Craft CMS vs WordPress: Which Is Better for Your Website?
WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world, powering a huge share of the internet and offering thousands of themes and plugins for almost any use case.
Craft CMS, on the other hand, was designed from the ground up for teams who care about structured content, flexible layouts, and long-term maintainability—especially when you're working with an experienced web agency.
At Mostly Serious, we've worked with both WordPress and Craft CMS (along with plenty of other options) to build a wide variety of sites. When we stack them side by side across the categories that matter most to our clients, Craft CMS and Craft Commerce usually come out ahead.
In this article, we compare the two platforms across eight practical categories that tend to drive real-world decisions:
- Content creation & management
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Built-in functionality
- Plugins & integrations
- Performance
- Security
- Ecommerce
- Pricing
Content creation & management
The primary job of a CMS is to make it easy to create, edit, and manage content. Both WordPress and Craft CMS technically get that job done, but they go about it in very different ways.
WordPress started life as a blogging platform in 2003 and has grown through years of incremental features, plugins, and theme ecosystems. The result is powerful—but it can also feel cluttered, inconsistent, and frustrating for non-technical content managers, especially when each plugin adds its own menus, settings, and quirks.
Craft CMS was built later with a single, focused goal: make life better for content authors. Flexible matrix fields, live preview, intuitive entry types, and structured fields make it easy for editors to create rich pages without wrestling with the CMS or breaking layouts.
Winner: Craft CMS
Search engine optimization
WordPress has long been known for strong SEO capabilities, thanks in large part to plugins like Yoast SEO. With the right configuration, it can certainly support a healthy search strategy.
Craft CMS has caught up and, in many ways, surpassed WordPress on this front—largely because of SEOmatic, a first-class SEO plugin built specifically for Craft. SEOmatic makes it straightforward to manage metadata, generate XML sitemaps, handle social sharing tags, and support more advanced SEO patterns without bolting on ten different plugins.
Beyond tools, Craft CMS often wins on the fundamentals that support SEO performance: clean templates, less bloat, faster load times, and flexible control over content structure. When developers aren't fighting the CMS, they can focus on building fast, accessible experiences that search engines (and humans) love.
Winner: Craft CMS and SEOmatic
Built-in functionality
If you're spinning up a DIY site in a weekend, WordPress offers a lot of out-of-the-box functionality through themes and plugins. You can assemble a decent site with relatively little technical knowledge—as long as you're comfortable making tradeoffs on performance and long-term flexibility.
For organizations partnering with a digital agency, the picture changes. Craft CMS ships with the kinds of building blocks our team expects: matrix fields for flexible layouts, robust content modeling, categories and tags, relationships between entries, and powerful localization. We can design the content model around your business instead of settling for whatever a pre-built theme supports.
In practice, that means less time fighting against templates and more time creating exactly what your content team needs.
Winner: Craft CMS
Plugins & integrations
This is the area where WordPress is the clear winner in raw numbers. With tens of thousands of plugins available, there's almost always a pre-built option for whatever feature you have in mind—from SEO and forms to membership systems and booking tools.
The downside is that not all plugins are equally maintained, secure, or performant. Stitching together too many can lead to conflicts, unexpected behavior, and a site that's difficult to update without breaking something.
Craft CMS takes a different approach. Its plugin ecosystem is smaller but curated, and the platform makes it straightforward for agencies and in-house developers to build custom integrations when needed. For many of our clients, that means we can deliver exactly the functionality they need without overloading the site with third-party code.
Winner: WordPress
Performance
On paper, both WordPress and Craft CMS can power fast websites—especially with good hosting and thoughtful configuration. In reality, WordPress sites often accumulate performance debt over time as themes, plugins, and customizations pile up.
Craft CMS is built on a modern Model–View–Controller (MVC) architecture. In simple terms, that means the system only loads what it needs for a given page instead of dragging every possible script and template along for the ride. Developers have fine-grained control over queries and templates, which makes it easier to keep the front end lean and fast.
For organizations that care about Core Web Vitals, mobile performance, and search rankings, that difference adds up quickly.
Winner: Craft CMS
Security
WordPress isn't inherently insecure, but its massive market share makes it an attractive target. Combine that with tens of thousands of plugins—each with its own code quality and update cadence—and you get a much larger surface area for potential attacks.
Craft CMS benefits from a smaller, more focused plugin ecosystem and a dedicated core team that ships regular security updates. While no platform is perfectly safe, we see far fewer emergency security incidents on Craft sites than on heavily customized WordPress installs.
When you're investing serious dollars in your digital presence, a quieter security inbox is worth a lot.
Winner: Craft CMS
Ecommerce
Both platforms support ecommerce, but they do it in different ways. WordPress leans on plugins like WooCommerce, BigCommerce integrations, and Shopify connectors to add carts and checkout flows on top of a general-purpose CMS.
Craft Commerce, built by the same team behind Craft CMS, takes a more integrated approach. Products, content, and checkout all live in one system, which is especially powerful for content-driven ecommerce sites that rely on storytelling, education, or editorial content to drive purchases.
For heavy-duty, high-volume ecommerce, we still often recommend specialized platforms like Shopify. But for many of our clients—especially those blending rich content with a catalog—Craft CMS and Craft Commerce are a sweet spot.
Winner: Craft Commerce
Pricing
WordPress core is free, which is a big part of its appeal. You still pay for hosting, premium themes, and plugins, but there's no license fee to get started. For organizations on a tight budget or individuals spinning up a simple site, that sticker price is hard to beat.
Craft CMS and Craft Commerce use a paid licensing model. Craft CMS licenses start in the low hundreds of dollars, and Craft Commerce adds additional cost depending on the tier. For our clients—who are typically investing in a custom, long-term digital strategy—that license cost is a small fraction of the overall project budget and often pays for itself in reduced maintenance and better performance.
If you are truly budget-constrained and need something quick, WordPress still wins on price alone. If you're investing in a platform meant to last, licensing rarely ends up being the deciding factor.
Winner: WordPress
Prefer to listen instead?
If you'd rather listen than read, here's a quick audio-style overview of this comparison you can play while you work.
So which platform is right for you?
Here's how our comparison shakes out across the eight categories we walked through above:
Content creation & management: Craft CMS
Search engine optimization: Craft CMS with SEOmatic
Built-in functionality: Craft CMS
Plugins & integrations: WordPress
Performance: Craft CMS
Security: Craft CMS
Ecommerce: Craft Commerce
Pricing: WordPress
In our work, that scoreboard is why we tend to recommend Craft CMS and Craft Commerce for most new website projects, especially when performance, flexibility, and long-term maintainability are top priorities.
WordPress still has a place—particularly for smaller, DIY-style builds or organizations that need to get something online quickly with minimal investment. But when you're ready to treat your website like a core digital product instead of a brochure, Craft CMS is usually the better fit.
Ready to talk about your next website?
If you're weighing WordPress versus Craft CMS for an upcoming project, we'd love to help you think through the tradeoffs for your specific goals, team, and budget.
Tell us a bit about what you're planning and we'll share an honest recommendation—even if that means pointing you toward a simpler solution.