Craft CMS vs WordPress: Which will shine in 2024?

Craft CMS vs WordPress? Is this a million-dollar question touring your mind, which is the best CMS you must choose for your next business website design? If that’s the case, then each of your queries matters a lot; from choosing the best web designing company to selecting the best CMS, whether Craft CMS or WordPress, it becomes daunting to move ahead with wise options or choices.

 If you are familiar with the development galaxy, you might know which CMS you would opt for. However, you do not need to get stressed if you’re a newbie. We help you explore everything about the best CMS for your next web designing project and gain insights into Craft CMS vs WordPress here in this article. Imagine the moment when choosing the best CMS to develop and design a stunning website for your business and taking it to the next level in a few clicks would be as easy as it seems not to be. It may be a moment you eagerly await! Right? 

All of your efforts will result excellently if you make wise decisions. And to help you make decisions wisely and timely, we came up with our new topic of debate, Craft CMS vs WordPress, to distinguish and choose the best CMS for designers in 2024. 

So, are you ready to dive deeper into Craft CMS vs WordPress? 

Let’s get started. 

Craft CMS vs WordPress: Quick Overview

To choose between Craft CMS vs WordPress, you have to go through the basic to in-depth comparison. Let’s start from the basics. Slowly, we’ll move forward to the in-depth comparison. 

Craft CMS

Craft CMS is an open-source, dual-licensed, and, most importantly, content management system that empowers the entire creative process. It is a hybrid, headless, and modern CMS that blends the authoring elegance of conventional WCM with the development benefits of a Headless CMS-only architecture. 

Deployment

Craft CMS Deployments are Serverless. These are deployed through Docker containers and controlled by Kubernetes orchestration.

If we dive deeper, there are three core components to Craft CMS.

1. Delivery Tier, Crafter Engine

The presentation framework uses either Groovy and FreeMarker or NodeJS to generate web pages and other rendered outputs. GraphQL or REST API can be entitled to serve structured content as headless API-first content. It is integrated with Elasticsearch to support advanced dynamic content query and search capabilities.

2. Authoring Tier, Crafter Studio

It is the user interface through which you can use content management and administrative functionalities. 

3. Content Repository, Crafter Repository

It is the place known as Git, where all content, metadata, and configuration are stored. 

Here, it is clear Craft Commerce 3 is the latest version of Craft CMS compatible with present-day operating systems.

More Thoughts on Craft CMS 

1. License

Craft CMS is available under the GPL.

2. Awesome Community

Craft CMS has 221 partners with 150+ sites created using it. 

3. What’s new in Craft CMS?

The latest version of Craft CMS is Craft 3.6, which brings a slew of accessibility, usability, and development experience improvements. Let’s have a look at a few of the highlights.

• Responsive Live Preview Viewports

• Improved Entry Creation Workflow

• User Impersonation URLs

• It Supports PHP 8
• Purchasing on Production
• Composer 2

4. Awards and recognition 

• 5th most popular in Norway in the Open Source category.
• 6th most popular in Belgium in the Open Source category.
• 7th most popular in Australia in the Open Source category.
• 8th most popular in the United Kingdom in the Open Source category.
• 9th most popular in the Top 100k sites in the Open Source category.
• 9th most popular in New Zealand in the Open Source category.
• 11th most popular in the Top 1 Million sites in the Open Source category.
• 12th most popular in the Top 10k sites in the Open Source category.
• 15th most popular in Norway in the Content Management System category.
• 19th most popular in Belgium in the Content Management System category.

This figure shows that the US tops the list with around 14,964 websites built with Craft CMS, followed by the UK: 5,821.

WordPress

WordPress is the world’s most popular website builder, which happens to be a content management system. It is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database. Initially created as a blog-publishing system, WordPress, with modern CMS features, has grown to support other web content types, including more traditional mailing lists, media galleries, membership sites, learning management systems (LMS), and online stores. Its high-end features are the reasons that WordPress web development is gaining popularity all over the world. It is available in 72 languages, and 71% of WordPress sites have English set as the primary language. WordPress is currently running on the 6.1 version till now, and users have downloaded it over 103 million times.

More Thoughts on WordPress

1. Architecture

Its architecture is a front controller, which routes all requests for non-static URIs to a single PHP file and identifies the target page. WordPress allows support for more human-readable permalinks.

2. Accessibility

The WordPress Accessibility Coding Standards state, “All new or updated code released in WordPress must conform with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 at level AA.

3. Awards and recognition

Following Awards and recognition reveal that WordPress is gaining popularity as the best CMS for designers:

• Winner of InfoWorld’s “Best of open source software awards: Collaboration,” awarded in 2008.
• Winner of Open Source CMS Awards’s “Overall Best Open Source CMS,” awarded in 2009.
• Winner of digital synergies “Hall of Fame CMS category in the 2010 Open Source”, awarded in 2010.
• Winner of InfoWorld’s “Bossie award for Best Open Source Software,” awarded in 2011.
• WordPress has a five-star privacy rating from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

4. What’s new In WordPress?

The latest version of WordPress brings the power of Gutenberg blocks to widget areas. What does it mean? With WordPress’s modern CMS, you can now enjoy the highly customizable layout and styling options that will bring you closer to a WYSIWYG editing experience. Let’s have a look at a few of the highlights.

• You can create interesting visual effects with overlapping layouts and duotone images.
• You can intersperse widgets and custom code throughout your visual design.
• You can easily copy & paste existing layouts from the WordPress pattern directory. 
• You can freely use traditional widget layouts (Or Not) with lots of flexibility over title and structure. 

The above table shows that more websites are built with WordPress than Craft CMS. In the USA, websites are 8,923,351; in the UK, 808,681; similarly, in other countries, the number of websites with WordPress is higher. It depicts that WordPress has the edge over Craft CMS while considering Craft CMS vs WordPress.

Craft CMS vs WordPress: A Comprehensive Guide

Craft CMS vs WordPress: Content Management

You may be familiar that a CMS’s main objective is to manage the content on a website. Both Craft CMS and WordPress empower users to manage content. However, while comparing Craft CMS vs WordPress, Craft CMS has proven heaven for most website developers to manage content. If we talk about content managers, we haven’t yet met an experienced content manager who didn’t fall in love with the ease-of-use Craft CMS provides. It’s just incredible. Its outstanding features, such as the matrix, live preview, one-click updating, intelligent page-building tools, etc., all empower Craft CMS to offer an exceptional user experience.

On the other hand, WordPress has continually added features and options since its original launch as a blogging platform. Over time, the patchwork of new features and plugins results in a cluttered mess for developers. To put Craft CMS vs WordPress plainly, many WordPress developers and users realized that the CMS is long enough to learn and navigate. 

Who is the winner?

– Craft CMS

Craft CMS vs WordPress: Technical In-how

This distinction helps you correctly select the ideal CMS for your next project. Yes, if we’re talking about CraftCMS, then you’ll need technical skills to use it. It could include learning it from the ground up. However, there are no such requirements when it comes to WordPress. You can utilize it without technical knowledge and succeed in your project. To decide on Craft CMS vs WordPress, it is appropriate to state that WordPress benefits beginners. WordPress is a good option if you need more time to learn technical skills and fundamental CMS programming.

Who is the Winner?

– WordPress

Craft CMS vs WordPress: Built-in Functionality

Needless to say, WordPress has more satisfying built-in functionality for the do-it-yourself masses with many templates, themes, and plugins (free and paid) to instantly get a website up and running, even if there is a bit of mess and confusion. But what about if DIY is not an option for many users? WordPress still holds impressive features. The best example is the new page editor, Gutenberg. Blocks and responsive design are the features users have been using for years before Gutenberg. To bring WordPress up to speed with Craft CMS, you’ll instantly be floating in plugins to achieve the base functionality. 

Craft CMS has one massive benefit in this area. See what’s that?

Content editing built-in functionality can change the battle scenario of Craft CMS vs WordPress. As with content editing, Craft CMS didn’t rise as a blogging platform, but now it has become the best content management platform due to its high-end features. Its out-of-the-box features include matrix fields to quickly build flexible pages, categories, tags to keep content organized, and relations to build smart connections between content throughout a website.

Though WordPress also has in-built plugins that are easy to set up for even amateur developers. But due to the availability of thousands of plugins, it becomes time-consuming for developers to choose the best, perfect for their websites. With Craft CMS, you can ensure that your site is going to work with intuitive and powerful features baked in simply.

Who is the winner?

– Craft CMS

Craft CMS vs WordPress: Pricing 

Another crucial difference that helps you make a wise decision quickly is pricing. In WordPress, you have to find a hosting service provider and then depend upon it entirely. The budget-friendly service provider you choose for your website, the services will accordingly be. The best thing is you can even customize the hosting services. 

Look at the different pricing models of WordPress in the following image

Talking about Craft CMS it is dependent upon solo people needing a single login.

Craft CMS’s pricing runs as follows:

Check out the different pricing models of Craft CMS in the given image:

By looking at the pricing models we can say that among Craft CMS vs WordPress, WordPress is the clear winner. Each platform also includes costs associated with premium tools and plugins. Investing $300 to $1,300 for the quality and the reliable platform is a straightforward decision rather than choosing the cheap and freemium option that will cost us in the future. 

Who is the winner? 

– WordPress

Craft CMS vs WordPress: Search Engine Optimization

WordPress has one of the best SEO plugins named Yoast SEO, it’s a lucky champ in this category. However, Craft CMS has not only joined the SEO game but also has blasted past WordPress with its stunning elite SEO plugins such as SEOmatic and Retour.

SEOmatic offers various advanced SEO practices and tools, like alt attribute and link title attribute fields. From automatically rendering metadata to creating sitemaps for Google, SEOmatic provides a range of modern SEO options. These tools are just superb. It is the reason many SEO experts enthusiastically use Craft CMS over WordPress. So amongst Craft CMS vs WordPress, the verdict goes to Craft CMS.

Craft CMS boost SEO performance such as page load times and site security. You may probably not know that Craft CMS generates nothing but allows developers to “create” rather than “manipulate.” What are the results? Less bloat, fast load time, and less investment to clients for developers to fix mistakes generated by a CMS. However, WordPress’s Yoast SEO sometimes can take you down in SEO, and thus, you can rely on SEOmatic. 

Who is the winner?

– Craft CMS (SEOmatic)

Craft CMS vs WordPress: Massive community and resources

Obviously, the resources accessible are considerably larger and more profound with the top CMS and such longevity as WordPress. This is why most entrepreneurs and developers prefer it over other CMS options in the market. Craft CMS isn’t out of the game just because WordPress has a large community and resources. Craft has a thriving, energetic, and supportive community. Craft CMS StackExchange is active, with many useful discussions and tips. However, you may have to pay for the majority of the resources, which is a significant disadvantage of Craft CMS.

The bottom line is that choosing to use Craft CMS vs WordPress comes down to two things: 

• What is your skill set?
• What do you want to do?

Who is the winner?

– WordPress

Craft CMS vs WordPress: Security

Let’s look into Craft CMS vs WordPress security aspect. WordPress has a bit of a tough spot in this case, and there is nothing like WordPress is worse than Craft CMS at security. On the other hand, Craft CMS also has Craft Commerce, which does magic in providing eCommerce solutions. It is better, but the market share of WordPress acts as a giant target on its back. Hackers can quickly attack WordPress sites due to the number of websites available in the market. Also, working with and securing more than 50,000+ WordPress plugins built by thousands of different developers makes it easy for hackers to hack a site. If we head to Craft CMS, a small and higher-quality plugin ecosystem holds up to 60% of the CMS market share and is much more secure than WordPress. 

Who is the winner?

– Craft CMS

Craft CMS vs WordPress: Ecommerce

Both Craft CMS and WordPress offer excellent eCommerce solutions. WordPress has a very popular plugin named Woocommerce that offers exceptional eCommerce solutions to businesses. However, Craft CMS, on the other hand, also has Craft Commerce, which does magic in providing eCommerce solutions. 

In short, both solutions fall under the category of content-driven eCommerce. And the platforms that fall under this category are perfect for businesses that sell products or services online and create a lot of content to attract clients to add value to their customer’s experience and journey. WordPress plugin Woocommerce and other significant eCommerce plugins, including seamless integration with BigCommerce and Shopify not built into WordPress natively.

However, the same full-time dedicated team builds and maintains Craft Commerce that handles Craft CMS. Their mission while creating Craft CMS remains to improve the lives of content managers or everyone related to eCommerce content creation. The magic of Craft Commerce helps it manage content and eCommerce together in one system. Its high-end combination of flexibility, scalability, built-in features and integration with content management makes Craft CMS and Craft Commerce the easy choice for eCommerce. So, it is a tie between Craft CMS vs WordPress.

Who is the winner?

– Both Craft CMS (Craft Commerce) & WordPress (Woocommerce)

Craft CMS vs WordPress: Performance

Performance is dependent upon the hosting service provider. The best hosting service provider you choose, both WordPress and Craft CMS, will work wonderfully. Craft CMS uses a standard called Model-View-Controller (MVC), made up of the Controller, Model, and View. The MVC assures Craft CMS only delivers the essential components required, making websites faster and more elegant.

WordPress, on the other hand, does not use the MVC framework. When sending a new request, you have to install many to make the website work faster and elegantly. Hence, when we weigh up Craft CMS vs WordPress, Craft CMS performance is iconic for a better experience for developers and delivers a blazing fast website that results in Google SEO rankings.

Who is the winner?

– Craft CMS

Key takeaways: We have observed Craft CMS won over WordPress in many cases based on the difference in these listed factors. 

• Content Creation & Management
• Search Engine Optimization
• Performance
• Security
• eCommerce
• Built-in Functionality
• Pricing

So, which CMS will you use to build your next website design project?

If you still doubt in your mind, the pros and cons of Craft CMS vs WordPress will surely help you out. Let’s see what are those:

Craft CMS vs WordPress: Pros and Cons

Pros of Craft CMS

• Content order control
• Does not need plugins to do many things
• Fully Customized
• Lightweight 
• Live preview
• Extremely well-documented

Cons of Craft CMS

• Expensive 
• Restrictions to installing templates
• Small and expensive developer community.

Pros of WordPress

• User-friendly
• Easy to learn
• Open-source
• Responsive
• Wide range of professional themes
• WordPress sites are mobile-friendly
• Best for online marketing
• Excellent social media integration
• Over 54,000 primarily free and paid plugins are available
• SEO-friendly

Cons of WordPress

• Regular updates create a nuisance 
• Vulnerable to hackers
• Not the best backend UI
• Specific sites have slow speed because of unnecessary generic code
• Customization can be expensive

A Fantastic Finale

Your option may differ depending on your business purpose and target audience. So, pick the one that best fits your project’s requirements. Craft CMS and WordPress have distinct advantages, disadvantages, technical aspects, and popularity curves. We hope you’ve figured out everything in the above comparison. As a result, it’s difficult to predict which will shine brighter in 2024. Both are winners in their own right, and both assist users in producing beautiful, user-friendly websites. Regardless of the CMS you choose, what matters most is that you make the best decision possible based on your research and analysis. Only move further once you’ve thoroughly examined the CMS you want to use for your next project. Do let us know if you want to hire a dedicated WordPress developer or a Craft CMS developer.