I'm almost about to buy ThemeFrame but I wanted to ask this first:

What are the advantages of ThemeFrame over Artisteer?

I know there are already some threads here about Artisteer but I didn't find an answer.

Thanks

ThemeFrame offers more detailed customization I'd say while Artisteer is probably easier to use.
Artisteer may be better suited to create many, many themes, whereas TF may be better suited to create less but more fine-tuned, more ambitioned themes.

Artisteer can output to various CMS systems while ThemeFrame currently only outputs to WordPress. Few other CMS may follow in ThemeFrame but it'll never serve as many CMS as Artisteer does.

Artisteer is written in C# I think while TF is written in PHP/JavaScript. Theoretically ThemeFrame should be less performant due to this but in reality it has no effect because the things both programs do are quite lightweight compared to i.e. video games or video processing. From my observations Artisteer is not faster than ThemeFrame. Both are sufficiently fast.

Artisteer seems to keep away more "under the hood" things from the users whereas ThemeFrame's philosophy is to resemble manual coding more closely.

Artisteer is probaby the closest competitor of ThemeFrame. These two are the only standalone programs that create WP Themes, as far as I know. All the other products (Premium Themes, Theme Frameworks) are themes themselves and need to run inside WP.

One could argue that TF isn't really standalone because currently it requires a local web server environment like Wamp/Xampp/Mamp to run on. This is not as bad as it may seem though. You may want to run a Wamp/Mamp/Xampp anyway to test Themes, Plugins and Wordpress itself, locally. So even if you use Artisteer, you still may want to install Wamp/Map/Xampp anyway.

Artisteer is out of Beta but TF isn't (but close, Beta will be over within April 2011). You can see critical posts on the forums of both.

I have nothing bad to say about Artisteer. I am not an Artisteer-Expert though. Not everything listed above may be still accurate.

Hi Flynn,

thanks a lot for your very honest and substantiated answer.

Best regards and Grüße aus Hessen,
Karl

I own Artisteer and find it more cumbersome in that it takes quite a bit of time to hunt down the section where changes need to be made. For a novice this could be helpful and you could even "design" sites using just the suggestions but you generally end up getting a site that looks like it was created in Artisteer.

I've used Artisteer and although it is easy to use, you don't have the same level of customization that Themeframe offers. At least without havinf to find and to dig into code. I've used Artisteer though for clients who want a blog added to their existing site and want it to match as closely as possible but yet have very little money to spend.

It's quick and easy but to be honest I prefer ATA or may use Themeframe for this in the future. Reason is the goal is eventually to get them to move off their existing platform and 100% to WordPress. And then i recommend using ATA or Themeframe cause you're halfway there.