Choosing the right CMS for your client’s website project can feel like a game of digital chess—there are many moves, but which one will lead to Checkmate? As a marketing agency, you know that the foundation of a website is just as crucial as the snazzy designs and clever copy you pour into it.

That’s where the CMS debate comes in. Two of the most common ones we see that go head to head among our clients? WordPress and Craft CMS.

Each has its strengths, but the real question we get asked is: which one truly delivers the goods for your clients’ unique needs? We sat down with our Tech Lead at Nerder, Glen Hayes, who rolled up his sleeves, dived into the nitty-gritty, and laid out everything you need to know to make the decision. Whether you’re looking for speed, flexibility, or just an easy win, this guide will help you match the right CMS with the right project.

WordPress and Craft are powerful content management systems, each with unique strengths. WordPress is renowned for its vast ecosystem of themes and plugins, making it an excellent choice for rapid deployment. Craft CMS, offers unparalleled flexibility without predefined content structures, allowing developers to tailor content models precisely to project needs. Your decision should be guided by the complexity of your project and the level of customization you require.
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder

Overview of WordPress and Craft CMS

First things first, let’s start with the basics; a bit of an overview before the deep dive.

What is Craft CMS?

Craft CMS is a PHP-based platform that’s more of a CMS than a website builder. This means it’s super flexible and customizable, but it also requires a bit more technical know-how to get it up and running.

Summary of Key Features of Craft CMS:

Built with developers in mind
Allows for a “clean sheet” start with each project
Highly customizable with a content-first approach
Includes built-in multi-language and multi-site capabilities
Powers about 0.2% of all the websites that use CMS
One of the top 10 headless platforms in terms of market share

What is WordPress?

WordPress, on the other hand, is the powerhouse behind nearly 64.2% of all websites (we know, right?). It’s a theme-based platform, which means you can pick a theme, customize it a bit, and you’re good to go. It’s user-friendly and has a massive library of plugins to extend its functionality. But it does come with limitations, more of which we’ll discuss ahead.

Summary of Key Features of WordPress:

Free and open-source CMS written in PHP
Theme-based, allowing for quick setup
Tons of plugins (over 60,000!) to add functionality
Multi-site capabilities out of the box
Widely supported by a large community
Powers about 64.2% of all the websites that use CMS

Comparing WordPress & Craft CMS

Now, let’s dive into the nitty-gritty. So, different developers have different elements they like to focus on when comparing CMSs. There are tons of them. We can’t analyze them all; there just isn’t enough time. We wanted to focus on 13 features that are important to us and which we think do a great job of showcasing the overall viability of the two CMSs.

Let’s take a look at how these two platforms stack up against each other in these key areas.

1. Multi-site/Multi-language Aspect

When it comes to managing multiple sites or languages, both WordPress and Craft have their strengths.

WordPress gives you multi-site functionality right out of the box, and with a few plugins, you can handle multiple languages too. However, Craft takes this a step further by offering both multi-site and multi-language capabilities built-in, with more granularity in how content is synced across sites.

Let’s say you’re managing a website for a large multinational company with multiple brands and regional offices across the globe. Each brand has its own site, and each regional office needs content in different languages—like English, French, and Spanish.

With WordPress, you can set up a multi-site network to manage all these sites from a single dashboard. But when it comes to syncing content, your options are a bit more limited. You might need to rely on plugins to manage multi-language content, which can make your website clunky and less integrated.

Craft CMS, on the other hand, offers these multi-site and multi-language capabilities right out of the box. It allows you to precisely control what content gets shared across all sites (like global announcements or brand guidelines) and what remains unique to each region (such as localized promotions or customer testimonials). For example, if you want your product descriptions to be the same across all sites but the pricing to differ by region, Craft lets you sync the descriptions while tailoring the pricing details to each market—all within a streamlined and efficient workflow.

What’s better? Craft CMS

Craft gives us a level of control for multi-language and multi-site that WordPress just can’t match out of the box. It’s like having all the settings you need right there without a pile of plugins. Makes a huge difference for global projects.
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder

2. Content Model

WordPress is designed with a blog-first mentality. This is great if you’re primarily focused on publishing content in a straightforward, consistent way. That means you’re often working within a predefined structure. You have posts, pages, categories, and tags—everything is neatly laid out for you, making it easy to get up and running quickly.

However, when your content goes beyond the basics—like if you need to manage a wide variety of content types, each with its own unique set of fields, relationships, and display requirements—this is where WordPress can start to feel limiting.

For example, imagine you’re building a website for an organization that needs to manage events, staff directories, portfolios, case studies, and more. Each of these content types might require custom fields, different layouts, and specific ways of being related to one another.

Craft CMS lets you define your content model from scratch. You’re not confined to a set structure; you basically have a “clean sheet” to work from. That means you can create exactly what you need. Want to add a custom field for an event’s venue, link it to related blog posts, and display it in a unique way on your site? Possible with Craft.

So if your website requires a more nuanced and flexible approach to content—where you’re not just posting articles but managing a complex, interconnected system of data/information—Craft gives you the tools to build that system precisely the way you want it.

What’s better? WordPress for simple content sites; Craft for complex models.

When it comes to building unique content structures, Craft’s flexibility is a dream. WordPress is great for simple sites, but for custom projects, Craft lets us design content just the way we want.
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder

3. Themes

WordPress is all about themes. You can choose from thousands of them (4,200 free and 10,000 premium themes, to be precise), customize them to your liking, and even switch them out when you want a fresh look.

Craft, however, doesn’t have official themes. You can probably get starters, for sure, but nothing is directly tied to Craft. There’s no theme-based functionality, such as purchasing or replacing themes like in WordPress. It’s more of a blank canvas, meaning your content needs to be designed and coded from scratch. If you search hard enough, you may find a few unofficial ones that might be a rare gem, but personally, we feel that can be a hit or miss, and you may have your work cut out for you with them.

What’s better? WordPress

WordPress wins here—having a huge library of themes is great for quick setups. With Craft, it’s all custom, which is awesome for branding but not as plug-and-play.
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder

4. Target Audience

The major difference between Craft and WordPress comes down to who’s building the website. Craft CMS was built with web developers in mind, while WordPress is geared more toward web designers and non-technical users.

If you’re working with a team of developers or have one on your team, Craft offers the flexibility and control you might want. But if your client has no coding skills or doesn’t have the resources to invest in a web development team in the future, WordPress might feel like a more comfortable fit.

What’s better? Craft CMS for your developers; WordPress for zero coding skill businesses.

For developers, Craft is like an open canvas. But if the client’s team isn’t technical, WordPress is easier for them to jump into without a lot of hand-holding.
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder

5. Plugins

WordPress is known for its plugins—around 60,000 of them, to be precise, and a lot of them are free, so there’s that. So you can add just about any functionality you need. But that’s not necessarily a good thing because that means that with WordPress, you get basic functionality that then needs to be fixed with added plug-ins. And while we all love plug-ins, here’s the catch: the more plugins you add, the heavier and slower your site can become. Plus, not all plugins are created equal; some might present security risks if they’re not well-maintained.

Craft seems to solve some of these problems because it’s designed to have more out-of-the-box features. There’s still a plugin store with fewer plugins than WordPress, but generally, the plugins are well-maintained. They feature more built-in capabilities and functionality than WordPress.

What’s better? WordPress

It’s a tie here. WordPress plugins? Tons of options. But Craft plugins? Fewer, yet they’re solid and don’t slow the site down. Both have perks.
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder

6. Simplicity of Use

WordPress and Craft CMS admin panels have some similarities. They both have a main dashboard menu on the left side of the screen. WordPress has an additional menu at the top of the screen as well.

Craft has a more concise main dashboard menu, which makes navigation easier and is overall less cluttered. Both CMSs offer ways to limit what editors see based on user roles. However, Craft CMS does a better job of administrative tasks, simplifies the interface, and shows relevant information like page performance, user engagement, etc.

What’s better? Craft CMS

Craft’s dashboard keeps things clean and easy to find, which is refreshing compared to WordPress’s extra clutter. Less is more when it comes to admin interfaces.
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder

7. Speed

Speed is crucial for any website, and here’s where things get interesting:

WordPress sites, especially those loaded with plugins like Jetpack, can suffer from slower speeds due to the extensive JavaScript code.

Again, we’re going back to the issue with plug-ins. With WordPress, we generally may need numerous plugins to achieve the desired functionality, and each plugin adds its own load on the server, which can slow down the site, especially if the plugins are not well-maintained or optimized.

Craft CMS, on the other hand, offers many of the features you’d need plugins for in WordPress right out of the box. This means fewer plugins and generally better performance. Additionally, Craft’s use of Twig templating allows us to create highly optimized, efficient code that enhances site performance.

Craft also uses Imgix which basically optimizes images by resizing them before displaying them, allowing it to load more quickly.

What’s better? Craft CMS

Craft is naturally fast because it doesn’t need as many plugins to run. WordPress can get weighed down if you’re not careful with plugins, but Craft’s lean build just makes it quicker out of the gate.
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder

8. Flexibility

This one really comes down to your definition of flexibility. If flexibility for you means more themes and plug-ins, then WordPress wins on that front. That being said, while flexible, WordPress often relies too heavily on these page builders and themes, and that can be tricky to modify if you want something truly unique.

So if you want a unique, one-of-a-kind website, Craft may be your go-to CMS. It’s incredibly customizable, allowing developers to create a site tailored exactly to your clients’ needs. This extends to every aspect of your website—from how content types are defined and related, to how pages are designed and displayed. You can customize everything from fields to templates, creating a truly unique and personalized experience without being restricted by the limitations of a pre-built theme or rigid framework.

What’s better? Craft CMS

With Craft, there are zero limits—whatever we can dream up, we can build. WordPress has flexibility too, but you’re always working within themes or plugins. Craft’s flexibility feels limitless.
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder

9. Security

This is a big concern for all our clients, and rightly so. It doesn’t matter how big or small your project is; you don’t want to compromise the safety of your client’s website and the information it holds, period.

Unfortunately, WordPress sites are a common target for hackers. How common? Let’s see some reports:

According to WP Clipboard, WordPress sites face an astonishing 90,000 attacks every minute. The risk of these attacks increases significantly when sites aren’t regularly updated—61% of hacked sites are actually running outdated code.
Plugins (here we go again) also pose a security challenge for WordPress, as they create multiple entry points for potential attacks. Specifically, 51% of vulnerabilities stem from outdated or poorly written plugin code, 37% originate within WordPress’s core code, and 11% are due to issues in theme code.

Craft, on the other hand, takes security seriously, and here’s how:

Craft regular updates and a design that minimizes potential attack points.
The CMS uses PDO (PHP Data Objects) for database interactions, which helps prevent SQL injection attacks—a common vulnerability in many web applications.
Craft also automatically escapes output in templates to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.
It doesn’t have a large theme or plug-in database like WordPress, so that reduces some of the vulnerabilities that stem from poorly maintained codes.

What’s better? Craft CMS

With Craft, we’re not battling as many security risks since it doesn’t rely on plugins the way WordPress does. It’s got a built-in security strength that WordPress just can’t match.
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder

10. Performance

Performance is often where WordPress gets a bad rap, especially as your clients’ sites grow in complexity. Optimizations become more challenging. You also need additional plug-ins for caching or optimizations. Craft, with its built-in functionality and fewer reliance on plugins, tends to offer better performance out of the gate.

That being said, remember our point earlier; we need to keep a close eye on which and how many plugins we’re adding to the site for various features. It’s a delicate balance here; we want to add plug-ins to extend the capabilities of a certain application without trying to change the core code, but in doing so, inadvertently negatively impact performance because of excessive use of plug-ins.

What’s better? Craft CMS

Craft’s built-in tools keep performance high, no extra add-ons needed. WordPress can perform well too, but the fewer plugins, the better. Craft’s simpler setup wins for speed.
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder

11. Community

WordPress has a massive community—no surprise, given that it powers about 60% of websites. You probably won’t find a single developer out there who hasn’t, at some point in time, used a WordPress built. And here’s something not a lot of developers will tell you: there’s a wealth of resources, plugins, and support available that can get things up and running pretty quickly and with very little technical know-how.

So, if your client needs additional dev work in the future, it brings down developmental costs significantly because you’re just relying on these free resources that are available to you. And that’s why most agencies want to use WordPress.

That being said, you need to keep one thing in mind here (and if you’re following along with us from the beginning, you know what we’re going to say) —plug-ins need to be used wisely. We cannot emphasize this enough. If you’re using plug-ins that aren’t updated regularly, you’re potentially creating entry points for unauthorized access (read: hackers) to your website. There’s also a risk of your website crashing. At the end of the day, you pay for what you get.

Craft’s community is much smaller but has grown over the years, and because it’s developer-focused, you’ll often find high-quality discussions and resources created by developers, content managers, and the Craft support team. It’s also a lot more regulated. All plugins are managed through a Craft ID, making it easy to handle updates and licensing in one centralized location.

While the smaller plugin selection might mean you’ll need to invest more in custom development, this also ensures that your site isn’t bogged down by unnecessary or poorly optimized plugins.

What’s better? WordPress (because of a larger community)

We recommend WordPress if you’re working with a tight budget and want an easy-to-use platform with a huge community and tons of SEO plugins. But if you’re ready to invest in something more customizable, with better performance and security, Craft is the way to go.
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder

12. SEO

WordPress offers a number of SEO plugins including lots of free options. Yoast SEO plugin is the most well known, but at Nerder we recently switched over to Rank Math as it offers a lot more features for free and is more secure.

Craft also has free SEO plugin options, but in our experience they aren’t very good. However, the SEOmatic plugin is excellent but does have a cost as licensing costs $99 for the first year + $49/year in subsequent years.

What’s better? WordPress for free plugins, Craft for better site performance and site security

WordPress is very SEO friendly and has some really good free SEO plugins, especially Rank Math. But looking beyond plugins, many SEO experts pick Craft due to faster page load times and increased site security.
Mladen Mladenovic, SEO Lead at Nerder

13. Pricing

Finally, let’s talk dollars. WordPress is free to use, with a wealth of free themes and plugins to choose from for as low as $55–$60. You could get a website up and running pretty quickly with preset templates, etc. This is great news. The downside actually comes in the event of premium integrations, themes or additional customizations; that’s when you can expect the costs to go up by a few hundred dollars.

Craft CMS is free for personal use. For more advanced use, it includes an upfront cost with annual licensing fees. The Pro version is currently priced at $399 for the licensing fee + $99/year for updates. So definitely a lot more expensive than WordPress.

In our experience, we’ve seen our clients go either way when making this choice. For the ones focused on a long-term digital strategy, the cost of Craft CMS and Craft Commerce is usually seen as an investment rather than a pain point. When launching a new website, choosing the right platform is crucial, so they don’t mind spending a little bit on a robust and reliable system.

If budget is a concern, WordPress might seem more appealing, but Craft’s investment could pay off in the long run with its superior customization and performance.

What’s better? WordPress

WordPress is budget-friendly, no question. But for clients willing to invest in a custom, long-term setup, Craft’s added cost usually pays off. It’s worth every penny for the right project.
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder

Craft CMS vs WordPress In a Nutshell

Here’s a quick summary to help you compare:

Feature	WordPress	Craft CMS
Multi-site/Multi-language	Multi-site out of the box; plugins for multi-language	Both built-in with more control
Content Model	Blog-centric	Custom content model
Themes	Thousands of themes	No official themes; fully custom
Target Audience	Designers, non-tech users	Developers
Plugins	60,000+ plugins	Fewer but more robust plugins
Simplicity of Use	Additional top menu; more cluttered	Clean, concise dashboard
Beginner Friendly	Can be used by beginners	Not suitable for beginners with no experience
Speed	Can be slow with plugins	Better performance out of the box
Flexibility	Customizable with themes	Highly customizable, no themes
Security	Vulnerable due to plugins	Strong security, regular updates
Performance	Needs optimization	Better performance, fewer plugins, fast load time
Community	Large, extensive support	Smaller, high-quality support
SEO	Good free plugin options (Yoast and Rank Math)	SEOmatic plugin is excellent, but has a license cost
Pricing	Free with paid themes and plugins	Free for personal, paid for advanced

The Verdict—Which One’s Right for Your Project?

Both WordPress and Craft CMS are really powerful CMSs. We tried to break it down as much as possible, but we do love simplicity. So if you’re still unsure which route to go, we hope this table will help:

Choose WordPress if:

You need a quick and easy setup.
You’re already used to WordPress and like using it.
You have limited technical skills.
You want access to a wide range of plugins and themes.
Your site requirements are pretty straightforward.
You have a limited budget to work with.

Choose Craft CMS if:

You need a highly customizable, unique and creative website.
You intend to work with developers and other technical resources.
Security and performance are top priorities. Your content architecture is complex.
You’re willing to invest in higher initial costs for long-term benefits.

Don’t let CMS choices drive you nuts. We’ve got your back.

With so many options out there, it’s no wonder creative agencies sometimes feel like they’re spinning plates.

But hey, that’s where we come in. We get it—you’re juggling client demands, deadlines, and probably more coffee than you’d like to admit (we are, too!). Let us take the stress out of this decision. Whether you’re eyeing something familiar or ready to dive into the deep end with something custom and scalable, we’ve got the web development team and expertise to guide you through it.

So, put down the CMS comparison chart and let us help you build something awesome. After all, we’re here to make you look good.