CraftCMS vs WordPress

These are the two most requested CMS solutions in my day to day projects, so I have a lot I can say about either of them. The most interesting aspect to me personally is how different their design philosophies seem to be, and how that is very clearly visible throughout the whole editing experience.

Design Philosophy

WordPress and CraftCMS originate from different beginnings and have evolved with distinct philosophies:

WordPress started out in 2003, and began as a easy to use blogging platform for the every-day blogger. Over the last 20+ years it's focus on ease and use and extensibility, have allowed it to evolve into a massive ecosystem of WordPress users, Theme and Plugin Developers and specialized Hosting Providers. Today, there's almost nothing you can't get done with WordPress, maybe there are some that you just shouldn't though.

The team behind CraftCMS formed in 2011 with the goal to build a well structures and well performing system with less assumptions about how their users might create websites. This makes it easier to build entirely custom web sites, without any unwanted features or extensions getting in the way.

Business impact

WordPress's broad familiarity and extensive community support make it cost-effective and easy to adopt. Its vast ecosystem — including prebuilt themes (or visual theme editors) and it's enormous plugin library — has great potential to both speed up initial development efforts, but also significantly slow down the website's performance when not carefully optimized.

CraftCMS offers many enterprise features already built-in, very structured content building, as well as high performance content queriying (and searching!). This makes it excellent, unopiniated starting point for the development of fully custom websites, with the potential drawback that features not available via the (comparably limited) plugin marketplace will put a bigger dent in your budget.

Editing experience

WordPress, nowadays, provides an intuitive interface with the relatively new Gutenberg editor, partially imitating an in-page editing workflow, where the preview of a content section is available right as you type in new content. Note that this is only the currently recommended way, of editing content in WordPress, with a long history of the relatively simple TinyMCE editor (think very basic word ) that brought along a huge selection of alternative ways to build with WordPress, that might be entirely different to what you might have come to expect from a previous project.

CraftCMS offers a streamlined and simple yet customizable editing experience across all defined content types, where a uniform content structure across large content collections is easily enfored. This allows you to more easily ensure the general quaity of content but potentially requires more training and/or custom development to add convenience features to the CMS. One example would be adding "matrix" content sections within other sections, a feature that has just landed in the CraftCMS core.

Developer experience

WordPress benefits from a large community and extensive resources, making development faster but potentially complex due to numerous plugins.

CraftCMS offers a more direct development environment with modern practices, that allows a team with the right skills to build sites with great performance and maintainability.

Maintenance

WordPress requires regular updates for plugins, themes, and core systems, which can be resource-intensive. Its large community offers ample support.

CraftCMS, with fewer updates due to robust core features, results in smoother maintenance but needs skilled developers for updates and customizations.

Performance

WordPress, though flexible, can slow down without optimization. Caching solutions like WP Super Cache and headless configurations with React or Vue.js can enhance performance.

CraftCMS, designed for speed, benefits from built-in caching and efficient code. Its headless setup with GraphQL supports dynamic, high-performing web applications.

Summary

The choice between WordPress and CraftCMS depends on your needs. WordPress offers flexibility and ease of use, suitable for diverse, content-heavy sites. CraftCMS provides performance and structure, ideal for complex content management. Evaluate your organization's requirements and capabilities to choose the best CMS for your digital strategy.

Not convinced either one is the right choice for you? Read on about all the best CMS options available in 2024.