Craft CMS vs WordPress. The honest comparison.

WordPress runs 40% of the web for a reason. It's free. It has the largest plugin ecosystem of any CMS. Hundreds of thousands of developers know it. For the right project — a blog, a small business site, a community forum, a basic brochure site — it's hard to beat.

But WordPress wasn't designed for what most of our clients ask us to build. Multi-region brand platforms. Custom content models with deep relationships. Enterprise-grade security. Editorial workflows where the CMS is the team's daily workspace, not a Tuesday-afternoon visit. At that level of complexity, WordPress fights you. Craft doesn't.

This page is the comparison we wish existed when we were making the choice ourselves.

Credit where it's due. WordPress is genuinely good at:

• Speed of starting. Spin up a WordPress site in an afternoon with a theme and a few plugins.
• Almost any feature you can imagine has a plugin for it.
• Talent pool. WordPress developers are easier to hire than developers for any other CMS.
• Cost at the low end. A small WordPress site can be cheap to build and cheap to maintain.
• Familiarity. Most marketing teams have used WordPress before.
• Block editor maturity. Gutenberg has come a long way.

If your project is a blog, a small business site, a brochure site, or a community site that benefits from the WordPress ecosystem — WordPress is probably the right choice.

WordPress was built for blog posts. Everything is a post, a page, or a custom post type bolted onto the post architecture. ACF and similar plugins translate that into custom fields, and most production WordPress sites end up running on a layered system that's working hard to be something it wasn't designed to be.
Craft was built for structured content. Entry types, fields, Matrix blocks, relationships — all native. No translation layer. The data model in the CMS matches the data model in your head.

Most editors tolerate WordPress. They learn the workarounds for what the WYSIWYG breaks. They navigate the chaos of multiple plugin interfaces. They develop muscle memory for which page builder field needs to be saved twice.

Craft's editor experience is consistent across every field, every entry, every workflow. Live preview is native. Drafts are native. Version history is native. Multi-language is native. There are no plugin UIs fighting for the same screen real estate.

WordPress multisite exists. WPML and Polylang exist. But every WordPress multi-region project we've seen has been a duct-taped collection of plugins, custom code, and prayer.

Craft's multi-site architecture is a core feature. One installation supports unlimited sites and unlimited languages. Each site has its own URL structure, its own content, its own editorial team. Content can be shared, translated, or independent — your choice per field, per entry.

A typical production WordPress site runs 20-40 plugins. Each plugin is a dependency you didn't write, a security surface you don't control, and an update you can't always trust. WordPress's biggest single security risk isn't WordPress — it's the plugin layer.

Craft has a deliberately smaller plugin ecosystem and a more conservative core. The result is a smaller security surface and fewer breaking changes between versions.

WordPress can be made fast. Most WordPress sites aren't. The combination of database queries, plugin overhead, theme bloat, and page builders creates a performance ceiling that requires aggressive caching to work around.

Craft starts faster and stays faster. Modern PHP, efficient queries, edge caching support, no plugin layer to optimise away.

WordPress major versions often require theme and plugin compatibility updates. The site can go down. The editors get notifications about plugins that "may not be compatible with the latest version." The dev team plans the upgrade like a project.

Craft upgrades cleanly because the surface area is smaller. Same architecture, same plugins, less to break.

If you read both lists and one of them describes your project more accurately than the other, you have your answer.

The most common objection to Craft from WordPress teams is editor retraining. It's a real concern, but a small one in practice.

Most editors learn Craft faster than they learned WordPress. The interface is cleaner. The fields are more consistent. The mental model is simpler. We've onboarded dozens of editorial teams onto Craft and the average time to comfort is roughly two hours of guided practice.

The team that knows WordPress isn't the team that needs to keep WordPress. It's the team that needs a CMS they don't have to fight.

Yes and no. Here's the honest breakdown.

Licensing
Craft Pro costs roughly €280/year per install. WordPress is free.

Development
Custom development on Craft and WordPress costs about the same at the mid-market level. WordPress can be cheaper at the low end (themes, plugins, off-the-shelf solutions) and more expensive at the high end (the harder you push WordPress, the more custom work it takes to bend it to your needs).

Maintenance
Craft is usually cheaper to maintain because the surface area is smaller, plugins are fewer, and upgrades are cleaner.

Total cost of ownership over 5 years
Craft typically wins for any project complex enough to require custom development. WordPress wins for simple sites built from off-the-shelf themes and plugins.

If you're comparing the cost of a serious custom WordPress build to a serious custom Craft build, Craft is usually the cheaper long-term choice. If you're comparing a Craft build to an out-of-the-box WordPress theme, WordPress is cheaper — and probably the right choice for that project.

That's a different conversation. If WordPress is working and your team is happy, there's no reason to migrate just because Craft exists. If WordPress is the bottleneck — slow, fragile, plugin-chaotic, security-prone, expensive to maintain — migration is worth scoping.

We migrate teams from WordPress to Craft regularly. Content, SEO, URLs, redirects, custom post types, ACF fields, WooCommerce — all preserved.