Summary
Templately and Responsive Starter Templates help agencies quickly build Elementor websites. Templately provides a wide selection of templates and the ability to collaborate with others in the cloud.
Whereas Responsive Starter Templates emphasizes providing a light-weight layout for each template, quicker deployment, enhanced performance, and supporting white label projects. Additionally, the Agency plan offers up to 1,000 websites making it an extremely economical choice for both emerging agencies/freelancers.
Selecting a starter template is not the only task. The selected template should speed up the launch of client websites without impacting performance or requiring extra customization.
Platforms like Templately and Responsive Starter Templates both offer ready-made Elementor website designed to speed up website creation using modern WordPress starter templates and starter templates for Elementor.
However, they take very different approaches when it comes to workflows, performance, scalability, and agency usability.
In this guide we will take a look at quality of templates, ease of use, speed, customisation needs and price points.
Templately vs Responsive Starter Templates: Quick Overview
Here is a quick comparison of Templately vs Responsive Starter Templates. Read this to get a better idea about the template and the plugin.
| Feature | Templately | Responsive Starter Templates |
|---|---|---|
| Builder Support | Elementor + Gutenberg | Elementor + Gutenberg |
| Elementor Structure | Mostly older section/column layouts | Modern Flexbox container-based layouts |
| Template Library | 6500+ templates | 250+ starter templates |
| Reusable Cloud Storage | Yes | No |
| One Click Site Import | Yes | Yes |
| Agency Workflow Focus | Collaboration & cloud reuse | Fast deployment & scalability |
| Performance Optimization | Moderate | Lightweight & speed focused |
| White Label Features | No | Available |
| Elementor Addons Integration | Works with Essential Addons | Integrated with Responsive Addons |
| Best For | Designers managing reusable assets | Agencies launching client websites quickly |
Responsive Starter Templates is the best plugin to import Website Templates – Get it for free.
Templately
Templately is a cloud-based template platform for WordPress that offers 6500+ ready-made templates for Elementor and Gutenberg. It offers templates for landing pages, WooCommerce, SaaS, portfolios, education, and more.
Templately also offers cloud storage for files, along with the rest of your thoughts, for easy retrieval later via MyCloud and Workspace.
It has one of the world’s largest template libraries and offers new tools that use AI to generate website content quickly and cost-effectively.
Responsive Starter Templates
Responsive Starter Templates is a WordPress plugin that is great for Elementor and Gutenberg. Users who want to build a website quickly with professionally designed layouts this plugin is for you.
In addition, it offers over 250 different website templates. There are templates for agencies, WooCommerce stores, healthcare, education, restaurants, portfolios, local businesses and more.
All of the templates focus on lightweight website development, are easier to customize, fully responsive, white-label, and provide a quick way for freelancers and agencies to deploy their customers’ websites.
One of its biggest advantages for agencies is scalability. The Agency plan supports usage on over 1000 websites, making it a cost-effective option for freelancers, web design studios, and agencies managing multiple client projects.
What Agencies Need From Elementor Starter Templates
When agencies are looking at Elementor starter template platforms, they see more than just the number of templates. The true value is how well the templates enable teams to quickly and effectively build, modify, and launch a client website.
Here are some of the critical features that agencies usually review:
- Fast Launch of Websites: Agencies need templates that can be used quickly with very little work required to be client-ready, simply by substituting branding, content, and images rather than beginning with a blank web page to create a website from scratch.
- Reusable Workflow: If your team builds a great agency website in week one, you want to be able to replicate that foundation for similar clients without starting fresh. The best template tools support this kind of systematized delivery, where the same layouts and reusable Elementor templates get adapted across projects rather than reinvented.
- Responsiveness of the templates: All templates should function well on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices without requiring excessive manual modifications after import.
- Lightweight Performance: With lightweight modern templates and a cleaner overall Elementor architecture, lightweight modern templates substantially improve load times, minimize DOM size and improve overall Core Web Vitals performance, making them ideal as fast website templates for agencies.
- White Labelling Support: It is important that agencies have the ability to remove references to third-party branding in their white-label dashboard, allowing for a more seamless and professional client dashboard.
For agencies, the best starter templates are more than just aesthetically pleasing. They enable greater workflow efficiency, faster web development, and overall faster delivery of client websites by providing a scalable structure.
Now we will review the two most popular plugins, Templately vs Responsive Starter Templates, and see which one is the perfect fit for agencies.
Template Library Comparison
Below, I have compared the plugin template library to see how they differ from each other.
Templately
Templately clearly stands out when it comes to template quantity. With 6500+ templates, the library covers almost every industry and website type imaginable.
It is a strong option for agencies that frequently work across different industries and need multiple design choices for clients searching for best Elementor template bundles and flexible agency website templates.
Responsive Starter Templates Plugin
Responsive Templates takes a more curated approach compared to Templately’s large-scale library. Instead of focusing on sheer numbers, the templates feel more structured around real business use cases and faster deployment workflows.
While browsing the collection, the layouts generally felt cleaner, more conversion-focused, and easier to adapt for Elementor templates for client projects. The designs also appear more streamlined, which helps reduce the amount of redesign work needed before launch.
Ease of Use for Freelancers & Agencies
The true value of the Elementor starter template for agencies and freelancers will come from how customizable and adaptable the templates are for use on actual client sites, especially for users searching for the best WordPress templates for freelancers.
Templately
Templately has over 6500+ fully built templates for both Elementor and Gutenberg. You can use these as a powerful resource to make your sites look amazing!
The library includes templates for agencies, consultants, WooCommerce stores, medical websites, education, restaurants, local businesses, and portfolios. Instead of focusing only on design variety, the templates are built to help freelancers and agencies launch fully functional client websites quickly.
But many of Templately templates still rely on Elementor’s old Section and Column layouts.
So they might look modern on the front end of the website, but their nested layouts can sometimes produce heavy DOM structures, requiring more adjustments when making responsive edits.
In addition, Templately does not have an agency-built-in feature (white-labelling), which means agencies cannot fully replace all plugin branding or create a personalized dashboard for clients.
Responsive Starter Templates
Responsive Starter offers 250+ high-quality templates for both Elementor and Gutenberg.
The template library includes agencies, consultancies, WooCommerce stores, medical sites, various types of educational institutions, restaurants, local businesses, and portfolios.
These templates are built to help freelancers and consultants launch fully functional websites for their clients in a fraction of the time it takes to design their own websites using only design templates.
One of the main benefits of using the Responsive Starter plugin is that it includes containers in the template.
This makes it cleaner, lighter, and easier to customize. Because of this new Flexbox structure, having a responsive layout and reducing all the HTML markup (DOM) size improves the performance of the agency’s websites over time.
Additionally, Responsive Starter Templates includes white label options for free, allowing agencies to deliver a more professional branded experience to their clients once their project is complete, which is useful for templates for web design agencies.
Performance & Website Speed
I conducted performance comparisons between the two plugins to ensure fairness by testing them in the same hosting environment and using two highly similar starter template library examples.
I activated only one plugin at a time to avoid unnecessary overhead and potential conflicts while testing both websites. After both websites were imported, I checked their performance on GTmetrix to see how well they loaded and how their page structure functioned, based on the loading performance scores.
The Templately template generated scores of approximately 71% performance and 90% structure with 2.6s LCP’s.
While the template provided a visually heavy page structure, the heavier-based section increased DOM size and led to longer load times.
Templately Performance
Responsive Starter Templates Performance
Responsive Starter Templates performed better than the Templately template with scores of approximately 81% performance and 98% structure with 2.1s LCP’s.
Responsive templates use containers and cleaner, flexbox-based layouts, resulting in more optimized, lighter page structures during testing.
While the test results from this study should not be considered entirely accurate, given the fact that testing results can vary based on hosting or optimization settings.
But it may help, to a certain extent, in determining how heavy the template architecture is in terms of overall weight, and whether there is a cleaner, lighter starting point for agencies focused on performance and core web vitals.
Pricing Comparison
Pricing is where this comparison shifts most significantly in Responsive Starter Templates’ favor for agency use.
Templately Pricing
Templately operates on a freemium SaaS model:
- Free (Starter): 2,612+ starter template items, 100 items in My Cloud, 1 Workspace, connect up to 2 sites.
- Premium: Starting at approximately $59.88/year for 5 sites, unlocking pro items, unlimited My Cloud storage, and unlimited WorkSpaces.
When it comes to the Premium subscription tier, if your agency is paying separately for each website, it will run up a considerable amount of money quickly.
For agencies with many websites, the Lifetime plan ($329.99 for unlimited use) is a viable option, but it does require a decent investment. Additionally, the AI credits consumed will be separate and possibly need to be topped off if you’re going to use them.
The subscription provides access to the core template and cloud infrastructure due to the internet’s structural independence in its architecture.
Responsive Pricing
The Responsive Starter Plugin is free. You can download it from WordPress.org.
- Personal Plan: $29.50/year for 1 site, full template access, Responsive Addons for Elementor included, and priority support.
- Business Plan: $39.50/year for 10 sites and all Personal features.
- Agency Plan: $59.50/year up to 1000 sites, all Business features plus white-label capabilities and Mega Menu.
For agencies managing multiple client websites, the Agency plan at $59.50 per year offers strong long term value.
Since the plan supports up to 1000 websites, the effective cost per site becomes extremely low as your agency scales.
Even if you manage just 100 client sites, the cost comes down to less than $0.60 per site annually, making it a highly cost efficient solution for growing agencies and freelancers looking for scalable starter templates for Elementor.
Which Platform Helps Agencies Build Websites Faster?
For agencies, faster website delivery directly impacts profitability. Both Templately and Responsive Starter Templates support one click imports and full website starter kits, but their workflows feel quite different during actual usage.
Templately
Using Templately provides a smooth workflow in Elementor for users, as they can browse, preview, and import templates within the editor. Templately provides additional benefits for teams that manage multiple reusable layouts across different projects, such as Full Site Import, MyCloud, and Workspace.
In addition to these features, the AI Builder can help speed up the initial setup of a new website by generating starter websites based on the information entered into a business description form.
The workflow is also highly dependent upon Templately’s cloud.
Although it is an excellent tool for teamwork, templates are primarily optimized around the Hello Elementor theme, which creates a stronger dependency on that specific setup rather than offering a more flexible theme-independent workflow.
Responsive Starters Template
Responsive Starter Templates take a more straightforward approach that is simply easier for being independent of additional services.
With ability to import templates directly to your WordPress administration panel, you can start building your site much more quickly than if you were importing via another host.
Newer features, such as the site builder, which allows you to create headers, footers, a 404 page, and a single archive page. Responsive Plus makes it easier to build an entire site within a single workflow.
For agencies managing multiple client projects, the lighter workflow and multi-site licensing structure make Responsive Starter Templates feel faster and easier to scale in day-to-day use.
FAQ
If you are looking for many different templates and an AI powered workflow, Templately is going to be the best option. If you prefer faster set up with light weight templates, and easy client management, Responsive Starter Templates will give you more value long term.
Most certainly! Both Templately and Responsive Starter Templates plugins work with WooCommerce sites and have many demo templates available that work with Elementor.
Yes. The Responsive Starter Templates plugin does allow you to rebrand the plugin from Cyberchimps to your company name, which helps to provide your clients with a more professional feel.
In general, Responsive Starter Templates plugin will perform better because its templates use simpler container designs that require less code overhead.
Conclusion
Both Templately and Responsive Starter Templates help agencies build Elementor websites faster, but they focus on different workflows.
Templately is better for users who want massive template variety, cloud collaboration, and AI assisted workflows. Responsive Starter Templates focuses more on lightweight performance, container based layouts, white labeling, and faster client website deployment.
For freelancers and agencies managing multiple projects, Responsive Starter Templates feels more scalable and cost effective, especially with support for up to 1000 websites in its Agency plan when comparing Templately vs Responsive Starter Templates.
If you enjoyed this article, then consider reading:
- How to customize website after importing Responsive Starter template
- Best WordPress Starter Templates to Build Websites Fast
- Introducing New Optical Store Starter Template
Try Responsive Starter Templates today and ease up on your client work!
