Choosing between Craft CMS and WordPress can feel simple at first. One is known for custom builds and structured content. The other dominates the web and offers endless themes and plugins.
Yet the decision gets clearer when you compare what matters day to day: how fast your team can publish, how safely you can scale, how much ongoing maintenance you can handle, and how much control you need over SEO and performance. This guide breaks down craft cms vs wordpress in plain language, with practical examples and current data.
Craft CMS vs WordPress: A Fast Snapshot
FURTHER READING: |
| 1. Is WordPress a CMS? A Clear Yes/No Answer and What It Means |
| 2. Change WP-Admin URL: How to Secure Your WordPress Admin Panel |
| 3. Top 5 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress in 2025 |
1. Market Adoption And Ecosystem Size
WordPress wins on sheer adoption. W3Techs reports that WordPress is used by 43.0% of all the websites, that is a content management system market share of 60.2% right now, which explains why you can find a WordPress developer in almost any city and at almost any budget level.
Craft CMS stays smaller, but it has a strong footprint in professional, custom-built sites. BuiltWith currently tracks 43,029 live websites using Craft, which signals a mature ecosystem even though it is not “mainstream” in the same way as WordPress.
2. Typical Team Fit
WordPress usually fits teams that want to move quickly with off-the-shelf building blocks. Marketing teams often like it because they can launch a site using a theme, then add features using plugins.
Craft CMS usually fits teams that treat the website as a product. If you want a clean content model, custom components, and a controlled editorial experience, Craft often feels more “designed on purpose” from day one.
3. Quick Decision Checklist
- Pick WordPress if you want maximum choice in themes and plugins, broad hiring options, and fast prototyping.
- Pick Craft CMS if you want custom content modeling, predictable admin UX, and a site that relies less on third-party add-ons.
- Either can rank well, but your SEO results will depend on content quality, technical execution, and how consistently you maintain the stack.
Flexibility And Content Modeling
1. Field Systems And Structured Content
Craft CMS shines when you need structured content that stays consistent across pages, campaigns, and channels. You model content with fields, sections, entry types, and relationships. Then you render that content in templates or in a headless front end.
WordPress can also handle structured content, but teams often reach for plugins or custom development to get the same level of modeling discipline. That approach can work well, but it can also create “plugin gravity,” where your content rules live across many settings screens.
Example: A university site might need Programs, Courses, Faculty, Locations, and News. Craft makes those relationships feel natural. WordPress can do it too, but the implementation choices vary widely by developer and plugin stack, so long-term consistency depends on governance.
2. Page Building And Editorial Freedom
WordPress offers a spectrum of editing styles. Some teams use the block editor as-is. Others rely on page builders. This can feel empowering because editors can assemble pages quickly and experiment with layouts.
However, that freedom can also increase design drift. If your brand team cares about strict layout rules, you may need guardrails such as locked patterns, custom blocks, and strong review processes.
Craft tends to push teams toward component-driven editing. You can still give editors flexibility, but you usually build it intentionally, component by component. As a result, many teams see fewer “surprise layouts” and fewer content debt cleanups later.
3. Multi-Site, Localization, And Governance
Both platforms can run multi-site setups, but the experience differs.
WordPress multi-site can work well when multiple sites share the same core setup. Still, plugin compatibility and network-wide updates can become a planning exercise, especially when different sites want different functionality.
Craft supports multi-site management in a way that often feels closer to “one system, many front ends.” This helps when you need shared content blocks, shared taxonomies, and consistent permissions.
Example: A product company with regional sites often wants shared product data but localized landing pages. Craft can centralize the shared data while keeping local editing simple. WordPress can also do it, but teams often rely more heavily on multilingual plugins and stricter editorial training.
4. Headless And API-First Builds
If you plan to go headless, both options can work, but Craft often feels more straightforward because content modeling stays clean and template decisions stay separate. Many Craft builds treat the CMS as a content hub and deliver content via API to a modern front end.
WordPress headless is common too. Still, you must make more early decisions: block content strategy, preview workflow, authentication patterns, and how you keep the editor experience usable when the front end lives elsewhere.
Cost: Licenses, Hosting, And Long-Term Maintenance
1. Upfront Licensing And Predictable Billing
Craft CMS has a clear commercial license model. For many teams, that makes budgeting easier. Craft’s pricing lists $399 per project with $99/year for updates after that, which sets expectations early for both clients and agencies.
WordPress core software costs nothing to download and run. That lowers the “start” cost. Yet most real WordPress budgets come from hosting, premium themes, premium plugins, and ongoing maintenance.
2. Plugin And Theme Spending Patterns
WordPress gives you a giant marketplace. That is a strength. It is also a risk if your site depends on many third-party add-ons that evolve at different speeds.
Even when you keep plugin counts low, you still need a plan for updates, conflicts, and vendor changes. In other words, WordPress can start cheap but become operationally expensive if nobody owns the maintenance discipline.
Craft’s ecosystem is smaller but still active. The Craft team highlighted that the Craft Plugin Store reached over 500 plugins, which means you can often find a supported add-on without jumping to a random vendor site or juggling separate licensing portals.
3. Hosting, Performance, And Ops Overhead
Both platforms can run on solid infrastructure. Still, the operational profile often differs.
- WordPress can run on almost anything, from shared hosting to enterprise platforms. That flexibility helps, but it also increases variance in quality. A fast WordPress site usually needs good hosting, caching strategy, image handling, and careful plugin selection.
- Craft commonly runs on more developer-oriented hosting setups. Teams often pair it with modern deployment pipelines and performance-minded front ends. That can lead to excellent speed, but it assumes you have someone who understands the stack.
Example: If you plan to run frequent campaigns with traffic spikes, WordPress might require extra performance tooling or managed hosting. Craft might require more upfront engineering, but fewer “mystery slowdowns” from plugin bloat if the build stays disciplined.
4. Staffing And Agency Economics
WordPress usually offers a lower barrier to hiring. You can find freelancers, agencies, and in-house talent quickly. That helps when you need rapid execution or a simple handoff.
Craft talent is more specialized. As a result, hourly rates may skew higher. Still, teams often spend less time debugging plugin conflicts and more time building exactly what the business needs.
So the cost question becomes simple: do you want a lower entry cost with more variability, or a more engineered build with more predictability?
SEO: Technical Control, Content Workflows, And Performance
1. Metadata, Schema, And URL Control
Both platforms can produce excellent technical SEO. The difference comes from how you achieve it.
WordPress typically relies on SEO plugins to manage titles, meta descriptions, canonicals, XML sitemaps, schema markup, and social metadata. This approach works well, especially for small teams, because it bundles best practices into a familiar UI.
Craft usually handles SEO through structured fields and deliberate templates. That gives developers more control and reduces surprises. It also means you must decide what “good SEO defaults” look like for your site, then implement them.
Example: If you run a marketplace with many page types, Craft makes it easier to enforce rules like “Product pages must have unique JSON-LD fields” because you can model the data. WordPress can enforce it too, but you often rely on a plugin’s schema system or custom code that must coexist with other plugins.
2. Content Operations That Drive Organic Growth
SEO success usually comes from consistency, not tricks. So you should evaluate how each CMS supports day-to-day publishing.
WordPress can support fast publishing, editorial collaboration, and integrations with marketing tools. Many teams also like the large ecosystem of editorial plugins.
Craft often supports cleaner workflows for complex content. When editors work with well-defined fields, they tend to produce cleaner, more reusable pages. That can improve internal linking, topic clusters, and content refresh cycles because the structure stays stable.
Example: A B2B SaaS team that publishes feature pages, case studies, and integration pages can build reusable “modules” in Craft. Then the team updates those modules once and keeps many pages aligned. WordPress can do something similar, but teams must commit to a component strategy instead of letting every page become a one-off design.
3. Core Web Vitals And Front-End Performance
Google rewards strong page experience when it aligns with user satisfaction. Google’s documentation recommends that Largest Contentful Paint happen within 2.5 seconds for a good user experience, and that guidance gives teams a concrete target to engineer toward.
Neither Craft nor WordPress guarantees that outcome. Your theme, front-end code, image strategy, and hosting decisions drive the result.
That said, WordPress sites often accumulate performance debt when teams add plugins for every new need. Craft sites can also slow down, but teams usually manage performance at the template and front-end level rather than through stacked plugins.
4. Migration And SEO Risk Management
Migrations can destroy rankings when teams treat URLs and content structure as an afterthought. So you should pick the platform that helps you control content and URLs over time.
WordPress migrations often involve plugin-driven content and shortcodes. That can complicate exports if your content depends on a specific builder. Craft migrations often involve structured fields, which can make mapping cleaner, but you still need careful planning for redirects and templates.
Practical tip: Before you choose a CMS, list the page types you care about for SEO. That list might include blog posts, landing pages, category hubs, author pages, and case studies. Then verify you can enforce unique metadata, stable URLs, and consistent internal linking for each type.
Security, Updates, And Compliance
1. Attack Surface: Core vs Plugins
Security starts with realism. WordPress powers a massive share of the web, so attackers focus on it. Most real-world incidents come through plugins, themes, and weak admin practices, not just WordPress core.
Patchstack reports 7,966 new vulnerabilities were found in the WordPress ecosystem in 2024, a 34% increase over 2023, with 96% in plugins and 4% in themes, which highlights the tradeoff of a huge ecosystem.
Craft has a smaller ecosystem, so it attracts less broad automated scanning. Still, you should treat any CMS as production software that needs patching, monitoring, and access control.
2. Update Cadence And Responsibility
Craft publishes clear lifecycle expectations. The Craft support policy shows Craft CMS five was released on 26 Mar 2024 with active support until 31 Dec 2030 and security support until 31 Dec 2031, which makes it easier to plan upgrades and avoid surprises in long-lived projects.
WordPress also ships frequent updates, plus frequent plugin updates. That can be fine, but it requires ownership. If nobody “owns updates,” WordPress sites drift out of date.
3. Real-World Hardening Steps For Both
Regardless of platform, take the same fundamentals seriously:
- Use strong admin authentication, and limit admin accounts to people who truly need them.
- Review every plugin or module like you would review a vendor, because it becomes part of your production surface area.
- Set a monthly maintenance cadence with backups, updates, and spot checks.
- Monitor uptime and errors so you catch issues before customers do.
If you want a data point that shows how quickly ecosystems evolve, the WordPress plugins team reported 12,713 plugins reviewed in 2025, representing a 40.6% increase compared to 2024, which signals rapid change and a steady stream of new code entering the ecosystem.
Real-World Examples: Which CMS Wins In Common Scenarios
1. Marketing Site With Custom Components
Craft often wins when you want a design system and reusable components. You can define a small set of page blocks, lock in brand consistency, and still keep editing pleasant. Agencies also like this approach because it reduces the “random layout” problem.
WordPress can still win if your team wants to iterate fast with a mature theme and minimal custom work. This is especially true when you have a strong internal marketer who understands the editor and stays disciplined about templates.
2. Content-Heavy Publication With Many Authors
WordPress often wins for publications that need speed, editorial tooling, and a familiar writing flow. You also get many options for paywalls, memberships, and ad tooling.
Craft can win when the publication also needs structured content beyond articles, such as rich topic hubs, research libraries, and content that must be reused across many page types without copy-paste.
3. Commerce And Membership Sites
WordPress can win if you want the broad WooCommerce ecosystem and a large pool of integrators. Many payment, shipping, and tax tools already exist as plugins, which reduces custom development time.
Craft can win when your commerce experience is content-led and highly customized. Teams that treat product pages as flexible content experiences often value Craft’s modeling and templating approach.
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4. Enterprise Integrations And SSO
Craft often wins when you need deep integration with internal systems and you want a clean, controlled admin experience for business users. It fits well when developers plan to build and maintain a tailored solution over time.
WordPress can win when the business already runs WordPress across many teams and wants consistency, shared training, and shared vendor support. In that environment, standardization can matter more than perfect architecture.
One practical way to decide: Write down your “non-negotiables,” then map them to build effort. If your site needs strict content structure, multi-site governance, and long-term predictability, Craft often aligns better. If your site needs speed, broad compatibility, and a massive talent pool, WordPress often aligns better.
Note on WordPress.com vs self-hosted WordPress: If you compare hosted plans, you should verify what you get at each tier. Forbes lists a WordPress.com Business plan at $25 per month, billed yearly, and it also highlights that the plan unlocks access to more than 50,000 WordPress plugins for teams that want plug-and-play expansion without self-managed hosting.
Final takeaway: the best choice is the platform you can maintain with confidence. Craft CMS rewards intentional design and structured content. WordPress rewards speed, community, and a deep ecosystem. Pick the one that matches how your team actually works, not how you hope it will work later.