser RemUI

Navigation inside courses allows the student to quickly go to any particular module or activity of the course. Edwiser RemUI offers a sidebar menu that helps in navigating to any part of the course, making it easier for the students to learn. 

Adaptable, too, has a sidebar for the same purpose. The student needs to click on the icon, and an expanded form opens up to let the student navigate inside the course, as shown above in the screenshot. 

Navigating between courses

All courses page of Edwiser RemUI

As far as switching between courses is concerned, Edwiser RemUI provides the student with a filter and a search bar just above the list of courses that makes navigating between courses a piece of cake. Adaptable shows all its courses on the front page instead. 

All courses of Adaptable 

#3. Customization Capabilities

There are 4 aspects that largely determine the customization capabilities of a theme: a real-time customizer, custom CSS and JS support, custom color scheme and font support, and a real-time customizer. Let’s see what these themes offer for each of these criteria: 

Live Customizer

The Visual Personalizer offered by Edwiser RemUI is a drag-and-drop page builder that helps you build your webpage from scratch in the blink of an eye. 

Edwiser RemUI Visual Personalizer 

You can simply drag and drop the desired elements from a sidebar into the main body area of the page to design your web pages as you want. This makes it possible to design a page from scratch without any coding knowledge. 

Block Region Builder of Adaptable

However, Adaptable allows you to define a custom layout by adding blocks with the help of a Block Region builder for the front page, footer area, dashboard, and course pages only. It’s not as easy to use as the Visual Personalizer of Edwiser RemUI and also doesn’t work for any other pages you may want to design.  

Customization blocks

The more customization blocks you have, the more freedom you get while designing your pages. While Edwiser RemUI provides more than 150 unique customization blocks that you can use to build your site as per your preferences, Adaptable has only 60 custom blocks in its library. As you can guess, you get much more flexibility to design your pages with blocks and elements of your choice when you choose Edwiser RemUI.  

Login page customization

The customizable login page of Edwiser RemUI

Both Edwiser RemUI and Adaptable have only one layout for their login page. However, Edwider RemUI allows you to change the appearance of the login page completely through its Login Page Customizer, while Adaptable does not come with any such options. 

The login page of Adaptable

Also, since the login page design of Adaptable is very basic, it may not sit well with you if you want your login page to have a modern appeal.

Custom CSS and JS support

Any kind of customization can be made to the Edwiser RemUI theme from the site settings functionality with the help of custom CSS and JS. If you know your way around these two, you can have endless customization possibilities. 

Adaptable too supports the use of custom CSS and JS to allow you to add your own code to the theme and customize the site according to your preferences. 

Basically, both themes are on-par with each other in this area.

Custom color schemes and fonts

Edwiser RemUI allows its users to change the overall appearance of the website with the help of custom color schemes and fonts. You can find all these options under the “Appearance” tab under Settings. 

Adaptable also allows the use of custom color schemes throughout the theme to alter the appearance of the site as per your preferences. Coming to fonts, Adaptable provides a wide range of Google Fonts to incorporate while building your site. 

Font Customizer by Adaptable 

#4. Responsiveness

Both Adaptable and Edwiser RemUI are 100% responsive Moodle themes that strive to offer you the best experience on all devices and screen sizes. This helps ensure that your learners never face any issues in their learning experience due to their devices. Both of the themes can make your site look good and work properly on laptops, desktops, smartphones, and tablets. 

#5. Compatibility and Stability

Compatibility with all popular Moodle plugins and various languages is essential to provide your users with a hassle-free experience. Also, the developers should be reliable and approachable enough to support the site owners in case of any kind of technical issues or bugs. Here’s how both the themes perform on this criteria: 

Updates

Edwiser RemUI developers are very serious when it comes to the improvement of their theme, and therefore they release updates to the theme almost every month. Each update either improves one or more aspects of the theme, enhances security, or sometimes fixes bugs. 

Adaptable theme, on the other hand, also releases regular updates but not as consistently as Edwiser RemUI. The latest release by Adaptable was 6 weeks ago. 

Moodle versions supported

All Moodle versions starting from 3.0 to 4.1+ are supported by both Edwiser RemUI, while Adaptable theme supports only recent Moodle versions (i.e., 4+). 

However, Edwiser RemUI doesn’t provide any support for versions older than 3.7, as Moodle itself doesn’t provide any kind of support for its legacy versions. So if you’re on those legacy versions of Moodle, we suggest you update your Moodle installation as soon as possible before using either of these themes on your site. 

Multilingual support

While Edwiser RemUI offers multilingual support, which helps user to publish e-learning content in any language of their choice, Adaptable does not offer multilingual support. This means that with Adaptable, you can publish your course content in English only. 

Apart from this, Edwiser also includes RTL support which allows you to publish your content in right-to-left flowing languages such as Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, etc., without any issues. Also, it’s translation-ready, so works well with Google Translate. 

#6. Reliability and Support 

Edwiser RemUI has robust customer support along with mostly positive reviews, which speaks a lot about its impeccable track record in customer support and service. Whenever you get stuck with something, you can write to their developers, and they respond within 2 working days with a solution.

On the other hand, Adaptable is not much reliable regarding customer service. They only provide support through the Themes Forum, and you may have to wait for a response if you get stuck somewhere. 

#7. Pricing

Edwiser RemUI is priced at $99 per year, while Adaptable is a free theme. Now, this explains the customer support and customization features of Adaptable are underwhelming in comparison to Edwiser RemUI.  

You get a full year of premium customer support with Edwiser RemUI at no additional price. Also, it has a lifetime license option for a one-time payment of just $299. 

However, Adaptable, being a free Moodle theme, has many great features. 

Final Thoughts: Which one to choose? 

Both Edwiser RemUI and Adaptable are unique in their own way and cater to the needs of their respective users. While Edwiser RemUI has an upper hand in terms of customization capabilities, layout, and UI, Adaptable offers a classic minimalistic appearance along with many free features. You can’t expect any better from a free theme. 

The following table provides a clear picture of the features included and not included in both themes and how they compare. 

We’d suggest that you try both demos provided by the themes to choose the one that works the best for you. The recent upgrade by Edwiser RemUI has made it even better than before by adding new demos and features. You can go through the demo of Edwiser RemUI here, and the demo for Adaptable is available here.