How is WordPress better than other CMS?

WordPress is better than other CMS options in five concrete ways: the size of its plugin and theme ecosystem, the number of people who already know it, the low cost of getting a site online, the freedom to take your code and content anywhere under the GPL, and a long habit of not breaking old sites. It is not better at typed, structured content, at multilingual sites out of the box, or at being left alone without patching. Whether it wins for you depends on which of those you feel most. Drupal, Joomla, Ghost, Craft, Strapi, Payload, Sanity, Wix, Squarespace and VeloCMS each beat it on at least one narrow axis, and the sections below name which one and what it costs.

Last verified: 2026-10-12.

Disclosure: I work on VeloCMS, and it's one of the options. It gets its own short section near the end with its weaknesses listed, shows up in the lists alongside the others, and gets no special treatment in the verdicts. I read every price, count and quote below from the linked primary page on 2026-10-12. Where a page wouldn't give me a number, I left the number out. Opinions are marked as mine.

How does the WordPress extension model compare with other CMS?

This is WordPress's biggest genuine advantage, and it comes in two parts: a simple hook system, and sheer volume.

The hook system first. WordPress core, themes and plugins all announce moments in their own execution, and your code subscribes to them. The plugin handbook says actions "will run at a specific point in the execution of WordPress Core, plugins, and themes", while filters "will accept a variable, modify it, and return it" and "should never have side effects" (hooks handbook). In practice that means you can change a site's behavior without touching core files:

// Action: run code when a post is saved (priority 10, two arguments).
add_action( 'save_post', 'myplugin_after_save', 10, 2 );
function myplugin_after_save( int \(post_id, WP_Post \)post ): void {
    if ( wp_is_post_revision( $post_id ) ) {
        return;
    }
    // Purge a cache, ping a search index, notify a channel...
}

// Filter: take a value, change it, hand it back.
add_filter( 'excerpt_length', fn( int $words ): int => 30 );

The default priority is 10 and lower numbers run earlier, per the actions reference. That's the whole mental model.

Other systems have equivalents, and some are tidier. Drupal 11.1 added object-oriented hooks, where a method tagged with a #[Hook('user_cancel')] attribute replaces the old magic function name (change record). Strapi fires lifecycle hooks such as beforeCreate and afterCreate, but its docs caution they aren't triggered if you use the knex library directly instead of Strapi's own functions (Strapi docs). Payload has root, collection, global and field hooks (Payload docs). Ghost is the sparest of those I checked: the extension points I found documented are themes, APIs and 29 webhook events, and the pages I read don't describe a plugin model (Ghost webhooks).

Now the volume, which is where nobody competes:

• WordPress plugins: 71,189 returned by the directory's own API on 2026-10-12 (API query). The plugins page itself shows no total, which is why I used the API.
• WordPress themes: 8,690 on the themes directory.
• Single plugins with huge reach: WooCommerce at 7+ million active installs (plugin page), Advanced Custom Fields at 2+ million (plugin page).
• Joomla extensions: 4,960 in the Joomla Extensions Directory.
• Drupal modules: 56,611 in an unfiltered Drupal.org search, though that spans every Drupal version, so it's not comparable to the WordPress figure.
• Wix: the App Market shows per-category counts, not a total.

One caveat: a big directory means a big quality range (my opinion), and two plugins can fight over the same filter. Still, if your requirement is "someone has probably built this already," WordPress wins on the numbers.

Is WordPress easier to own and to leave than other CMS?

WordPress is licensed under the GPL, version 2 or later, which the project's about page frames as four freedoms: run it for any purpose, study and change it, redistribute it, and distribute your modified versions. Nobody can withdraw the code you already have. Drupal is also GPL, version 2 or later (Drupal licensing), and Ghost is MIT-licensed (repository).

Content portability is the practical half. WordPress's export screen produces a WXR file containing "your posts, pages, custom post types, comments, custom fields, categories, tags, custom taxonomies, and users" (export docs). Plenty of competing platforms have an importer for that format, so it's close to a lingua franca.

Compare the hosted side:

• Wix: its support page says a site "needs to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers," though you can connect a domain bought elsewhere (Wix support). You can point a domain elsewhere. You can't take the site.
• Sanity: you can export a dataset to a tarball with npx sanity@latest datasets export production production.tar.gz, which per its docs contains data.ndjson plus asset folders (Sanity docs). Your content leaves cleanly. Your front end is yours already.
• VeloCMS: posts, media, subscriber records and settings export as JSON or CSV from the admin, but the application itself is proprietary, hosted only, with no self-hosted core or source access (VeloCMS for developers).
• Payload: MIT-licensed and, per its repository, runs on MongoDB or Postgres you control (GitHub).

So the fair statement is narrower than "WordPress is open, others aren't." Ghost, Payload, Strapi, Craft and Drupal are also self-hostable. WordPress's edge over them is that the export format is so widely understood, and, in my read, that more hosts will run it than will run any of them. Its edge over Wix, Sanity's hosted store and VeloCMS is simpler: you hold the whole stack.

Is WordPress cheaper to run than other CMS?

At the bottom end, yes, though the software being free is only part of it.

WordPress recommends PHP 8.3 or greater, MariaDB 10.11 or greater or MySQL 8.0 or greater, and HTTPS, on Apache or Nginx, and says it also works on PHP 7.4+ and MySQL 5.5.5+ even though those are end of life (requirements). That is a very common server profile, which I'd say is why cheap hosting for it is everywhere. WordPress.org lists Pressable, Bluehost and Hostinger as recommended hosts without printing prices (hosting page), so I can't give you a self-hosting floor. I can give you the hosted-WordPress floor:

• WordPress.com: Free at $0, then Personal, Premium, Business and Commerce at $4, $8, $25 and $45 a month on yearly billing ($9, $18, $40 and $70 monthly), with hosting on every plan and real-time backups only from Business up (WordPress.com pricing).
• Ghost(Pro): Starter $18 a month, Publisher $29, Business $199, at the yearly-billing rate and in USD. Paid subscriptions and custom themes start at Publisher, and Ghost lists a 0% transaction fee there, though payment processor fees still apply (Ghost pricing).
• Craft CMS (self-hosted licences): Solo is free, Team is $279 per project, Pro is $399, and updates after the first year are $99 a year. The page says Team and Pro are free when hosted on Craft Cloud (Craft pricing).
• Strapi Cloud: Starter $35, Pro $90, Business $450 per project per month on the monthly toggle (the page advertises yearly savings of up to 17% without printing yearly prices), with no free tier listed (Strapi Cloud).
• Sanity: Free at $0 with 20 seats and 10,000 documents, Growth at $15 per seat per month with 25,000 documents (Sanity pricing).
• Wix: a free plan exists, and the paid Light plan was listed at $17.77 a month on yearly billing as a USD reference, with prices varying by location (Wix plans).
• Squarespace: no free plan, a 14-day trial with no card, Basic at £12 a month on annual billing, with a 2% store fee and 7% membership fee at that tier (Squarespace pricing).
• VeloCMS: Pro $9 a month, Business $29, Agency $69, no free plan, 14-day trial that takes a card and charges on day 15 (VeloCMS pricing).

Contentful belongs here too, but its pricing page refused my request, so no number from me: check contentful.com/pricing.

WordPress.com's free tier is one of three free entry points here (Sanity and Wix have one too). But "cheap" and "cheap to maintain" aren't the same: when you self-host, patching, backups and plugin updates are your time, and no pricing page shows that.

Is it easier to hire for WordPress than for other CMS?

Almost certainly, though I have no job-board count I'd trust, so treat this as an inference from usage.

W3Techs reports that on 2026-10-12 WordPress runs 40.1% of all websites, which is 58.6% of those with a known CMS. (WordPress.org's own about page says over 43% of all sites, a different and rosier count; I use W3Techs because it's an independent measurement.) The rest of the list is a long way down: Shopify 5.4%, Wix 4.2%, Squarespace 2.4%, Joomla 1.1%, Tilda and Webflow 0.8% each, Drupal 0.6%, Ghost 0.1%, and Craft CMS in the group at 0.1% or less (W3Techs). Usage isn't headcount, but a platform on four in ten sites has trained a lot of freelancers and agencies, and a Craft or Payload shop draws on a much smaller pool (my estimate, not a vendor number).

There's a flip side: a large pool is a mixed-quality pool, and "WordPress developer" can mean someone who configures plugins or someone who writes them. For the common case of a marketing site that needs a maintainer in two years, though, the odds favor WordPress.

Does WordPress have a better built-in API for headless use?

It has the oldest broad one, which counts for something, but it's not the cleanest.

The REST API ships in core. Any WordPress site can serve JSON from /wp-json/wp/v2/posts. I confirmed it live against the WordPress core team blog:

curl "https://make.wordpress.org/core/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?per_page=1&_fields=id,slug,title"

That returned a post whose title arrived as {"rendered": "..."}. That small detail is my main complaint: WordPress hands you rendered HTML and shortcode output, not a clean content model, so a headless front end often has to deal with markup it didn't choose. The REST API handbook says it provides REST endpoints representing posts, pages, taxonomies and other built-in data types, which you can query, modify and create content through as JSON.

For GraphQL, WPGraphQL is a free, open-source, GPL-3 plugin that adds a schema and API to any site. It isn't core, but it's mature enough that many headless WordPress builds start there.

How the others compare:

• Drupal: the JSON:API module is part of core, and its docs describe it as a "zero-configuration required" way to get RESTful CRUD over a site's content (Drupal docs).
• Craft: a GraphQL API is part of the CMS, with a public schema that's disabled by default and private schemas behind bearer tokens (Craft docs).
• Strapi: REST and GraphQL, based on a plugin system (Strapi docs).
• Payload: "Instant REST, GraphQL, and straight-to-DB Node.js APIs generated from your config" (Payload docs). The local API is the standout, because your code can skip HTTP entirely.
• Sanity: content lives in the Content Lake and is queried with GROQ, with the content model written in TypeScript (Sanity Studio).
• Ghost: a read-only Content API whose keys only expose public data (Ghost docs).
• VeloCMS: a versioned REST API under /api/v1, bearer-token auth, and an OpenAPI 3.1 document at /api/v1/openapi (VeloCMS help).

If the content model is the product, headless-native tools beat WordPress. If you want to keep an editing UI your editors already know and bolt a new front end onto it, WordPress is hard to beat.

Is the WordPress block editor better than other CMS editors?

It's different rather than better, and it's one of the few places where I'd call WordPress's position genuinely mixed.

What it has going for it: the theme system is now declarative. The handbook calls block themes "the modern method of building WordPress themes", built from HTML templates, and notes that classic PHP themes are "still supported in WordPress today" (block themes). Design settings sit in a theme.json file:

{
  "$schema": "https://schemas.wp.org/trunk/theme.json",
  "version": 3,
  "settings": {
    "color": {
      "palette": [
        { "name": "Black", "slug": "black", "color": "#000000" }
      ]
    }
  }
}

(That's the handbook's own example; version 3 is the format from WordPress 6.6.) For an agency, that means a client gets a constrained palette and editors can't wander off-brand. The 7.0 developer notes also list patterns defaulting to Content-Only mode, which looks aimed at that locked-down-for-editors case (my reading) (developer blog).

What it has against it: Wix and Squarespace are hosted builders where the editor, hosting and updates are one product, and my read is that their editing is simpler for a non-technical owner. Squarespace also gates custom code by plan, with advanced code blocks and code injection from Core upward (Squarespace pricing). So they trade flexibility for fewer ways to break a page.

Which CMS handles multilingual and multisite better, WordPress or the rest?

Not WordPress, at least on the multilingual half. This is a place where the usual "WordPress has it all" claim falls over.

Multisite is a WordPress strength. One install can run a network of sites: the docs describe it as several instances "managed within one installation," sharing themes and plugins while each site gets its own database tables, with only the user table shared (multisite docs). Craft does something similar, since "a single Craft installation can power any number of websites", with a soft cap of 100 that you can raise (Craft docs).

Multilingual content is different. The WordPress roadmap lists "Multilingual: Core implementation for Multilingual sites" as the fourth phase of the long-term plan, with no date attached (roadmap). Until then you use a plugin, and Polylang, at 900,000+ active installs, is a common one (Polylang). It works, but your theme and every other plugin have to cooperate with it.

Others ship it in the box:

• Drupal core includes four multilingual modules: Language, Locale (interface translation), Content Translation and Configuration Translation (Drupal guide).
• Joomla separates installed languages from content languages and has a Multilingual Associations component for linking translations (Joomla manual).
• Craft sets a language per site and lets you translate content per field (Craft docs).

If a bilingual or Arabic-and-English site is a day-one requirement, Drupal, Joomla and Craft start ahead of WordPress. That's a real reason to skip it.

Is WordPress's backward-compatibility policy really a strength?

Yes, if you maintain sites for years, and it's the argument for WordPress I find hardest to answer.

The block editor handbook opens its compatibility page with "Historically, WordPress has been known for preserving backward compatibility across versions" and says the team tries "to guarantee that existing APIs don't break and build new alternative APIs" (handbook). The requirements page shows the habit from the other side, since it still says WordPress works on PHP 7.4+ even though that's end of life. A site you built years ago tends to keep running.

Contrast that with ecosystems that retire major versions on a schedule. Drupal's core team states that "Drupal 10 will officially be supported until December 2026" (Drupal core blog), and the project page says Drupal 7 bugfix and security support ended on 5 January 2025, with 11.4.9 the current stable line as of 2026-10-09 (Drupal project). That's a defensible policy, but upgrade projects arrive on someone else's calendar. My read: WordPress optimizes for the site you already have, and Drupal optimizes for the codebase you'll have.

On long-term survival, the evidence is the release cadence. The release archive lists 7.0 on May 20, 7.1 on August 19, and 7.1.1, 7.1.2 and 7.1.3 on September 17, September 22 and October 6, 2026. Joomla's download page lists 6.1.4 as the latest (Joomla downloads), so the other classic open-source CMSs are shipping too. And GPL licensing means the code itself can't disappear on you.

Compare the hosted options. Wix, Sanity's hosted store and VeloCMS exist as long as their companies run them, which is a different kind of long-term risk (my inference, not a prediction about any of them). That's the survival argument for WordPress in one line: nobody can turn it off.

When is WordPress not the better choice?

More often than its fans admit. Here are the cases where I'd steer someone elsewhere, and where.

• You publish for a living and the newsletter is the business. Ghost bundles email and paid memberships and lists a 0% transaction fee from Publisher up (Ghost pricing). It's a publishing product, not a store or a general site builder.
• Your content model is the real product. Craft stores its schema as YAML under config/project/ so it travels through version control (Craft project config). Payload and Sanity treat a typed config or TypeScript schema as the starting point. WordPress can model custom content, but usually through a plugin like ACF, and your content model then lives in a plugin and database rows.
• The owner is non-technical and you want nothing to patch. Squarespace and Wix take hosting, updates and security off your hands, at the cost of portability and, on Squarespace, platform fees at lower tiers.
• You need multilingual in core. Drupal, Joomla or Craft, per the section above.
• You're building inside a Next.js app. Payload describes itself as a fullstack Next.js framework and is MIT licensed, so you skip running a separate PHP service.
• You want a hosted blog, newsletter, paid membership and small store behind one login and don't need a plugin ecosystem. That's what VeloCMS is for, and it comes with the caveats below.
• You don't want to be the sysadmin. Any hosted product avoids that, and WordPress.com is the hosted version of WordPress itself.

None of those make WordPress bad. Its strengths just don't apply to what you're trying to do.

Where does VeloCMS fit next to WordPress?

VeloCMS is a hosted CMS bundling a blog, newsletter, paid memberships, a small store and a page builder behind one login. Its for-developers page says the frontend is Next.js 16 with React 19 and TypeScript, backed by PocketBase.

Pricing from velocms.org/pricing: Pro is $9 a month (5 GB, 5,000 subscribers, one site), Business is $29 (50 GB, 50,000 subscribers, five team members), and Agency is $69 (five sites included). There is no free plan. Every plan starts with a 14-day trial, and the page says the card is added when you start it and charged on day 15 unless you cancel. The page says the platform takes no cut of sales (membership and paywall at a 0% fee), so only Stripe's processing fees apply.

Its weaknesses against WordPress are plain. It's a young product with a far smaller ecosystem. It's proprietary and hosted only, with no self-hosting or source access, so you hold less of the stack than you would on WordPress. Third-party plugin and theme development isn't an open program yet, although the plugin SDK is MIT-licensed on npm. And the WordPress import guide says the importer brings in posts, pages, categories, tags and media from a WXR file, but not comments, user accounts, custom post types or plugin data like WooCommerce and ACF. It also pulls media from your live site, so the old site has to stay up during import.

How do you decide, dimension by dimension?

Here is the short version, written as rules of thumb rather than a ranking.

• If your requirement is "there must be a plugin for it": WordPress. No directory here comes close, as the counts earlier show.
• If your requirement is full ownership of code and data: WordPress, Drupal, Ghost, Craft, Strapi or Payload, all self-hostable. Not Wix, and not any hosted-only product, including mine.
• If your requirement is lowest entry cost: WordPress.com Free, or Sanity and Wix free tiers.
• If your requirement is a decoupled front end on an existing editor: WordPress with WPGraphQL or the REST API.
• If your requirement is a typed content model in Git: Craft, Payload or Sanity.
• If your requirement is multilingual in core: Drupal, Joomla or Craft.
• If your requirement is a newsletter-first publication: Ghost.
• If your requirement is a site that someone non-technical edits and nobody patches: Squarespace or Wix, accepting the lock-in.
• If your requirement is blog, newsletter, membership and store in one hosted login: VeloCMS or Ghost for the first three, depending on whether you need the store.
• If none of those hurts: stay on WordPress. Migrating costs URLs, plugin data and retraining before it pays anything back.

FAQ

Is WordPress still the best CMS for most people?

For most general-purpose sites, it's the safest default, because of its ecosystem, hosting choices and hiring pool. It's 40.1% of all websites per W3Techs. "Best" depends on the job, though, and the sections above show where it loses.

Is WordPress better than Wix?

It's better if you want ownership and extensibility, since Wix says a site must be hosted on Wix's servers (Wix support). Wix is better if you want a managed builder with a free plan and nothing to patch.

Is WordPress better than Ghost for blogging?

For a plain publication with newsletters and paid members, Ghost is more focused, and its pricing bundles those features. WordPress is better when you need arbitrary plugins, a store or heavy customization.

Can WordPress work as a headless CMS like Strapi or Payload?

Yes. The REST API is in core and WPGraphQL adds GraphQL. The trade-off is that responses carry rendered markup (title.rendered) rather than a purpose-built content model, which Strapi, Payload and Sanity give you by design.

Is WordPress free?

The software is free under the GPL (WordPress.org), and WordPress.com has a $0 plan with hosting included (pricing). Self-hosting still costs a server, backups and your time on updates.

Is it easy to migrate away from WordPress?

Getting the data out is easy: export a WXR file from Tools, then Export. Getting it into another platform depends on the importer. VeloCMS's guide, for one, lists comments, users, custom post types and plugin data as not imported, so test with a pilot batch first.

Sources (all accessed 2026-10-12)

W3Techs content management usage · WordPress.org about · WordPress.org requirements · WordPress.org hosting · WordPress roadmap · WordPress releases · WordPress themes directory · WordPress plugins API · Plugin handbook: hooks · Plugin handbook: actions · REST API handbook · Multisite docs · Block themes handbook · Global settings and styles · Backward compatibility · What's new for developers, March 2026 · Export screen docs · WordPress.com pricing · WooCommerce · Advanced Custom Fields · Polylang · WPGraphQL · Drupal project · Drupal core blog · Drupal licensing · Drupal Hook change record · Drupal multilingual modules · Drupal JSON:API · Drupal module search · Joomla downloads · Joomla Extensions Directory · Joomla multilingual manual · Ghost pricing · Ghost on GitHub · Ghost webhooks · Ghost Content API · Craft pricing · Craft sites docs · Craft GraphQL docs · Craft project config · Strapi docs · Strapi lifecycle hooks · Strapi Cloud pricing · Payload docs · Payload hooks · Payload on GitHub · Sanity pricing · Sanity Studio · Sanity export docs · Contentful pricing · Wix plans · Wix App Market · Wix export support page · Squarespace pricing · VeloCMS pricing · VeloCMS for developers · VeloCMS API help · VeloCMS WordPress migration guide

Last verified: 2026-10-12.