Craft vs WordPress, honestly

We only build in Craft, so treat everything here with the scepticism that deserves. But a comparison that doesn't concede anything isn't a comparison, it's a brochure — and there's already a great deal of that written on this subject by people with the same conflict of interest we have.

So: the places WordPress genuinely wins, first, and at proper length.

Where WordPress wins

It's cheaper to start, and sometimes that's the correct answer. No licence cost, an enormous supply of themes, and a plugin for nearly every conceivable requirement. For a small brochure site on a genuinely small budget, that's a real advantage. A studio that insists on a £10,000 custom build for a client who needed a £2,000 site isn't demonstrating standards, it's failing to listen.

You can replace your developer. This matters far more than agencies like to admit. If your build partner disappears — goes under, gets too busy, becomes unresponsive — the pool of people who can pick up a WordPress site is vast and available in every town. The Craft pool is good, engaged, and much smaller. That's a genuine risk you take on, and you should take it on knowingly.

The client may already know it. Familiarity has real value. A marketing team that's used WordPress for a decade will need less support on it than on anything new, however well designed the alternative is. Training time is a cost even when nobody puts it on an invoice.

The ecosystem solves unusual problems. Some requirement arrives that's specific to an industry — a particular booking system, a compliance integration, a regional payment provider — and somebody has already built a WordPress plugin for it. In Craft, that's often custom work.

Where Craft wins

The content model matches the design instead of the other way round. In Craft you define fields and structures to fit the thing you actually designed. In WordPress you frequently reshape the design to fit what the page builder can express, or you install something to bridge the gap and inherit its opinions, its markup and its update schedule along with its functionality.

That compromise is invisible in the finished screenshot and extremely visible eighteen months later, when the client wants a variation the builder can't express and the answer is another plugin.

The control panel is defensible. A well-modelled Craft install presents an editor with exactly the fields their page needs and nothing else. The default WordPress experience presents a large surface area, most of it irrelevant to the specific site, some of it capable of breaking the design, and a good deal of it advertising other plugins.

This is the thing clients actually experience daily, and it's the thing they'll form an opinion about. That opinion attaches to whoever's name is on the project — which is yours, not your developer's.

The security surface is smaller, and it's smaller by design. Craft's comparative lack of plugins gets filed as a weakness in most comparisons. Operationally it's the strongest thing about it. Fewer third-party dependencies means fewer things that can be compromised, abandoned, or silently changed under you by a maintainer you've never met.

WordPress's scale also makes it a target in a way Craft simply isn't. Mass automated exploitation is worth someone's time when the install base is that large. It isn't when it's a fraction of the size.

Upgrades are predictable. This follows from the point above. A site with four dependencies upgrades cleanly. A site with twenty-five is only as upgradable as its least-maintained one, and it only takes a single abandoned plugin to hold a site on an old major version for a year.

Craft has fewer plugins. That's the point, not the compromise.

The editor experience, compared properly

This deserves more than a bullet because it's where the two diverge most and where studios are most often surprised.

In WordPress, the block editor is generic by design — it has to serve every site, so it offers a general-purpose set of tools and the theme constrains what they produce. The client can build almost anything, including things you'd never sign off, and the guard rails are whatever your theme happens to enforce.

In Craft, a Matrix field is specific by design. You define the blocks that exist. If the design has three heading levels, the editor offers three. If cards work at two, three or four across, those are the options. The client can't produce something off-brand, because nothing off-brand is available to them.

Which of those is better depends entirely on what you're selling. Maximum flexibility is genuinely right for some clients. If what you sold was a brand identity, constraint is the feature.

The question that actually decides it

For a design studio the decision is rarely technical. It comes down to this: are you selling a website, or are you selling the brand you just spent six weeks building?

If it's the first — the client needs a functional site, the budget is modest, the brand is not the point — WordPress is frequently the correct commercial answer, and we'd tell you so rather than take the work. There's no virtue in over-building.

If it's the second, the CMS needs to hold the design without argument. Because in eighteen months the website is the thing the client points at when they describe their brand, and every compromise made to fit a template is a compromise made to your work, in public, permanently.

The honest cost difference over time

Craft builds cost more up front. There's less to reach for off the shelf, so more of the site gets built deliberately, and deliberate work takes longer than configuration.

What tends to come back is a lower running cost. Fewer plugin licences renewing annually. Fewer emergency patches. Fewer of the small monthly failures that quietly consume a support retainer and make everyone feel the site is fragile.

Whether that trade pays depends almost entirely on how long the site is expected to live. Under two years, WordPress often wins on total cost and it isn't close. Over five, it usually doesn't. Most brand-led sites are built with a five-year horizon and replaced in seven.

What we'd actually tell you

Ask what the site is for. If it's a marketing site that carries the brand, that the client will edit regularly, and that needs to still look right in four years, Craft is the better instrument and the cost difference is recoverable.

If it's a small site on a small budget, or the client has a WordPress team already, or the requirement list is full of things with existing plugins — use WordPress, and use somebody good at it. We'd rather turn work down than build the wrong thing well.