Craft CMS vs WordPress: which is right for your project?

The reason this comparison is worth writing anyway: Craft is small, but it's the platform a disproportionate number of senior digital teams pick when they've got the budget to choose deliberately and the experience to know what they're optimising for. If you've landed on this page, it's usually because a developer you trust mentioned it, an agency put it in a proposal, or you've been burned by WordPress enough times to start looking for alternatives.

So this isn't "WordPress is better" or "Craft is better". It's about when the niche platform is worth the extra friction, and when sticking with the default is the right call.

Full disclosure upfront: I've delivered twenty-plus projects across both platforms, including leading the introduction of Craft CMS as the core platform at Bright Labs, a Melbourne agency. I also run and maintain WordPress sites today. I'm not religious about either. The rest of this piece is the comparison framework I use when a client asks which one they should pick.

The short answer

• WordPress is right for most content-led sites with editorial teams, straightforward content structures, and functionality that mature plugins already cover.
• Craft is right for custom content-modelled sites where editor experience, structured data, and long-term maintainability matter more than plugin ecosystem or theme availability.

If that's enough to make the decision, stop reading. If the edges feel blurry, the rest of this piece is for you.

Architecture

WordPress. PHP and MySQL. Plugin-driven. Theme-based. The content model (posts, pages, custom post types, taxonomies) is fixed in the core, and everything else extends through hooks and plugins. Automattic maintains the core; a vast ecosystem maintains everything else. That scale is both the argument for WordPress and the source of most of its problems.

Craft. PHP and either MySQL or PostgreSQL. Custom content modelling is native, not bolted on. Templating is Twig, which is clean, logical, and maps well to how designers think about content. Plugin ecosystem is smaller but curated. The company behind it, Pixel & Tonic, is run by a small team that's been consistent about product direction for over a decade.

The architectural difference matters more than it sounds. WordPress gives you flexibility through plugins. Craft gives you flexibility through content structure. Those two paths produce very different sites ten years later.

Content editor experience

WordPress. The block editor (Gutenberg) has improved significantly since 2018, and Full Site Editing is usable for themes built around it. The editor experience varies enormously depending on the build. A well-built WordPress site with a thoughtful page builder or custom block library feels fine. A badly built one feels like editing a Word document inside a crossword.

Craft. Content modelling is a first-class feature. Matrix fields, structured blocks, entries, categories, and tags give editors a predictable, clean interface that matches the content model rather than fighting it. Editors who have used both tend to prefer Craft once they adjust. The control panel is opinionated in a way that works.

If you have a dedicated content team who will be in the CMS every day, editor experience is not a nice-to-have. It's a productivity line item.

Developer market

WordPress. The largest developer pool in the world. Cheap to source, quality varies enormously. Easy to replace a developer. Hard to find a senior one. The distribution of skill is extremely long-tailed. For a vetted senior pool, directories like Codeable and agencies like Human Made and 10up exist, but the price floor goes up accordingly.

Craft. Smaller, more specialised developer pool. Higher average quality, because the platform self-selects for developers who care about clean content modelling. Harder to source and more expensive hour-for-hour. The trade-off is that delivery risk is typically lower. Agencies like Viget, nystudio107 (Andrew Welch's shop), and PutYourLightsOn (Ben Croker, major Craft plugin developer) set the benchmark. In Australia, Hallmark Agency and Bright Labs run on Craft.

The practical translation: on WordPress you pay less per hour but spend more on supervision. On Craft you pay more per hour but supervise less.

Hosting and operations

WordPress. Runs on anything. Cheap managed hosting is a genuine strength here: WP Engine, Kinsta, and Flywheel all offer serious WordPress-specialised hosting at accessible prices. Security requires discipline, because plugin surface area is large. The Patchstack vulnerability database catalogues WordPress vulnerabilities at a pace that will either reassure you (transparency) or terrify you (volume), depending on your temperament.

Craft. Runs anywhere, but Craft-specialised hosts like Servd and Arcustech are worth the small premium for the operational experience. Security posture is better out of the box because the plugin surface area is smaller and the core team is conservative about what gets into the admin path.

Cost

Build cost. Similar at the professional end. WordPress can be cheaper at the low end, but the low end is exactly where projects end up needing replatforming. You don't save money going cheap on the build. You just pay for it twice.

Licence cost. WordPress is free. Craft Solo is free for single-user sites. Craft Pro is USD $399 plus USD $99 per year for updates. In AU terms that's negligible against build and maintenance costs, but worth mentioning because it still catches clients off guard.

Total cost of ownership. Often lower on Craft at the mid-market end, because the plugin-dependency tax on WordPress compounds over time. Every plugin is an ongoing commitment: updates, compatibility, occasional abandonment. Five years in, a WordPress site running fifteen plugins has a measurably higher maintenance burden than a Craft site running three.

Ongoing maintenance burden

WordPress. Plugin updates, core updates, theme updates, security patches. All manageable with discipline. All painful without. The WordPress security team does a good job on core. Plugins are a patchwork. You need a maintenance retainer and someone who actually runs it.

Craft. Smaller update surface area. Updates tend to be cleaner and less frequent. Breaking changes between majors are real but well-communicated, and the migration tooling is mature. Still requires a maintenance retainer. Still requires someone watching it. The load is lower.

When WordPress is the right call

• Content-led business with an editorial team publishing regularly.
• Standard functionality covered by mature plugins: forms (Gravity Forms), ecommerce (WooCommerce), SEO (Yoast or Rank Math), memberships (MemberPress).
• Budget sensitivity at the build stage.
• Low-to-medium complexity content model.
• Tight launch timeline, where "what a plugin does" is acceptable scope.
• In-house team you expect to rotate through multiple developers over the site's lifetime.

If you've got a mid-market business publishing a reasonable volume of content, with a marketing team who want to run things themselves, and no exotic content requirements, WordPress is usually the right pick.

When Craft is the right call

• Custom content model. Complex product catalogues, case study taxonomies, event structures, multi-language, multi-brand setups where WordPress would need five plugins to approximate what Craft gives you natively.
• Editor experience matters to the business. Dedicated content team. Long content pieces. Structured landing pages that need to look consistent.
• You've been burned by WordPress plugin rot before and never want to do that again.
• Long-term maintainability is the priority over short-term build cost.
• The site will be maintained by one or two senior developers for years, not rotated through a churning team.
• You want a performance baseline that doesn't require fighting the platform. Craft sites, well built, tend to be fast by default.

When neither is right

Worth naming. Framing the decision as "Craft or WordPress" is sometimes the wrong frame entirely, and the right answer sits somewhere off the map this article has been drawing on.

• Pure ecommerce at any scale. Go to Shopify or Shopify Plus. Trying to run serious ecommerce through WordPress plus WooCommerce works for small stores and becomes a maintenance burden at scale.
• Content-first sites where the team loves Laravel. Statamic is a flat-file or database-backed CMS built on Laravel. If your developers already live in the Laravel ecosystem and the site is more marketing than application, Statamic is often the smoothest pick. Licence is one-time, editor experience is strong, and the Laravel DX is unmatched.
• The site is really an app with some content attached. Payload CMS is TypeScript-native, self-hosted, code-first, and designed to live inside a Next.js monorepo. If you're building an application with a content layer rather than a content site with an application bolted on, Payload is worth a serious look.
• Enterprise content operations across many brands, regions, and translations. Headless SaaS platforms like Contentful, Storyblok, or Sanity are built for this shape of problem. Craft gets close at the upper end, but if you're running content across ten markets with formal translation workflows, a proper headless stack is usually cheaper over three years.
• Something genuinely custom that no off-the-shelf CMS should touch. A custom Laravel or Rails build is occasionally the right call for businesses whose content model is so specific, or whose operational workflows are so integrated, that fitting it inside a CMS means fighting the CMS forever. Rare, expensive to maintain, sometimes correct.
• Internal employee platforms and intranets. SharePoint if you're in the Microsoft ecosystem. Don't fight this one.
• High-performance marketing sites with heavy personalisation or a mobile app sharing the backend. Decoupled architecture with Craft, WordPress, or a headless CMS as the content source and a Next.js or Astro front-end. Complicated, expensive to run, right for a small set of projects.

Let's be honest: if you've read this far and none of the options feel clearly right, that's usually a sign the problem isn't platform choice. It's that the requirements haven't been interrogated properly yet. Platform-first decisions tend to lock you into the wrong shape of build for the next five years. Requirements-first decisions make the platform choice obvious by the end of the workshop. If you want help making sense of the mess before anyone writes a brief, get in touch and we'll work out what you actually need before pointing at a logo.

The decision framework in five questions

If you can answer these five honestly, the platform choice usually becomes obvious.

1. Does your content team publish regularly, and does editor experience actually matter to the business? If yes, Craft has an edge. If you publish four blog posts a year, either is fine.
2. How custom is your content model? If the site is posts, pages, and a team listing, WordPress is ample. If it's multi-level taxonomies, relationships between content types, and custom interface patterns for editors, Craft.
3. How long do you expect to run this site before the next rebuild? If it's three years, WordPress is often fine. If it's seven-plus, the maintenance tax on WordPress bites. Craft wins on longevity.
4. Who will maintain it? A single agency or internal senior: Craft is safe. A rotating in-house team or a budget that forces you to change developers regularly: WordPress is safer because replacements are easier to find.
5. How strict are your performance and security requirements? If you're in regulated financial services, healthcare, or anywhere with a compliance function who reads security advisories, Craft's smaller surface area is easier to defend.

Where to from here

If you're weighing a new build or a replatform and the answer still isn't obvious, a short call is usually enough to resolve it. The website project manager engagement page covers how website projects actually run when someone senior owns the brief, the vendor, and the QA, across either platform.

If you're already on one platform and wondering whether you should move, the honest answer is usually "not yet". Replatforming is expensive, disruptive, and rarely the fastest path to the outcome you actually want. A website health check will tell you whether the platform is your problem or whether the platform is fine and something else is leaking.

The right CMS is the one your team can run well, for a long time, without fighting. Sometimes that's WordPress. Sometimes it's Craft. Occasionally it's neither. Pick for the next five years, not the next six weeks.

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