TheGem has been around since 2018. Codex Themes bills it as a “Multi-Purpose WordPress Theme” — the author's words, not ours. themesinfo.com's crawl of live WordPress sites shows it holding a steady, gaining spot among the few hundred most used themes we track.
A licensed builder theme, not a free repo pick
TheGem is a commercial, WPBakery-powered multipurpose theme for agencies and small businesses that want a finished design system rather than a blank canvas. It isn't on WordPress.org — you buy a license, usually through a marketplace, and support runs through Codex Themes rather than a community plugin repo. The company also sells a version built on TheGem (Elementor) for buyers who'd rather skip WPBakery entirely, which suggests builder lock-in worries enough buyers to need an answer.
Who actually ends up running it
The lean toward certain industries is real but mild. Agency and marketing sites show up most, followed by construction firms, nonprofits, medical and dental practices, photographers, and legal or finance firms — no vertical dominates. It reads as a theme for services businesses generally: client-facing sites built around home, services, portfolio and contact pages. A content-heavy blog or niche membership site isn't the typical install.
What it's actually good at
Plugin pairings support that reading. Contact Form 7 and WooCommerce both appear often, covering lead-generation and small stores alike, and Yoast SEO shows up on a solid share of installs — sites built to be found, not just admired. Revolution Slider and LayerSlider turn up heavily too, matching a theme sold on polished homepage demos: it's built to look finished on day one without custom development.
Where it starts to hurt
The same richness is the cost. js_composer, WPBakery's builder, appears on almost every install we can attribute; there's no option to skip it, and every WPBakery theme carries the same baggage — shortcode-heavy markup, painful migration later, and pages that slow as sliders and modules stack up. Sitting outside WordPress.org means support and future compatibility depend entirely on Codex Themes' own release schedule. And rising usage hasn't produced a large stable of child themes — customization mostly happens inside the builder's own settings, not through a wider community.
Built on WPBakery, not Gutenberg
Design happens through WPBakery's drag panel and TheGem's own bundled elements plugin, not the block editor — a deliberate choice, not an add-on. Anyone building a page learns TheGem's own modules rather than transferable Gutenberg blocks. Multilingual builds lean on WPML, which lines up with the theme's strong showing outside English-speaking markets, especially German, Spanish, French and Italian sites.
If you're weighing other options
For a similar builder-driven, agency feel, Extra and Kalium draw from the same crowd of creative and marketing buyers. Want a lighter footprint with WooCommerce built in from the start? Zakra is the leaner starting point.
Questions worth answering first
Is TheGem free?
No. It's a premium theme sold through marketplaces like ThemeForest rather than the WordPress.org repository, so there's no free version to test beyond a demo.
What page builder does TheGem use?
The core version runs on WPBakery Page Builder. Codex Themes also sells separate editions built on Elementor and a lighter WPBakery-only version.
Is TheGem good for a WooCommerce store?
It can run one — WooCommerce shows up on a modest share of installs we see — but it wasn't built shop-first. A WooCommerce-focused theme will need less workaround.
So, should you use it?
Pick TheGem if you're an agency or small business that wants a finished multi-page site fast, is fine with a paid license and renewal, and can live inside a proprietary builder long-term. Skip it if you want block-editor portability, a lean page, or fewer plugin dependencies — WPBakery, sliders, and the bundled elements plugin aren't optional extras here. They're the whole product.
Last updated 2026-11-05
