Craft CMS vs WordPress: Which CMS is the best fit for your website?
WordPress is the world's most popular CMS, but for businesses that need tailor-made solutions, high performance and control, WordPress can be limiting. At Vasser we recommend Craft CMS as a flexible and professional alternative. Here we explain why Craft CMS is often the better choice for complex, tailor-made website projects.
In short
WordPress is the world's most popular CMS, largely thanks to a wide selection of affordable themes and plugins.
Nevertheless, there are good alternatives for those who want more advanced or tailor-made solutions. Craft CMS is an example of exactly that.
In this guide we compare WordPress and Craft CMS to help you find the solution that best fits your needs.
Why Craft CMS can be better for tailor-made work
Craft CMS is a publishing system particularly well suited to complex and tailor-made websites.
Here you have almost unlimited possibilities to shape functionality and content structure exactly as you want, and the content production tools are highly user-friendly.
Why WordPress still dominates
WordPress, for its part, is built on a cost-effective ecosystem of themes and plugins. This often makes it possible to get started quickly and affordably.
The downside is that this flexibility is largely tied to third-party solutions. That can make larger scaling and customisation needs more demanding in the long run.
Market developments
Although the use of Craft CMS is growing rapidly, not least in Norway, WordPress is still by far the most widely used CMS internationally.
At the same time, more agencies and businesses are now looking to Craft CMS when they need extra speed, scalability and control.
A shared technical platform
Both WordPress and Craft CMS are based on PHP and use an SQL database underneath. This means both systems can run on equivalent server infrastructure, which can make it easier to compare operating costs and hosting options.
The CMS is for people who like to take their time and do things right. It’s for those of us who truly approach our work with the utmost skillfulness and craft.
Brandon Kelly – Pixel & Tonic
Introduction to Craft CMS
Craft CMS is developed with full flexibility in mind. Instead of relying on predefined features – as WordPress often does with, for example, a blog section – you can build the structure you actually need. If you need a blog, you create one easily; if not, you avoid having to clear away redundant content. This approach makes Craft CMS especially well suited to tailor-made projects where usability, scalability and precise control over content are the focus.
The system has seen marked growth in recent years, especially among businesses and agencies that prioritise speed, security and a professional framework. Nevertheless, WordPress is still by far the most widely used CMS worldwide, and thus holds a solid market share compared with Craft CMS.
User interface in Craft CMS vs WordPress
A great many people have sooner or later encountered a WordPress admin panel due to the system's popularity. Our experience, unfortunately, is that there is very often broad use of free themes and plugins depending on individual developers spread across the globe. It is therefore not unusual for a WordPress site to contain outdated elements, and to be met already on the dashboard with various notifications about licence problems and version conflicts.
But in this case, for the sake of tidiness, let us take a clean WordPress installation as our starting point.
Image editing
Both WordPress and Craft CMS have tools for basic image editing.
Craft CMS, however, is much more intuitive to use, user-friendly and visually appealing. WordPress feels somewhat outdated in this area.
Craft CMS can also define a focal point on images to make sure that part of the image always remains visible (for example the eyes in a portrait).
Costs – licences and plugins
Craft CMS has an entry price of $299 (then $59 annually). WordPress, for its part, is free. This is the reason for WordPress's substantial market share.
WordPress is, however, often dependent on third-party plugins and themes to achieve advanced functionality, which can lead to conflicts and security problems. With Craft CMS the customisation possibilities are built in, so developers can easily create unique solutions without being bound by plugins.
Below are some examples of plugin prices:
SEO plugin:
Yoast for WordPress: €99 per year
SEOmatic for Craft CMS: €99 the first year, then €49 per year for updates
Advanced editing of content fields:
WordPress often needs extensions to accommodate clients' wishes to create more creative content. A very common solution is to add an extension called "Elementor".
Elementor: $59 per year (Essentials)
Craft CMS: Built-in standard functionality called the "content matrix". This is not an extra extension – the flexibility is already built in.
Advanced forms:
Gravity Forms for WordPress: $59 per year
Formie for Craft CMS: €99 the first year, then €49 per year
Note that SEO, forms and advanced content editing do not require plugins in Craft CMS – they are only possible additions if you want specially sharpened functionality.
All in all, prices are comparable except for the entry price, which is a difference of $299. If your website project hinges on this cost, the recommended system would usually be something other than these two options anyway.
With a budget below NOK 25,000, no-code tools such as Squarespace and Wix are usually more suitable, combined with your own efforts and/or freelancers.
Hosting
Both WordPress and Craft CMS websites have a wide range of hosting possibilities. One of WordPress's strengths has been its flexibility in this area. Many hosting providers have so-called "one-click install" solutions that give you a WordPress site "out of the box" on their server. WordPress can technically run on any shared or dedicated server with standard PHP and SQL.
Craft CMS is also very standardised in terms of server requirements, but is somewhat more technically demanding to set up and requires a technology partner. It also uses slightly more server resources. It is therefore recommended not to use shared web hosting with a Craft CMS website (for example a standard Domeneshop web server).
Craft CMS expects a modern workflow in its technical setup. For example, tools such as Composer are used, which are often not available on shared servers. This may sound like a weakness, but it is actually a big advantage for developers, and fundamentally ensures a considerably tidier codebase.
Where WordPress can technically be downloaded as a zip, dropped straight onto a server and be more or less up and running, Craft CMS requires a somewhat more technical setup – which in return provides version history and tools for developers to work with a development environment separated from production.
Regardless of WordPress or Craft CMS, the advantage of both is that you can have full control of your own server and decide where you want it. You can take geographical considerations, sustainability considerations, and not least freely scale server capacity depending on your needs. This makes it possible to add functionality and adapt the website as the business's needs change.
Why Craft CMS outclasses WordPress on performance
Having fast websites is one of the strongest advantages you can have over competitors. It gives you better results in Google (keyword: Core Web Vitals), and is proven to be directly linked to conversion rates, bounce rates and other critical factors.
Craft CMS is recognised as being among the fastest and most efficient in its class, especially when it comes to handling large databases and heavy traffic.
WordPress is fundamentally known for being so-called "bloatware". What does bloat mean? Simply that it is inflated. A Google search for "wordpress bloat" yields nearly 6 million hits. Slowness problems on WordPress sites are, in other words, widely known.
What makes Craft CMS better on performance? This is largely about the modern underlying codebase. WordPress is built on an old foundation, while Craft CMS follows a more modern MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture. Particularly negative for WordPress is how it handles external resources for themes and plugins. It is not unusual for WordPress websites to have several thousand lines of uncompressed CSS and JavaScript code.
Not only does this cause slow websites, it is also unsustainable, causes unnecessarily high data usage for customers, and increases resource use on the server, making it vulnerable to larger traffic volumes.
SEO
WordPress has long been a favourite for its SEO tool "Yoast SEO". At a time when Joomla, Drupal and other competing systems had remarkably poor SEO tools, Yoast and WordPress stood out as a formidable improvement. But that is over 10 years ago.
Is Yoast SEO still just as good? In a sense, but the market has caught up. Today there are very many good alternatives, including in the Craft CMS world. The clearest alternative in Craft CMS is called SEOmatic, and it is at least as robust (we think a notch better).
In many ways you could say both are equally good at SEO, but SEO is about much more than correctly structuring data for search engines. As mentioned in the section on performance, Craft CMS is superior, and that also matters a great deal for SEO.
Incidentally, one of the world's largest SEO tools (Moz) uses Craft CMS and SEOmatic.
Headless CMS
Both WordPress and Craft CMS can be used so-called "headless".
Craft CMS has a dedicated built-in headless mode, equipped with everything a developer needs in terms of GraphQL and other technical details used in modern headless setups.
WordPress, for its part, has a relatively outdated REST API if you want to use built-in functionality. Otherwise you must lean on third-party plugins. WordPress is rarely the chosen solution when going for a headless system.
Craft CMS can work remarkably well as a headless system, and you can combine traditional use of the system for the website with serving data to other channels (for example other types of digital apps) via GraphQL.
Open source
"Open source" is often mentioned as a strength of WordPress. Let us take a closer look at this terminology.
Both WordPress and Craft CMS have their source code openly available on GitHub. You can actively take part in development, through both discussions and contributions to the code.
So what is the difference between the two?
Although Craft CMS has its source code available on GitHub, the codebase is managed by a company, namely Pixel & Tonic. WordPress is somewhat more open in the sense that the community, rather than a company, is behind its development.
That said, WordPress is strongly tied to the company Automattic, run by WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg.
Tailor-made work
If you are looking for tailor-made solutions, WordPress is usually more expensive than you first think. WordPress is normally used in combination with ready-made themes with a predefined range of possibilities.
If you want possibilities beyond the predefined options available, you either need PHP developers, or you depend on contacting the plugin/theme developers and hoping they can assist. This is close to hopeless, as you are often one of thousands using that plugin/theme and everyone has different wishes.
When it comes to tailor-made work, Craft CMS offers more flexibility compared with WordPress, which is often limited by ready-made themes – whether outwardly or inside the CMS itself. Almost every piece can be adjusted on a Craft CMS website. And because the codebase is so well structured, the path to a solution is usually considerably shorter than the equivalent in WordPress.
What about Sanity, Webflow, Squarespace and Shopify?
If you would like an article like this for another solution, feel free to send us an e-mail! We have made exactly the same assessments of the other systems, but have not yet had time to write them up.
Considering WordPress for your next project, but wondering whether Craft CMS might be a better solution? Contact us for a no-obligation assessment.
A lightweight alternative: Kirby CMS
For projects that need a simple and affordable solution, we also offer Kirby CMS. Kirby CMS is a lightweight CMS that provides fast performance and easy administration without unnecessary plugins and bloatware, making it ideal for smaller projects or businesses on tight budgets. While Craft CMS is our recommendation for advanced and tailor-made websites, Kirby CMS can be a good alternative for those who want a more minimalist solution without compromising on quality.
