Edwiser RemUI vs. Lambda Theme Comparison: Which is A Better Moodle Theme?
A great theme is necessary for building a promising Moodle site. And when you search for great Moodle themes, you may stumble upon two names repeatedly — Edwiser RemUI and Lambda. While the latter claims to be the oldest Moodle theme on Themeforest with 400+ user reviews, the former is among the first most aesthetically appealing and professional Moodle themes anywhere (not just on Themeforest).
In such a situation, it’s pretty natural to be confused about which one to choose. If you are also navigating this dilemma of choosing Lambda or Edwiser RemUI, don’t worry. We’re going to provide you with an unbiased account of how both themes compare against each other so you can choose either of them as per your needs.
Edwiser RemUI vs. Lambda Moodle Theme: A Comparison
We’ll compare both these themes on many criteria, but all can be collectively organized into 5 categories. Those categories are layout and UI, navigation, customization capabilities, stability and customer support, and pricing.
Let’s start!
Table of Contents
#1. Layout and UI
Edwiser RemUI homepage
If you look at both Edwiser RemUI and Lambda side-by-side, it becomes clear immediately that Edwiser RemUI has a more modern interface than Lambda. The latter follows a more minimalist approach when it comes to the design of pages, while the former focuses on keeping things as polished as possible. Neither approach is better nor worse than the other, and you can choose either based on your preferences.
Lambda theme homepage
However, what makes the difference starker between both themes in this area are the following things:
Number of layouts
Edwiser RemUI is very generous when it comes to the number of layouts. It offers 7 homepage layouts and 6-course page layouts so that you can design your Moodle site with a layout of your choice. Then there’s one layout each for the enrollment page, index page, and login page.
On the other hand, the Lambda theme offers 2 layouts for the course index page and 5 for course pages — that’s all! There’s just one layout each for the homepage, course enrollment page, and login page. This lack of layouts for the homepage leaves you with just one option for the style of your homepage.
Number of demos
Edwiser RemUI includes dozens of pre-designed demos that can be imported quickly with their in-built demo importer to design your Moodle site faster. Once a demo has been installed, your layout and features are already in place, and you just need to replace the placeholder content with your content to send your site live. This significantly reduces the site development time and allows you to go online quickly.
Unfortunately, the Lambda theme falls short of expectations in this area. It comes with a single default demo design installed automatically when you install the theme, and then you can either stick with it or venture out on your own to design the whole site (or a few pages) from scratch if you don’t like what you see. This increases the amount of time needed for site development.
Responsiveness
Edwiser RemUI and Lambda are both 100% responsive Moodle themes. But that doesn’t explain the full picture. The responsive user experience is something that needs to be analyzed in detail, so we chose to do that, and we found something quite interesting.
We found in our analysis that while both themes can adapt to different screen sizes and resolutions, Edwiser RemUI adapts better to dozens of resolutions on various devices ranging from the smallest of smartphones to the largest of iMac displays. Lambda is responsive, but it properly adapts only to the most common screen resolutions and aspect ratios of smartphones and laptops only. If the screen size is too large or too small, certain elements in its design do not show up properly.
#2. Navigation
After layouts and UI, the next thing that matters the most in any Moodle theme is navigation because that’s what helps you find the courses and the content that you want to learn. So the theme you choose must provide the necessary navigation features to make it easy. Here’s how both these themes fare at this criteria:
Navigation inside courses
The course navigation panel in Edwiser RemUI
Edwiser RemUI provides great features to navigate between topics and subtopics inside a course. There’s a panel in the sidebar that shows up inside individual modules and activities, and it can be used to jump between the various modules of the course quickly. Besides that, each module includes buttons to navigate between the previous and the next one quickly.
Navigation features inside Lambda theme modules
Lambda theme, on the other hand, includes both a side panel as well as a dropdown menu and buttons at the bottom of course pages to jump to a specific section of the course. This makes switching between the various parts of a course much easier.
Jumping between courses
In both themes, you can navigate between various courses the site offers using the Course index page or the search bar included in the theme.
All Courses page of Edumy
Edwiser RemUI provides you with a course index page whose layout can be switched to 3 different options: grid view, list view, or summary view. You just toggle a button, and you get the view of your choice. You’re also given filters that can be used to sort or filter the courses as per your preferences based on category or name.
Course page index in Lambda theme
Lambda theme also provides two different layouts for its Course index page: grid layout and list layout, to be precise. However, that’s all you get. None of the layouts provides filters and sorting features like Edwiser RemUI to help you find the courses of your choice quickly.
In a nutshell, Edwiser RemUI’s navigation features and capabilities are better than Lambda’s.
#3. Customization Capabilities
The customization capabilities offered by a Moodle theme also matter a lot because they define how distinctive and unique your site can look from the competition. Here’s how both these themes compare in 4 major areas of customization:
Live customizer
Edwiser RemUI includes a live customizer (Visual Personalizer) that can be used to design any of your web pages in real time.
Edwiser RemUI Visual Personalizer
It’s like a drag-and-drop page builder you can use to build new pages from scratch within a few minutes. You can simply drag and drop the elements of your choice (i.e., text box, image box, or any of the other components included in the theme) from a sidebar into the main content area of your page, and the element is added to the page in the desired place.
The same thing also applies to the editing of existing web pages. While editing a page, you can apply your changes and preview them side-by-side to determine whether those changes are worth keeping or not.
Lambda theme, on the other hand, doesn’t include any such page builder or live customizer that you can use to alter the design of your pages or create new pages easily. You need to do those things in a complicated manner through theme settings only.
Customization blocks
Edwiser RemUI includes over 150 customization blocks to help you design the course pages of your choice. The block library has just about every popular kind of element that you may want to add to your pages, from simple text boxes to advanced things like 3D boxes or animated numbers.
Lambda theme, on the other hand, includes only a dozen customization blocks and elements developed using the Bootstrap framework that can work with it. They include popular elements such as carousels, dropdowns, alerts, etc., but still, the fewer number of elements significantly limits what you can or can’t do with your pages if using this theme.
Custom CSS and JS support
Edwiser RemUI supports the use of custom CSS and JS to allow you to use the power of custom code for making any other appearance or functionality-related changes in your site if they can’t be done through the in-built features of the theme. The Lambda theme, however, doesn’t provide this feature, and you need to meddle with the theme files to make such changes.
Custom color schemes and fonts
Both Edwiser RemUI and Lambda support custom color schemes and fonts. These changes are applied from the Settings screen of both themes and allow you to create a design that aligns with the brand identity of your eLearning site.
Login page customization
The customizable login page of Edwiser RemUI
Edwiser RemUI has a fully customizable login page that can be altered as per your preferences and even built from scratch using the features that are provided to customize it. You can change the location of the login form, use background images or colors of your choice and make it look even more distinctive with the use of custom fonts.
Lambda theme login page
Lambda theme also allows login page customization but in a limited manner. You can only change the colors and fonts of your form in line with the sitewide color scheme and fonts you have applied. Besides that, however, you can’t customize it much.
#4. Stability, Compatibility, and Support
Compatibility with the latest Moodle versions and plugins is one of the most important things that make a good Moodle theme. Also, the quality of customer support offered by the developers to help out the site owners when they face some problems is a crucial consideration. Let’s see how these themes fair on this criteria:
Updates
Lambda constantly releases new runtime versions, including security updates, bug fixes, and several other new features. A look at its changelog reveals that 4 updates have been released by them so far this year, which says a lot about the commitment of their developers to keep the theme secure and up-to-date.
Edwiser RemUI also releases updates almost every month to release some major features or fix any security vulnerabilities as soon as they’re discovered.
Moodle versions supported
Lambda supports all Moodle versions starting from Moodle 2.5 to Moodle 4.2, while Edwiser RemUI supports Moodle versions starting from Moodle 3.0 to Moodle 4.2+.
However, Moodle installations between 2.5 and 3.1 are not supported anymore by either of these themes. Moodle itself does not provide any support for its legacy versions, so it’s not surprising that theme developers also refrain from providing any kind of support for them.
Multilingual support
Edwiser RemUI and Lambda both come with multilingual support, which can help you publish eLearning content in any language of your choice. Both themes also support RTL languages, which makes it easy to publish content in languages like Arabic, Urdu, Hebrew, etc. Also, both themes are translation-ready.
Customer support quality and response time
The customer support and response time of Lambda are better than their competitors. After signing up with Lambda, you instantly get access to their community support portal, where you can find answers to your questions. Also, you can easily open a support ticket for the questions not answered in the community portal.
Edwiser RemUI also provides a support request form to seek customer support if you get stuck anywhere by opening a ticket. Also, you can approach them over email, and they respond to your queries within two days max. Like Lambda, they too have a vibrant community of users on Facebook that’s always available to help.
Simply put, both themes are very reliable when it comes to customer support.
#5. Pricing
The regular license of Lambda is priced at $59, while Edwiser RemUI is priced at $69.
Lambda offers 6-month support at this price and charges an extra $18.38 if you want to extend the support period to a year. You also get lifetime updates along with quality checks by Envato.
Edwiser RemUI, on the other hand, provides a full year of support at no extra cost. You pay only $69, and that’s it.
Or else, if you don’t want to keep paying again and again, Lambda offers an extended license at $2250 (expensive, isn’t it?). Edwiser RemUI, on the other hand, offers its lifetime license for only $299.
Final Verdict
Overall we can say that Edwiser RemUI has an edge over Lambda in almost all areas. It’s not only much more polished and well-designed but also has a larger block library and is easier to customize than Lambda. It also makes navigating through the content much easier. The recently released major upgrade of the theme also added several new demos and unique layouts to Edwiser RemUI, making it even better.
We hope you’re now in a much better situation to decide which Moodle theme to choose between Edwiser RemUI and Lambda. If you want to experience the points we’ve made above, check out the demos of both themes once. Then choose the one you like the most, and thank us later!
Read More: Edwiser RemUI vs. Space: A Comparison of Two Popular Moodle Themes, Edwiser RemUI vs. Edumy: Which Moodle™ Theme to Choose in 2023, Edwiser RemUI vs. New Learning Moodle Theme: Which One is Best for Your Moodle Site
Post Author
Ashish brings years of working experience with website backend systems and platforms to the table. He has used and reviewed dozens of LMS and CMS platforms. In his spare time when he is not reviewing or testing these platforms, he finds solace between the pages of books.
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