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WordPress vs Its Competitors: 7 Key Differences and Advantages

WordPress vs Its Competitors 7 Key Differences and Advantages

There’s not a single ounce of doubt about who leads the pack when it comes to CMS (Content Management System) market share. There are other content management systems available, but, no competitor comes close to WordPress!

With WordPress, it’s never been easier to create a website for your business, and even more complex solutions such as larger multisite platforms, SaaS systems, CRM, and server infrastructures as well. The project that you want to create will determine how complex the process will be, and if and why you should choose WordPress as your CMS platform.

Before diving into the key benefits of WordPress, it’s important to address a common question: Is WordPress a CMS? Absolutely.

WordPress is not just a blogging tool – it’s a comprehensive Content Management System (CMS) that powers a significant portion of the web. Its evolution from a simple blogging platform to a robust CMS has made it the go-to choice for businesses seeking a reliable, scalable, and flexible solution for their online needs.

Understanding why WordPress is a CMS of choice for many businesses starts with its unparalleled versatility. Unlike other platforms, WordPress caters to a diverse range of website needs, from simple blogs to complex e-commerce sites. Its user-friendly interface makes it accessible to beginners, while its extensive plugin architecture allows for advanced customizations.

Today, WordPress is an all-inclusive CMS that we at DevriX use to develop powerful solutions for enterprises!

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Key Benefits of WordPress

So, how is WordPress better than other CMS platforms out there? Let’s have a look at its main features:

6 Key Benefits of WordPress

Easy Administration

The installation process alone doesn’t take more than 5 minutes, and you don’t need to be a technical expert to develop and publish content on the platform. With some community help, you can easily access and modify your pages, monitor, and install plugins.

Lots of Plugins and Add-Ons

Many excellent plugins and widgets that you can use on your WordPress system are free. These add-ons help you customize your website, and they’re brilliant to use for both small to midsize business pages, and more complex solutions that require much more technical development work.

SEO-Friendliness

While a lot of WordPress competitors fail to deliver an easy-to-use search engine optimization experience, WordPress itself is especially good for deploying SEO best practices. With the power of quality content, keywords, and plugins, you can further analyze and optimize your content.

Flexibility

The possibilities of scaling your website is one of the key aspects that make WordPress what it is! The development work is helped by over 59,471 plugins! The number of add-ons is staggering, and perhaps more than any other CMS. Whatever you need on your WordPress site, it can be done. If you can’t on your own, it can be achieved by a WordPress development professional!

Security

With the right set of security plans, which should include keeping the WP core up to date, keeping plugins updated, using a WordPress-managed hosting from a reliable company with top-notch support, making sure that the custom code is written following the best practices, etc. – WordPress is as secure as any other CMS out there.

Community

WordPress is built from and for the community, and we at DevriX are constantly giving back to its improvement, whether through our own contributions or running WordCamp workshops! There are 455 million websites built with WordPress, which is proof of a strong community and commitment to taking open source technology to new heights.

Disadvantages of WordPress

However, we aren’t saying WordPress is perfect, and there are a few setbacks in the platform, such as:

  • Need of complex modifications. Sure, you can find tons of ready-made snippets and templates, but, if you really want a sleek and unique solution, you need to have at least PHP and CSS support on hand.
  • Plugin trouble. Plugins are what makes WordPress so competitive in the CMS marketplace. However, too many plugins can significantly damage the performance of your website.
  • Safety issues. Its open-source nature means that your code is not as protected as you think. Additionally, there are also badly-formatted plugins that can be easily cracked by hackers if they have weak points.

However, apart from these few disadvantages mentioned above, brands such as Xerox, Sony, Walt Disney Company, and most of the Fortune 500 companies are powered thanks to WordPress! As a matter of fact, the most powerful institution in the world, the White House is powered by WordPress!

These examples alone are enough to convince you of what is the ideal CMS choice for multinational and big corporations.

While considering the WordPress competitors, it’s crucial to understand that each CMS has its strengths and caters to different needs. However, WordPress stands out due to its scalability, extensive community support, and the sheer volume of themes and plugins.

WordPress is the forerunner in the marketplace, however, there are other content management systems that can compete on several levels.

How To Choose The Right CMS For You?

What To Consider When Choosing A CMS

Choosing your content management system is the foundation of your web presence. In a nutshell, you need a platform that will meet each of your requirements while scaling your business in the process.

In the context of WordPress competitors, it’s evident that each CMS offers unique features and user experiences.

Here are the most important criteria that you´ll need to consider when comparing competitors to WordPress:

  • Cost. The end cost will depend on your demands, and the CMS needed to bring you the best ROI (Return on Investment) for your money.
  • Simplicity. The platform should be simple enough for flawless content management.
  • Layout. Your CMS should help you stand out among your competitors, refrain from using generic layouts like the rest of them.
  • Adaptability. Adding as many features as you like should be effortless, as well as using different plugins and add-ons.
  • Purpose. What is the main goal of your website? For example, if you want to sell through your website, eCommerce integration is a must for your CMS.
  • Security. Again, every website out there is liable for safety risks, however, your CMS needs to protect you from every impact.
  • Community. The CMS that has a busy and energetic community means that you’ll have 24/7 support and your CMS will constantly be up-to-date.

Who Are the WordPress Competitors?

6 Main WordPress Competitors

Let’s have a quick look at the top CMS competitors. Each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages and features that make them distinctive from each other.

Joomla

Joomla started back in 2005 as a CMS called Mambo. Currently, it’s the second most popular CMS behind WordPress with 5.4% of the market share. Joomla is based on PHP and also utilizes SQL databases.

There are paid and free add-ons and extensions, as well as available themes. However, not all are in its directory.

Joomla is mobile-friendly, multilingual, and with solid SEO features.

However, it is also substantially more complex than WordPress, and creating content is not as customized. Even posting an article can get difficult here, considering the number of options and categories that you have to set first before you even start writing it.

Drupal

Drupal was first introduced in 2001 and it’s currently the 3rd most popular CMS with 3.5% of the market share. It’s built with PHP, and guess what, it’s even more complex than Joomla!

With even more options and controls that you need to surpass to create your content, Drupal needs a sturdy technical knowledge of HTML, PHP, and additional programming languages so you can customize your content.

It’s also multilingual and good for SEO, and Drupal can be faster than WordPress because it uses fewer resources to run. However, considering how complex it is, Drupal can be difficult, especially for novice content managers who want to publish regularly via their site.

Squarespace

Squarespace is also among the WordPress competitors. It is a SaaS web builder that you pay per month to use, and you’re provided with all sorts of templates, hosting, support, and a domain name for your money. Currently, Squarespace captures 2.7% of the content management marketplace.

There is a Standard version which is a lot easier for someone without technical knowledge, and there’s also the Developer version which is the techie one that allows you to alter your website code.

The idea behind Squarespace is that anyone can make a website without coding knowledge. However, this doesn’t mean that you can build an enterprise system with it.

WordPress definitely offers you more configuration options, more add-ons, customizations, and flexibility to build whatever you want, compared to the limited options of a free website builder like Squarespace.

Wix

Wix is a website builder similar to Squarespace that lets you build your website from scratch with a drag-and-drop feature. At the moment of writing, Wix holds only 1.9% of the CMS marketplace. The websites built with Wix are hosted on the platform. However, there are additional costs involved in each of the more advanced plans.

The bottom line, Wix is user-friendly and pretty easy to understand, however, you’re not in full control of your content, and the designs and templates that are available are not perfect.

Craft CMS

In comparison with WordPress and other platforms, Craft is the relatively new kid on the CMS block. The content management interface is simple.

Plugins are not required, and all the necessary options for development are present, except for the advanced features that WordPress already has.

Of course, being a young entrant means that its community is still not big enough yet. The functionality of Craft is also a bit complicated and this increases the projects’ development time.

Weebly

Weebly is a website builder and hosting service that offers an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface. Weebly is ideal for small businesses, online stores, and simple websites.

Weebly is a popular choice as it offers a generous free plan. However, it’s more outdated than some of its competitors, with limited customization options and few of the tools necessary for long-term growth.

That said, it’s good for beginners, providing step-by-step guidance on how to build a website and optimize it for search engines. Once you outgrow the free plan, though, you’ll likely need to switch to a different platform in order to continue growing your website.

If you’re serious about making your Weebly site rank high in search engine results pages, then you’ll be glad to know that Weebly’s help and support center contains really helpful SEO guides. These guides provide advice on coding, keyword optimization, and tips on boosting your site’s ranking. In addition, the guides are regularly updated to reflect the latest changes in search engine algorithms.

While platforms like Joomla, Drupal, and Squarespace have their merits, WordPress’s ease of use and extensive customization options often give it a competitive edge.

How Does WordPress Compare To Each of Its Top Competitors?

How Does WordPress Compare To Each of Its Top Competitors

WordPress vs Drupal

Drupal has been around longer than WordPress, and it’s more complex to use than WordPress, but does that mean that it’s better? Let’s analyze the core differences, shall we?

WordPress Is Easier to Grasp

The interface of WordPress is much more intuitive With the refined Gutenberg Editor, managing your components is even simpler.

On the other hand, for users who don’t understand programming languages and technical aspects, Drupal’s interface is way too complicated for content management. If you want something new, you need assistance from a developer. Even Drupal themselves are aware of this:

“In general people expect a much richer user experience around content creation than Drupal offers, much of the functionality that people consider standard for a CMS is simply missing.”

Safety Nuances

It seems that Drupal is slightly superior when it comes to security. While the core of WordPress is protected, if you rely on too many third-party extensions, hackers can easily find vulnerabilities and attack them.

According to a study conducted by WordFence, in more than 50% of all hacker attacks, plugins are to blame! If you really want to protect your WordPress system, we encourage you to limit the number of plugins and choose them wisely.

On the other hand, security is probably the biggest advantage of Drupal. Even though everything is not perfect in the Drupal world, the platform has faced fewer security issues than any other CMS.

The bottom line is that both of them have their advantages and flaws. WordPress has an easier learning curve, more flexibility, and scalability, yet, slightly less secure than Drupal. However, Drupal requires much more technical expertise, and may not be the best choice for a publisher that needs to produce content on a regular basis.

WordPress vs Joomla

The most basic difference between WordPress and Joomla is that Joomla started as a CMS specifically designed for portal websites, while WordPress started out as a blogging platform.

Fast forward, today, both of these content management systems can be used for every type of website. Let’s see what are their core differences.

Subtle SEO Differences

If you take a bare WordPress and Joomla and compare their SEO capabilities, in the beginning, Joomla looks like a better option. It enables you to optimize your meta description without any coding work. With the SEO feature QuixRank, optimizing your website content is just a matter of following the steps!

However, WordPress also has a robust SEO plugin – the mighty Yoast SEO plugin.

WordPress vs Joomla Second

With Yoast, you can optimize different areas of your content for SEO, and get guidelines in real time on how to optimize while you create your content. This is practically unbeatable compared with the sole option of Joomla where you need to optimize the meta description yourself without any pointers at all.

Each WordPress Site Is Uniquely-Secure

Along with its popularity, come the vulnerabilities. Out of the millions of WordPress sites that are live, each of them is unique in its safety and security measurements. This makes poorly designed WordPress sites a favorite target for hackers!

The good thing is that each WordPress site that runs on version 3.7 and above can be maintained and updated automatically. The WordPress core couldn’t be safer than it is today, and most of the security issues are related to plugins, not to the core.

Another weakness that pops up from time to time is the user aka unsafe user login information, and that part of the safety is totally up to you as the web owner.

The security of Joomla sites is also up to the user, and Joomla even provides you with a security checklist that covers everything from hosting to running your website and protecting it from cyber attacks.

The bottom line is that WordPress is better for content management, customization options, and SEO. This is why it’s much better all around than Joomla.

WordPress vs Squarespace

Squarespace, as a website builder is pretty straightforward, however, it’s extremely limited compared to the features that WordPress has. However, to be completely transparent, let’s review the crucial differences that set them apart.

Designs and Layouts? WordPress Is Limitless

WordPress and Squarespace both offer ready-made themes and templates and tools that you can utilize to individualize your page.

As a matter of fact, WordPress provides you with thousands of free and paid website templates that are extremely customizable. Most of the high-quality themes come with various layouts and drag-and-drop builders that already provide you with more of the features that Squarespace has.

It really doesn’t matter what type of website you want, WordPress has the right theme for you.

Squarespace also allows you to use pre-designed themes and layouts for your website. However, the number of templates available to kick-start is limited, as well as the customization options.

It’s clear that WordPress again is the better option in terms of customization and layout flexibility.

Unlimited in Integrations as Well

The secret of WordPress lies in the community and the powerful plugins and extensions that developers have made to make sure that no CMS gets near in terms of quality and options for different integrations. In essence, there’s not a feature that comes to your mind that is not available in the form of a robust plugin.

You have essential plugins such as Sucuri, OptinMonster, and Yoast, then if you want to open an eCommerce, WooCommerce, and much more. As a matter of fact, each of the most powerful tools for email, live chat, lead generation, and more already has a plugin that makes the tool ready for WordPress integration.

On the other hand, the integration possibilities of Squarespace can’t match WordPress and on top of data, Squarespace can’t provide devs with powerful APIs to build on such as WordPress does.

Additionally, Squarespace lacks the customization options for opening an online store.

WordPress vs Wix

Of course, Wix is another option that you can use to create your website. Our CEO and Chief WordPress Architect Mario Peshev got to try Wix, and according to him when it comes to developing complex projects:

“Bloggers, solopreneurs, small businesses running a 5-page business website may pick Wix for their needs. And that’s fine – they rarely need to stand out when they just start out.

The more they keep growing, the more likely it is to outgrow the platform. Think of integrating a modern marketing automation platform, a CRM, a powerful eCommerce platform handling shipping across different countries – anything that a slightly larger website has to support.”

Wix Is Easy but Expensive

Let’s see, you’re getting the WordPress core for free, and you only need to pay for your hosting services. In addition, with Wix you need to pay for additional options that are not included in their free plan, and if you want to grow things further.

On top of that, even the paid plans are somehow vague and without unlimited data storage for its users. If users don’t pay for the hosting, but overpay for using the website builder, how is that viable in the long run?

What you pay to use Wix, you get it for free by using WordPress, it is as simple as that!

WordPress vs Craft

Let’s look at some of the differentiating factors when it comes to WordPress vs Craft CMS.

WordPress is a Stability God for Craft

Of course, there are a few bugs here and there, but other than some “deprecated” APIs that are still in the codebase, WordPress doesn’t have too many problems when it comes to system stability.

The WordPress core team is laser-focused on compatibility, and in comparison, Craft is still quite young and feels really unstable as a WordPress competitor against WordPress itself. We don’t say that Craft breaks all the time, but compared to WordPress, there have been bigger changes for cracking between major versions.

Basically, Craft is still a new area to be explored, while WordPress has dedicated years to stability issues.

WordPress has a RESTful API built-in and Craft doesn’t have a REST API in the core, but for the easier content jobs, there’s the first-party Element API plugin.

WordPress Multisite is Superior

The WordPress Multisite feature makes managing different sites separately unnecessary. For example, let’s say that you want to build a platform and scale it, but you also want a separate one where you’ll bring in additional users to convert. Instead of installing WordPress one more time, you can use the same username and dashboard to manage them both.

Multisite networks share the same plugins, themes, and database, but, they don’t have their own server directory, while they do have individual media directories and tables in the database.

Craft 3 also has multi-site, although it’s less equipped to completely run separate sites under the same CMS install.

WordPress vs. Weebly

Weebly and WordPress are two popular site-building platforms. Weebly is barely amongst the WordPress competitors as it is newly developed. This CMS platform is a beginner-friendly and is great for both personal and professional sites. WordPress is a more technically demanding platform that can accommodate very large websites and blogs.

The main difference between the two platforms is their technical setup. Weebly includes web hosting and customer support, while WordPress requires you to take care of this yourself.

Both platforms have their own strengths and weaknesses, so it’s important to choose the one that’s right for you. If you’re just starting out, Weebly is a great option. If you have more experience, or if you need a more flexible platform, WordPress may be a better choice.

Ease of Use

Weebly is probably the easiest website builder to use in the world. It uses a drag and drop editor to create your website. They also have an App Center where you can enhance your site through all kinds of gizmos and add-ons. The Weebly platform is built on top of Amazon’s AWS infrastructure, which gives it incredible performance (it’s one of the fastest-loading website builders we’ve tested).

However, while Weebly’s drag-and-drop editor is fairly user-friendly, it does have its limitations. The editor is quite restrictive, and you might find yourself frustrated with Weebly’s lack of creative freedom.

Keep in mind that Weebly is still a relatively new platform. As such, it’s likely that the company will continue to improve the drag-and-drop editor in the future.

Flexibility and Style

Weebly offers over 55 free templates. They are quite outdated and lack variety. Templates aren’t as cutting-edge and contemporary as WordPress, making it difficult to create a website that stands out.

Wrapping Up

There you have it, our take on the key differences and advantages of WordPress over the main WordPress competitors. There are lots of content management systems to choose from for your business, but only one among them is ace!

It’s easy to see why WordPress holds the majority of the CMS market share. It is the best option for enterprises in so many ways: it is user-friendly, extremely flexible and customizable. Also, the WP platform is suitable for a simple blog, eCommerce sites, multisite publishing and SaaS systems. In addition, it can be reinforced by expert contributors and the community that we’re part of.