Craft CMS vs WordPress: Which is the Best CMS for You?

Disclaimer: We're Craft CMS developers. With over 100 Craft projects since 2013, and we haven't touched a WordPress build in years.

We used to build on it. We stopped because of the work it brought us. WordPress is a blogging CMS with a theme market grown over the top, and you have to bastardise it to make it do anything else. We wanted custom builds shaped around what a client actually needs, with content that's agnostic to the design. Craft does that from the start.

So we're biased. Worth knowing that up front. But WordPress is still the right answer for some projects, and we'll tell you which ones. Every figure below is sourced and linked, so check our work.

At a glance

Sourcing: pricing from craftcms.com/pricing, checked 24 August 2026. Security flaw counts from the National Vulnerability Database, the US government's public list of reported software security problems. The first row is matched to each platform's own entry on that list; the second is a wider keyword search that picks up plugins too. Both pulled 24 August 2026. Plugin counts from WordPress.org's own plugin API and Packagist's search API, both pulled 24 August 2026. Client performance and traffic figures are our own, measured in Google Analytics on sites we run.

How to read those two rows. The first counts flaws found in the platform's own code, which is a like-for-like comparison and the number we would defend. The second is a wider search that also catches flaws in plugins, and it sweeps up some unrelated results along the way, so read it as a rough scale rather than an exact count. Either way the gap runs the same direction.

Pros and cons

Craft CMS

• You define the content structure. Nothing to fight when your content isn't shaped like a blog post.
• GraphQL, multi-site and Craft Commerce ship with the platform. Templates are Twig, so there's no mix of PHP and shortcodes to unpick.
• Far fewer reported security flaws, and far less third-party code to keep patched.
• You need a developer. There's no theme market to fall back on.
• Smaller talent pool, so hiring and handover take more care.

WordPress

• The fastest route to a live site for a standard brochure or blog, with 66,326 plugins on WordPress.org to draw on.
• It's the most widely used CMS on the web. More editors and developers already know it, which makes both hiring and handing a site over easier.
• Core is free and it runs on almost any shared host, so the entry cost is lower than Craft's.
• That plugin sprawl is the liability. More third-party code on your site means more to patch, and the security flaw numbers show it.
• A post-shaped content model that most non-blog sites end up working around.

Where we stand

Custom, content-heavy or serving more than one audience? We build on Craft. Every time. The flexibility and the security gap compound over a site's life: fewer plugins to patch, less structure to work around, and a platform we've shipped over 100 times.

We've lost pitches to WordPress. Plenty of them. Usually because the client wanted a website and we wanted to spend the first few weeks working out what their website was for. That discovery work is where most of our value sits, and if you don't want it, we're the wrong agency and WordPress is probably the right platform.

Brochure site, personal blog, tight budget, no marketing team in-house? WordPress is a reasonable answer, and we've said exactly that to prospects' faces.

When Craft CMS is the right call

• Your content isn't blog-post shaped. A museum archive. A member community hub, like the one we built for Global Connections. An interactive murder mystery for a Google phone launch, like The Fold.
• More than one audience or region running off the same site, like the regional sites we built for MicroPort across the UK, Europe and Japan.
• Security and maintenance overhead matter enough that a smaller, curated plugin ecosystem earns its keep.
• You have developer support, or you're hiring it. Craft has no drag-and-drop fallback.

When WordPress is still the right call

WordPress fits plenty of projects. If you're on it and it's working, we're not going to tell you to move for the sake of it.

• A brochure site or blog where the built-in post and page model already fits.
• No developer on retainer, and speed to launch matters more than long-term structure. Althought you'll still need to keep it updated!
• A genuinely tight budget, where the free core and the huge template market outweigh Craft's licence cost.
• You want a website delivered without a discovery phase first. That's a fair position, and Craft's upfront structure work won't earn its keep.

One caveat, and it's a real one. When someone comes to us with a small brochure site and a budget that won't reach Craft, we don't send them to WordPress. We send them to Framer. Same reasoning as the list above, no custom functionality and no room for the strategy work, but without a plugin estate to keep patched afterwards. Everything should get proper strategy work. Not every budget stretches to it, and we would rather tell you that than sell you something you don't need.

Security

Publicly reported security flaws in widely used software get logged on the National Vulnerability Database, a public list run by the US government. WordPress's own code has 583 entries. Craft's has 97. Include plugins and it's roughly 19,800 against 587.

This isn't a claim that one team writes worse code than the other. It's arithmetic. Sixty-six thousand third-party plugins means sixty-six thousand places a flaw can appear, and none of them sit under WordPress's control.

Here's what that looks like in practice. We rebuilt a site in Craft for a global brand insight agency, one whose own clients are household names. Their WordPress dashboard had a button on it that would take the whole site down. Not buried in a settings page. On the main dashboard. It belonged to a plugin that had broken, and the fix everyone had settled on was a note beside it saying do not press. That button shouldn't exist. That's WordPress at its worst, held together with sticky tape.

Cost

Craft's licensing is per project. Solo is free for personal work. Team is $279 one off, plus $99 a year if you want updates after year one. Pro is $399 on the same terms. Enterprise is a conversation.

WordPress core is free. That's rarely the real cost. Most non-trivial WordPress builds end up paying annual licence fees across several premium plugins and a theme, and we can't quote you a single number for that, because it depends entirely on which plugins the site ends up needing.

What matters more is the build. Ours run from £20,000 to about £110,000, which is the largest we've delivered so far. Where a project lands in that range comes down to what it has to do: e-commerce, custom integrations into systems you already run, or a large data-driven site with a lot of content to model. A brochure site on WordPress will come in under the bottom of that range. If that's the whole brief, we'll tell you so.

Developer and editor experience

WordPress templating mixes PHP, shortcodes and theme-specific functions. How much of that an editor ever sees comes down to the theme and page builder installed. Anything that isn't a blog is a bastardised blog underneath, and your editors live with whatever that compromise left behind.

Craft templates are Twig. Content is structured through Matrix fields and element queries that a developer defines once, for your project. What your editors get is a control panel matching the content types actually on their site: a case study, an FAQ, a product. The trade is that a developer has to build that structure first.

What editors tell us afterwards is fairly consistent. It's logical, it's quick to learn, and they like being able to preview a page properly before it goes out. The comment that comes up most is that they can't break the design, and they mean it as a compliment.

That authoring experience has had a harder test than our opinion of it. When the W3C, the body that publishes the WCAG accessibility guidelines, chose a CMS for its own site redesign in 2020, it shortlisted Craft, Statamic and WordPress. It discounted WordPress partly over the accessibility of the Gutenberg editor, and selected Craft. Craft publishes conformance reports against WCAG 2.2 AA and ATAG 2.0 AA, ATAG being the standard that covers authoring tools rather than the sites they produce.

We've done it over 100 times since 2013. The Oxford Character Project is a multi-content-type platform for the University of Oxford. Cardo Group is e-commerce running on Craft Commerce. Global Connections is a community hub for a global member network.

What if you stop working with us?

Fair question, and the honest answer starts with a concession: the Craft talent pool is smaller than WordPress's. It's in the cons above and we're not going to pretend otherwise.

What it lacks in size it makes up for in specialism. Craft developers have picked a CMS built for mid-market and enterprise work, and the ones we deal with, plus the plugin developers around them, are a cut above the average WordPress hire. The community is growing rather than shrinking. Craft's own partner directory lists agencies all over the world, so if you ever need to move on from us, there are people to move to.

There's a second kind of lock-in that our clients actually ask for. The structure we build holds your brand consistent across the whole site. Nobody can install a plugin on a Friday afternoon and leave you looking like a different company by Monday. Locked in, in the good way.

Migrating from WordPress to Craft

Hitting the plugin-sprawl or security ceiling on a WordPress site you already own? Here's the honest version of what we do, because it isn't a migration in the way most people mean the word.

We don't lift a WordPress site across one for one. Almost nobody wants that. The templated site you ended up with is usually the reason you're leaving, so copying it into Craft would just move the problem somewhere more expensive. What we do instead is run our discovery and strategy process, build the site the business actually needs, and bring across the content worth bringing.

• Articles and resources import automatically. Blog posts, news, resource libraries, all of it comes over through Craft's Feed Me, so years of writing doesn't get retyped.
• Everything else gets rebuilt deliberately. Pages get remodelled into content types that match how your business works, instead of the theme's idea of what a page is.
• URL structure and redirects. We do the technical SEO research, then build a 301 redirect spreadsheet mapping every old URL to the page that replaces it. You sign that off before anything goes live, and it gets imported through Feed Me alongside the content. That mapping is what carries your ranking signals over when the structure changes, and on a rebuild it will change.
• Parallel build, single cutover. The new Craft site gets built and reviewed in full before the switch, so you get one clean go-live.

Traffic usually dips at launch. We say that to clients before they sign, because new URLs take search engines a few weeks to digest. More often than not it comes back to where it was or better. What we can't do is promise you a figure in advance, because it depends how much of the old structure survives the rebuild.

One example, and we'll be straight about our part in it. A US regional news site came off WordPress onto Craft in March 2026. We didn't do that rebuild. We picked the Craft build up, finished it, did the speed work and launched it on our own server. Comparing the five months after launch with the same months a year earlier, sessions held within 5%, so a full platform change cost them almost nothing in reach, while pageviews rose 42% and pages per visit went from 1.4 to just over 2. Their own team puts the improvement at around 40%, which is what their analytics show.

The short version

If your content is custom, structured, serving more than one audience or just genuinely complicated, build on Craft. That's what we do, every time, and the reasons stack up over a site's life: less third-party code to patch, a content model shaped around your business, and an editing experience your team can't accidentally break.

If you need a brochure site next month on a small budget, we wouldn't recommend a Craft project. Get a Framer site live and spend the difference on something that moves the needle. And if you're already on WordPress and it's working, stay there until it stops working.

The dividing line is simpler than Craft against WordPress. Does your website have a job specific enough to be worth designing for? If it does, a blogging platform with a theme on top will fight you for years. If it doesn't, you don't need us, and we'd rather tell you that now.

Talk to us about your Craft CMS project: get in touch.