WordPress vs Craft CMS: what are the differences and which one suits your organization? 🚩

Craft CMS is strong in complex content structures and customization for developers.
WordPress is more flexible, accessible and better suited for marketing-driven organizations looking to grow, optimize and connect.

Craft CMS is a commercial CMS especially loved by agencies and developers. The system comes as a compact core with no frills. You define all the fields, content types and templates yourself. As a result, Craft CMS feels very clean and technically elegant.

WordPress is open source, globally embraced and extremely flexible. You can run a simple website with it, but just as easily a large platform with links, content models, dynamic pages and complex workflows. Whereas Craft CMS deliberately stays small, WordPress actually leans on a large ecosystem of plug-ins, themes and developers.

Important to remember:

• Craft CMS is developer-driven and requires more technical knowledge.
• WordPress is more widely applicable and easier to adopt by marketing and communications teams, especially if it is set up properly.

One of the oft-cited pluses of Craft CMS is that it doesn't push you into a straitjacket. You literally start with an empty system. Content types, fields, taxonomies and templates are customized. For a technical team, that can be nice. You have no legacy of old themes or builder plug-ins, and you control exactly what the HTML and CSS look like.

That same freedom can also be a pitfall. Because much is custom, it almost always requires a developer to add new structures, blocks or page templates. A marketing team that wants to experiment independently with landing pages, campaigns or A/B testing is then often dependent on development capacity.

With custom WordPress, you can achieve the same design freedom in practice. You build a custom theme, write your own templates, define your own blocks and set up a neat component library. The difference is not in what is technically possible, but in how you combine it with management and continued development.

Because WordPress has a mature ecosystem, you can pair design freedom with a user-friendly editor. With a custom backend and Brabo Composer, for example, you can combine all the creative possibilities of a custom-designed website with an administration environment that marketers can quickly work with.

The key questions then are:

• Who will manage the site on a daily basis?
• Do you have in-house developers who really want to embrace Craft CMS?
• Or are you looking for a balance between technical freedom and independent management by marketing?

In many organizations, the latter option is more realistic. Then WordPress is often the obvious choice.

Both Google and modern AI assistants, such as ChatGPT or Perplexity, benefit from clear structure, understandable content and clean technology. Think good headings, neat URLs, logical internal links, schema markup and a fast site.

Craft CMS provides a solid foundation for that. You can manage meta-titles, descriptions, alt-texts and URL structures well. With extensions you extend that to sitemaps and more advanced options. The core is technically sound, so you won't start out behind.

Still, WordPress has an edge here in practice. Not because the core is necessarily better, but because the ecosystem around SEO is very mature. With plug-ins like Rank Math or Yoast, you get, among other things:

• Linking with Search Console,
• Advice on content structure and readability,
• Automatic XML sitemaps,
• Extensive schema options for such things as FAQ, articles and products,
• Tooling to build internal links smartly,
• Redirects and canonical management without the hassle.

For AI findability, this is equally relevant. AI models get a lot of input from well-structured, semantic HTML with rich context. A thoughtfully designed WordPress site with good headings, clear FAQs, internal links and structured data is therefore picked up faster and interpreted better.

If SEO and organic growth are important to your organization, WordPress is usually the logical choice. Craft CMS can do it too, but more often requires additional customization or extensions that you have to continue to maintain yourself.

When comparing CMSs, security always comes up. Craft CMS has a reputation for being secure and tight, while WordPress is sometimes dismissed as more vulnerable. That perception is only half true.

Craft CMS is a commercial product. The core is maintained by a single development team, with controlled releases. The number of extensions is limited, and many projects use mostly custom code. Fewer dependencies theoretically means less attack surface.

WordPress is open source and maintained by a large community. There are thousands of plug-ins and themes, and that's where things often go wrong. Insecure themes, poorly written plug-ins and cheap shared hosting cause most of the problems, not the WordPress core itself.

In professional environments, WordPress usually runs differently:

• On fast, well-managed WordPress hosting
• With a slim list of carefully chosen plug-ins
• With automatic security updates
• And with clear maintenance and support or SLA

In that scenario, a WordPress site is just as secure as a Craft CMS site, and sometimes even patched faster because there are so many eyes on the code.

So the choice here is not about secure or insecure, but how seriously you organize maintenance and hosting. If you choose custom WordPress with good management, then in terms of security it is just enterprise-level next to Craft CMS.

Are you considering WordPress for your website?
Learn how we as a WordPress agency help businesses move forward.

Craft CMS has a minimalist architecture. No unnecessary features, no big legacy, a lean database. That's good for performance. A Craft site built well is often very fast.

It is a misconception that WordPress is necessarily slower. A slow WordPress site is usually the result of:

• Page builders that generate a lot of HTML and scripts,
• Dozens of plug-ins that all bring their own CSS and JS,
• Cheap hosting without caching or CDN.

If you remove those factors and treat WordPress as a custom system, many disadvantages disappear. With a custom theme, neat code, limited dependencies and good hosting, you will achieve similar scores in Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals as with Craft CMS.

So both systems can be fast. The real difference is in the discipline of the developer:

• Build lean and future-proof, or
• Are you pasting layers of tooling and builders over it?

If performance is important, choosing Craft or WordPress is less exciting than choosing a party that incorporates performance into design, development, caching, image optimization and hosting.

In practice, this is often where the biggest difference in perception between the two systems arises.

In Craft CMS, content is usually set up with Matrix fields. Those are flexible blocks where you define which fields and combinations are there. For a developer, that's powerful. You get a controllable, structured content layer.

For marketers and communications staff, on the other hand, it can feel abstract. The interface is less visual, the logic is technical and you often need explanations to understand which blocks you use where.

In WordPress, if you replace the default Gutenberg editor with a custom editor, you can put down a different experience. With Brabo Composer, for example, you can:

• Create blocks that resemble the final page,
• Provide a logical layout based on design components,
• Create handy presets that make content faster,
• And add AI support that helps with texts and structure.

The result is a CMS that delights not only developers, but especially marketing teams. Campaign pages, landing pages, insights and cases can be built independently within clear frameworks. Developers keep control over the technology, marketers get freedom in content.

If your organization leans a lot on marketing, content and lead generation, that user experience weighs heavily. In that case, WordPress with a good editor is usually a better fit.

Both Craft CMS and WordPress can grow well with an organization. More content, additional languages, new propositions or different audiences are possible in both systems.

Craft CMS is often chosen for projects with complex data models and lots of custom logic. Think platforms with complicated content relationships or specific publishing flows. If you have a dedicated development team working full-time with Craft, that's a strong choice.

WordPress excels as soon as links and marketing technology become important:

• CRM integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive, for example,
• ATS systems for work-by-sites,
• Marketing automation such as ActiveCampaign, Spotler or Mailchimp,
• Headless setups with frontends in React or Next.js, for example,
• Multilingualism, multisites and branded portals.

Because of the large ecosystem, there is a plug-in, SDK or reference implementation for almost every tool. You need to invent less yourself and can go live faster.

For organizations that see their website as the spider in the web of their digital landscape, that integration power of WordPress is often critical.

Craft CMS works with license fees per site. In addition, you have hosting, any paid extensions and the development cost of customization. Because many components are custom built, the initial investment is often higher than for a smart WordPress setup. That's fine if the business case justifies it and you have the development capacity.

WordPress as a core is free. The cost is in:

• Design and development,
• Premium plug-ins or services,
• Hosting and maintenance.

Because you can lean on existing plug-ins and libraries, less time goes into reinventing basic functionality. That makes WordPress more cost-effective in many cases, especially if you want to expand later with additional features, links or sites.

In the longer term, something else comes into play. With Craft CMS, you are dependent on one party for licensing and roadmap. With WordPress, the community is so large that the platform itself is less vulnerable to the future.

Craft CMS is especially suitable for organizations with very complex content structures and a strong focus on customization on the backend. Think of situations where content is not simply pages, but many interrelationships, custom fields and strict publishing rules. Craft is often chosen by organizations working with extensive editorial workflows, multiple content types and complex dependencies between content.

In addition, Craft CMS fits well with teams that have an in-house development team or collaborate structurally with developers. The platform is powerful, but less forgiving: almost everything is set up custom. That gives control, but also means that marketing or content teams can work less independently without technical support. For organizations where governance, control and technical precision are more important than speed and flexibility, Craft CMS may be a solid choice.

In a nutshell, Craft CMS works well in environments where technology is leading, content is relatively stable and changes go carefully through developers.

WordPress is the better choice for organizations where marketing, content and growth are key. The platform is ideally suited for teams that want to work independently, move quickly and continuously optimize without depending on developers for every tweak. With the right technical foundation, WordPress is not only user-friendly, but also powerful and scalable.

For many commercial organizations - from SMEs to larger brands - WordPress provides exactly the balance between flexibility and accessibility. Content structures can be complex, but remain manageable. Integrations with CRM, marketing, e-commerce and analytics tools are quick to implement, and the platform moves easily with new campaigns, propositions or markets.

This makes WordPress especially suitable for organizations that want to grow, experiment and optimize, and who see their website as an active marketing and sales platform rather than a static content archive. Moreover, with custom development, WordPress can be set up as robustly as enterprise solutions, but with significantly less friction in day-to-day use.