Craft CMS vs WordPress: Which Platform is Better for Your Project

Choosing the right Content Management System is a critical decision for anyone planning a web development project. There are two popular choices that we hear about from our partners often lately: Craft CMS vs WordPress?

We know each one for their strengths and never shy away from weaknesses, so it’s only fair that we share our knowledge and insight on this feat. Let’s compare these platforms across various aspects to help you make an informed decision.

After all, your system choice is one of the factors determining the success of the whole project! 

Quick Overview of Craft CMS vs WordPress

As a team of professional tech specialists, it’s our responsibility first to introduce you to the two content management systems.

WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, powering over 40% of all websites. Originally, WordPress started as a blogging platform, which laid the foundation for its user-friendly interface and content publishing features. Over time, it has evolved into a full-featured CMS capable of handling complex websites. It is open source, allowing anyone to use, modify, and distribute it freely. The WordPress core is open source and serves as the foundation for its flexibility, security, and the vast ecosystem of plugins and themes available to users.

What is WordPress?

WP is an open-source CMS with a wide range of powerful features. Over 43% of all existing websites use it, according to W3Techs. Known for its user-friendly interface and extensive plugin ecosystem, WP is a go-to choice for bloggers, businesses, and developers alike.

What is Craft CMS?

It is a more recent entrant in the content management landscape, gaining popularity for its flexibility and developer-centric approach. Craft CMS’s architecture and features—such as its modular design, high performance, and seamless integration with Craft Commerce—make it especially appealing to companies selecting Craft CMS for complex, scalable, or security-sensitive projects. Companies selecting Craft CMS often have in house developers or agency partners who benefit from its ease of creating custom plugins and integrations. Craft CMS focuses on providing a robust foundation for content creation and management.

Craft CMS vs WordPress: A Comprehensive Guide

Let’s get into the details. This guide will compare Craft CMS and WordPress across key features, security, flexibility, and more. While considering the 10-year age gap between the systems, it may be tough to compare them. But we did!

Themes and Plugins in WordPress and Craft CMS

Craft CMS

Craft CMS is known for its custom development approach, where developers can build custom solutions for specific project needs. In addition to custom builds, Craft has a curated selection of Craft CMS plugins in its plugin store, with a focus on quality over quantity to ensure reliability and security. Plugin developers are actively involved in the Craft community to drive plugin development that prioritizes secure integrations and high standards. Instead of duplicating plugins, Craft CMS encourages publishing plugins that provide unique or better functionality, and a community-driven approach to continuous improvement.

WordPress

WordPress has a huge library of themes and plugins. You can add new features and customize the look and feel of your website. There are many premium plugins and super useful plugins that extend site functionality and user experience. But you should update WP’s plugins regularly to avoid security vulnerabilities. The plugin store is a marketplace for free and premium plugins. Developers maintain and publish plugins to ensure ongoing compatibility and security.

WordPress vs Craft CMS Security & Stability

When it comes to security and stability, there’s some not-so-good news for WordPress users. Due to its large cms market share, WordPress is a frequent target for hackers, which increases the risk of security vulnerabilities. Its popularity exposes it to a few security flaws, especially related to outdated or unsupported plugins, making regular updates and maintenance essential to mitigate these risks.

However, WordPress has made significant improvements in recent years, with regular security updates and a large community dedicated to identifying and patching vulnerabilities. Still, the sheer number of plugins and themes available can introduce additional risks if not properly maintained.

Craft CMS

The system is known for its security-first approach. It provides a secure environment with features like enforced SSL, user permissions, and more. Craft prioritizes stability to ensure a reliable platform for content management.

WordPress

WP has made significant strides in eliminating security risks, with regular updates and a vigilant community. However, due to its popularity, WordPress sites can be more susceptible to security issues if not properly maintained.

Ease of Use

Craft CMS: Clean and Intuitive Interface

Craft CMS is known for its clean and intuitive interface, making it easy for users to navigate and manage their websites. Even an experienced content manager will appreciate Craft CMS’s intuitive and powerful features for content editing, which streamline the process and reduce reliance on external plugins.

WordPress: Familiar but Sometimes Overwhelming

WordPress offers a familiar interface for many users, but it can become overwhelming due to the abundance of options and settings. While the interface is user-friendly, many experienced WordPress users still encounter frustrations with its complexity, and even experienced WordPress users may find Craft CMS more seamless and easier to use out of the box.

Flexibility

Craft CMS is renowned for its flexibility and creativity, making it a top choice for developers and designers. It is ideal for building custom websites, as it allows developers to write custom modules that deliver tailored functionality and integrations beyond what standard plugins offer. The platform’s core functionality, combined with its efficient architecture, ensures that only necessary components are delivered. MVC ensures Craft CMS optimizes performance and scalability for every project.

Craft CMS

It provides a combination of flexibility and space for creativity, allowing developers to create custom code without the constraints of predefined structures. This flexibility makes it an excellent choice for complex and unique projects.

WordPress

WP offers flexibility through its extensive plugin ecosystem and built-in features, enabling users to make the development process easier and add various functionalities without extensive coding knowledge. It’s also possible to add third-party plugins! While it may not match Craft CMS in terms of absolute flexibility, it strikes a balance for many businesses looking to enhance their user experience.

Pricing

Craft CMS Pricing

The system operates on a licensing model with pricing tiers based on the project’s scale, impacting development cost. While it may involve upfront costs, this model can be cost-effective for larger projects.

WordPress Pricing

WP is open-source and free to use. However, costs may arise from domain registration, web hosting, premium themes, and plugins/add ons, depending on the project’s requirements.

Community

Craft CMS has a growing and dedicated community of users and developers. In addition, Craft boasts an active community on platforms like Discord, where members engage in support, knowledge sharing, and collaborative discussion.

Craft CMS

This content management system has a growing and dedicated community. While not as extensive as WP, the community is active, providing support and resources for developers and users.

WordPress

WP has one of the largest and most active communities in the CMS realm. The vast community ensures a wealth of resources, support forums, and a robust ecosystem of plugins and paid or free themes for content managers and developers alike.

SEO

SEO in Craft CMS

Craft CMS comes with built-in SEO functionality, making it easier to optimize your site for search engines. Craft CMS has advanced in the SEO game with its own elite SEO plugin, SEOmatic, which is considered one of the best SEO plugins available and offers a fully turnkey SEO system for craft websites. Craft sites and craft websites trump WordPress in terms of SEO performance, customization, and user experience. The SEO tools in Craft CMS are designed to optimize for both users and search engines, ensuring your site is accessible and effective for both audiences.

SEO in WordPress

WordPress offers a wide range of SEO plugins to help improve your website’s visibility. Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress, known for its user-friendly interface and comprehensive features. However, some believe that Craft CMS’s SEOmatic has blown past WordPress in terms of features and results, providing more advanced SEO capabilities for craft sites.

Accessibility

Craft CMS

The system provides accessibility features, allowing developers to create websites that cater to users with disabilities. However, implementation may require additional effort during development.

WordPress

WP is committed to accessibility, with ongoing efforts to make the platform inclusive. The availability of accessible themes and plugins facilitates the creation of websites that meet modern standards.

Performance and Speed

Craft CMS

Craft CMS is known for its robust performance optimization capabilities, allowing developers to fine-tune websites for speed and efficiency. However, Craft CMS requires a higher level of technical knowledge and technical expertise for setup and customization, making it more suitable for complex projects where advanced features are needed.

WordPress

WordPress offers good performance out of the box, with many plugins available to further enhance speed and caching. WordPress is often chosen for simple websites due to its ease of use and lower technical requirements, making it accessible for users with minimal technical skills.

Craft CMS Ecommerce Capabilities

When it comes to building a robust online store, Craft CMS truly stands out with its powerful ecommerce platform, Craft Commerce. Unlike many other content management systems, Craft Commerce is designed to integrate seamlessly with Craft CMS, providing a unified and user-friendly interface for managing every aspect of your online store.

With Craft Commerce, businesses can easily manage products, orders, and customers all in one place. The platform allows you to create custom product types, manage inventory in real time, and process payments through a variety of popular gateways. This flexibility means you can tailor your ecommerce solution to fit your unique business needs, whether you’re selling physical goods, digital products, or subscriptions.

Craft CMS ecommerce capabilities go beyond the basics, offering support for discounts, promotions, and loyalty programs—features that are essential for driving sales and building customer loyalty. Content editors will appreciate how intuitive it is to update product information, adjust prices, and track inventory levels, all from a user-friendly interface that streamlines day-to-day management.

Another major advantage is Craft CMS’s focus on search engine optimization. The platform is built with SEO best practices in mind, ensuring your online store is easily discoverable by search engines and potential customers. This means you can focus on growing your business, knowing that your ecommerce site is optimized for visibility and performance.

For companies seeking a highly customizable and scalable ecommerce solution, Craft CMS offers the tools and flexibility needed to create a truly unique online shopping experience. Whether you’re launching a new store or upgrading an existing one, Craft Commerce empowers you to build, manage, and grow your ecommerce presence with confidence.

Headless CMS Options: Modern Content Delivery

In today’s fast-evolving digital landscape, delivering content across multiple platforms and devices is more important than ever. Craft CMS offers a modern solution with its headless CMS option, giving developers the freedom to use Craft as a powerful content repository while delivering content to any frontend framework or device.

With Craft CMS’s headless capabilities, you can leverage its robust content management features and use the platform’s API to fetch and display content wherever you need it—be it a website, mobile app, or even IoT devices. This approach provides a flexible and scalable solution for businesses looking to create custom applications and seamless omnichannel experiences.

The headless CMS option is especially valuable for organizations that want to maintain a single source of truth for their content while distributing it across various channels. Craft CMS offers developers the tools to build tailored solutions, ensuring that content delivery is both efficient and secure. Performance and security are top priorities, so you can trust that your content will reach users quickly and safely.

Craft CMS’s headless CMS is highly customizable, allowing for integration with a wide range of technologies and platforms. This makes it a popular choice among web developers and businesses who need modern, flexible content management systems that can adapt to their evolving needs. When comparing Craft CMS to other content management systems, including WordPress, its headless capabilities often stand out for their ease of use, scalability, and developer-friendly approach.

Whether you’re building a single-page application, a mobile app, or a multi-platform digital experience, Craft CMS offers the modern content delivery options you need to stay ahead in today’s competitive market.

Main Similarities Between Craft vs WordPress

We at ProCoders talked to our developers to get more information on the similarities and differences of the two systems. While Craft content management system and WordPress differ significantly in certain aspects, they share some common features:

• Content Management: Both platforms offer robust content management capabilities, allowing users to create, edit, and organize content efficiently. Both also allow for flexible navigation structures, but WordPress can sometimes suffer from unstructured menus and excess tags, which may impact SEO and user experience.
• Active Communities: Both systems have active and engaged communities. Developers, designers, and users contribute to forums, share insights, and provide support.
• Regular Updates: Both platforms prioritize updates to enhance security, stability, and functionality. Regular updates ensure that users can benefit from the latest features and improvements.
• Template Engines: Both utilize template engines to manage the presentation layer of websites. Craft uses Twig, while WP uses PHP-based templates.

Alright, what about the differences? After all, it’s them that help business owners decide which CMS to use, right? Gladly, ProCoders experts provided info on that as well!

Key Differences Between the Two

While the two systems share similarities, their differences play a crucial role in determining the right fit for your project:

• Customization Approach: WP relies on a vast ecosystem of themes and plugins for customization. Its counterpart, on the other hand, focuses on development, providing coders with the flexibility to create tailored solutions. Craft CMS knew it would have fewer plugins than WordPress, so it focused on making it easy for developers to build custom ecommerce solutions and integrations.
• Learning Curve: Craft CMS, with its developer-centric approach, may have a steeper learning curve. In contrast, WordPress is much more user-friendly.
• Community Size: WP is proud to have one of the largest and most diverse communities. The other system, while growing, has a smaller but dedicated community.
• Licensing Costs: WordPress, being open-source, is generally more cost-effective, especially for smaller to medium-sized websites. The other system involves licensing costs, making it potentially more expensive for smaller projects.
• Flexibility vs. Ease of Use: Craft CMS prioritizes flexibility, allowing developers to have granular control over the structure and design of a website. WP strikes a balance by offering a user-friendly experience with a vast plugin ecosystem.

The final verdict is yours. But we sure can help you with more information for your unique case!

Conclusion

In the world of content management systems, it’s Craft CMS vs WordPress. Ultimately, it’s down to your project. One offers ultimate flexibility for developers who want a bespoke solution, the other a user-friendly experience with a huge community and an enormous ecosystem.

Think about your project scope, your team, and the features you need to make an informed decision that aligns with your goals and your business. And remember, we’re here for you and your business!