# Craft CMS vs WordPress

> A true data-driven, real-world breakdown of Craft CMS vs WordPress from the implementation experts who build it: 184 criteria in 10 categories, with the reasoning and evidence behind every score.

Source: https://www.dxpscorecard.com/head-to-head/craft-cms-vs-wordpress
Scores last reviewed: 2026-10-10
Full reviews: https://www.dxpscorecard.com/platform/craft-cms · https://www.dxpscorecard.com/platform/wordpress

## The short answer

Choose Craft CMS for a bespoke, structured site or a small portfolio of related sites, built by developers who want schema as code, GraphQL in every edition and a perpetual license. Choose WordPress for speed to launch, marketer-built landing pages, the strongest SEO plugins and the deepest hiring pool. Neither gives you personalization, approval workflows or compliance certifications from the vendor. The choice depends on whether you value a disciplined content model or an off-the-shelf ecosystem, and on who will own patching.

**Choose Craft CMS if:**

- Your content model is complex and must match the business exactly
- You run several related sites or languages and want no per-site license fee
- Your developers want schema in git, GraphQL included and branch-based environments
- You want managed hosting from the CMS vendor itself through Craft Cloud

**Choose WordPress if:**

- Organic search and fast landing page production drive your marketing results
- You need to hire developers or agencies easily at any price point
- You want no license fee and the lowest hosting floor available
- You want WooCommerce, an LMS plugin or another ready-made extension for most needs

## The differences that matter

| Area | Craft CMS | WordPress |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Content modeling | Nestable Matrix entries, conditional field layouts and per-field translation rules, with the whole schema committed to git as YAML. | Custom post types plus ACF fields in an unenforced key-value store, with localization added through WPML or Polylang. |
| Ecosystem and talent | About 1,300 plugins, a verified partner network and a helpful Discord community, but a niche hiring pool. | Roughly 60,000 free plugins, the most requested CMS skill in job postings and agencies at every price point. |
| Pricing model | Perpetual per-project license: Solo free, Team $279, Pro $399, optional $99 yearly renewal; Craft Cloud costs $130 to $260 monthly. | Free under GPLv2; you pay for hosting from about $5 a month and per-site premium plugin subscriptions. |
| Marketer tooling | No theme marketplace or page builder; SEO, forms and redirects come from plugins such as SEOmatic and Formie. | Yoast or Rank Math plus Elementor and other drag-and-drop builders let marketers ship pages without developers. |
| Operations and security | Craft Cloud removes most operations, while self-hosted installs never auto-update and saw several critical vulnerabilities in 2026. | Core security fixes auto-apply within hours, but plugins carried 91 percent of 11,334 ecosystem vulnerabilities logged in 2025. |
| Compliance paperwork | No SOC 2 or ISO 27001, but a published accessibility conformance report on the VPAT 2.4 template. | No certifications at the software level and no current accessibility conformance report; certifications come from your host. |

## Pricing & total cost

Craft CMS sells a perpetual license per installation. Solo is free forever for one user account, Team costs $279 for up to five users and Pro costs $399 with unlimited users. Each includes a year of updates, renewal is then an optional $99 a year, and a lapsed renewal is never back-billed. Craft Cloud hosting runs $130 a month for Team and $260 for Pro, with small annual discounts. Enterprise, which carries SAML single sign-on, is quote only.

WordPress has no license at all. The real costs are hosting (about $5 to $35 a month), per-site premium plugins such as ACF Pro at $49 a year, Yoast Premium at $99 and WPML at $99, and a maintenance retainer that commonly runs $50 to $500 a month.

Over several years the gap narrows. Craft builds are bespoke because there are no themes, but practitioners report only half a day to a day of senior developer time a month for upkeep. WordPress starts cheaper and builds faster, while plugin renewals, conflict testing and security monitoring recur every year. Adding a site costs no CMS fee on either.

**What to ask Craft CMS:**

- Which features, such as SAML single sign-on, require the Enterprise edition, and what does it cost?
- What will Craft Cloud charge for asset storage and bandwidth overage at our expected traffic?
- When will your SOC 2 or ISO 27001 report be available for our procurement team?

**What to ask WordPress:**

- Which host or agency will own patching, backups and uptime, and under what service level agreement?
- Which premium plugins will the build need, and what do their per-site renewals total each year?
- Will our host sign a Business Associate Agreement or share SOC 2 evidence if we need it?

## Implementation & hosting

Both are PHP applications on MySQL, and Craft also supports PostgreSQL. Craft can be self-hosted or run on Craft Cloud, which binds each git branch to an environment with its own database and preview domain. WordPress is self-hosted only. You choose shared hosting, a VPS, containers or a managed WordPress host, and no CDN, monitoring, SLA or support comes with the software.

Craft suits a developer-led build. The schema lives in Project Config YAML and moves between environments with one command, and official starters cover Next.js, Nuxt and Astro. Every site is bespoke; practitioners quote two to six weeks for a custom marketing site. WordPress launches fastest from themes and page builders, but configuration is spread across the database and plugin screens, and schema changes on live content need custom tooling.

Day to day, Craft never auto-updates, so someone must watch its critical-releases feed. WordPress core fixes apply automatically, but plugins install with no lockfile, so staging tests and a firewall are effectively mandatory. Craft 5 is supported through 2031, so the Craft 6 move to Laravel is optional.

## Marketing & personalization

WordPress gives marketers more on their own. The block editor, the Site Editor and builders such as Elementor or Bricks let them assemble landing pages without a developer. Yoast or Rank Math cover meta tags, sitemaps, structured data and redirects, and form plugins such as Gravity Forms feed CRMs. Craft editors work inside developer-defined Matrix and Content Block components, with Live Preview and shareable draft links, and rely on SEOmatic and Formie for SEO and forms.

Neither has native personalization, segmentation or analytics. WordPress has more plugin options: If-So and Logic Hop for targeting, Nelio for testing and Site Kit to show GA4 data in the admin. Craft relies on an external engine such as Croct and small community plugins.

Craft is stronger for multi-site and multilingual work. One Pro license runs any number of sites with per-field translation rules, and its media library adds focal points and on-the-fly image transforms. WordPress Multisite shares one codebase across brand sites, but translation works at document level through WPML or Polylang, and media folders and focal points need plugins.

## AI capabilities

Neither ships much AI for editors in its core. WordPress 7.0 added Connectors, a central vault for OpenAI, Anthropic and Google keys that any AI plugin can reuse. Plugins such as Jetpack AI, AI Engine, Yoast and Rank Math generate copy, alt text and metadata. Craft has no native AI. Plugins such as CoPilot, Lens and Multi Translator cover writing, alt text and translation, with far smaller install bases.

For agents, both offer a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, the standard way AI assistants connect to outside tools. WordPress has an official MCP Adapter from its core AI team, built on the Abilities API and hardened in 7.1. Craft's third-party MCP server has passed 2,500 installs and exposes 55 tools. It lands every agent write as a reviewable draft under Craft's own permissions, which is a stronger governance default.

Both keep you on your own keys, including self-hosted models through Ollama. Neither has AI personalization in core, though WordPress has more vector search and recommendation plugins to choose from.

## Moving between them

These are independent products from different camps: Craft CMS comes from Pixel & Tonic, a small commercial vendor, and WordPress from an open-source project. Both run on PHP, so hosting skills transfer, but little else does.

Moving from WordPress to Craft means rebuilding the content model as sections, entry types and Matrix fields, rewriting the theme in Twig or a JavaScript front end, and replacing each plugin with a Craft equivalent. Content can be loaded with Feed Me, Craft's first-party importer. Moving from Craft to WordPress starts with Craft's native CSV, JSON or XML export, then maps nested Matrix content onto blocks, custom post types and ACF fields. That flattens structure and loses per-field translation rules.

Sites built heavily in Elementor or Divi need extra cleanup, since their shortcodes do not port. Do not move to Craft if marketers depend on page builders or the plugin catalog. Do not move to WordPress if your value sits in a deep content model or a portfolio of related sites.

## Overall

| | Craft CMS | WordPress |
| --- | ---: | ---: |
| Suite capability (0-100) | 55 | 56 |
| Categories won | 4 | 5 |
| Criteria won | 54 | 101 |

1 of 10 category is within 2 points, which the scorecard treats as level.

## Category Scores

| Category | Craft CMS | WordPress | Leader |
| --- | ---: | ---: | --- |
| Core Content Management | 66 | 58 | Craft CMS |
| Additional Platform Capabilities (DXP Features) | 47 | 49 | WordPress |
| Technical Architecture | 64 | 64 | Level |
| Platform Velocity & Health | 66 | 79 | WordPress |
| Total Cost of Ownership | 70 | 76 | WordPress |
| Build Simplicity | 68 | 63 | Craft CMS |
| Operational Ease | 59 | 54 | Craft CMS |
| Use-Case Fit | 38 | 46 | WordPress |
| Regulatory Readiness & Trust | 47 | 43 | Craft CMS |
| AI Enablement | 42 | 53 | WordPress |

## Use-Case Fit

| Use case | Craft CMS | WordPress | Leader |
| --- | ---: | ---: | --- |
| Marketing | 42 | 54 | WordPress |
| Commerce | 45 | 50 | WordPress |
| Intranet | 25 | 34 | WordPress |
| Multi-Brand | 40 | 46 | WordPress |

## Biggest Differences

### Where Craft CMS leads most

- **Data modeling constraints** (66 vs 40 for Craft CMS vs WordPress): Schema lives in version-controllable Project Config YAML with a documented conflict-resolution path (project-config/touch then apply), there are no field-count caps, migrations have a first-class extend API, and Feed Me plus native CSV/JSON/XML/XLSX/YAML exporters cover import/export; Craft 5.10 added a deletion workflow that surfaces blocking relations and lets you replace or remove them before destroying content. Against that, field type changes can still lose data, cross-environment plugin migrations can clobber pending YAML unless schema versions are checked, the Matrix-to-entries migration was a genuine breaking change, and the 5.9 categories/tags deprecation queues up another content-model migration before Craft 6. Above 60 because tooling support is real, but well short of risk-free.
- **Additional certifications** (40 vs 15 for Craft CMS vs WordPress): The additional-certification portfolio is empty: no CSA STAR, PCI DSS, Cyber Essentials Plus, FedRAMP, IRAP, ENS, or C5. Craft does run a credible informal security program — a documented Security FAQ, a coordinated vulnerability disclosure path, a critical-releases Atom feed, GitHub security advisories, and a #security Discord channel — but none of it is third-party attested. Sits below the 45–55 base band because there is no anchor certification at all for additional credentials to build on, and PCI DSS is contractually excluded rather than merely absent.
- **Accessibility documentation** (66 vs 42 for Craft CMS vs WordPress): Craft publishes two formal, procurement-usable artifacts — an ACR on the ITI VPAT 2.4 template scoping WCAG 2.0/2.1/2.2 A and AA, and a separate ATAG 2.0 conformance report — with a named evaluator, a dedicated accessibility@craftcms.com contact, and a documented test methodology and screen list. That is well above what most mid-market CMSs offer. It no longer clears 70 on currency: the ACR is dated 26 March 2024 against Craft v5.0.0 and the ATAG report 12 August 2024 against v5.3.0, while the shipping release is 5.11.3 — neither has been refreshed across eleven minor versions and roughly two and a half years, and there is no Section 508 conformance statement. The quarterly accessibility blog series partially compensates by evidencing continued remediation, but blog posts are not a VPAT a procurement office can file.
- **Media library & image handling** (76 vs 54 for Craft CMS vs WordPress): Assets live in volumes and folders with per-volume field layouts, translatable alt text, focal points, a built-in image editor and named or ad-hoc transforms (crop, fit, letterbox) with WebP and AVIF output, exposed through Twig and GraphQL. Craft 5.10 added reference blockers showing where an asset is used before deletion. Not higher because modern format output depends on server ImageMagick support on self-hosted installs and assets have no versioning.
- **CI/CD integration** (76 vs 55 for Craft CMS vs WordPress): Project Config captures all schema changes (sections, fields, entry types, sites, plugin settings) as YAML committed to git and applied with `php craft up --interactive=0`, giving real schema-as-code migration tooling. Craft Cloud layers branch-bound environments on top: each environment binds to a git branch and gets its own database, asset storage, environment variables, logs, preview domain, and deploy trigger (on-push or manual), with pre-migration DB snapshots on deploy. Held below 80 because environments are manually created rather than ephemeral per-PR, data is not cloned between them (you restore a backup by hand), and environment count is capped by plan tier.

### Where WordPress leads most

- **Community size** (58 vs 95 for Craft CMS vs WordPress): WordPress has the largest community of any CMS by an order of magnitude — powering ~41.5% of all websites and ~59% of CMS-detected sites (2026, W3Techs), with the nearest rival near 5%. The wordpress.org plugin repository hosts 60,000+ free plugins (90,000+ including premium), and its Stack Overflow volume, @wordpress npm downloads, and WordCamp network are all unmatched; even the WordPress Foundation G2 listing alone carries 9,500+ reviews. The recent share dip is a momentum signal (4.3.2), not a community-size change.
- **Talent availability** (62 vs 95 for Craft CMS vs WordPress): WordPress is the most abundant CMS talent pool in the market — the most-requested CMS skill in web-development job postings, with the largest freelancer availability across every hiring platform and price tier. Demand remains robust into 2026 for custom theme/plugin work, headless builds, and increasingly AI integration. Hiring risk is essentially nil.
- **Third-party content** (66 vs 95 for Craft CMS vs WordPress): WordPress third-party content is the deepest of any CMS, and the 7.0/7.1 releases generated a fresh wave of upgrade guides, feature breakdowns, and video coverage from raidboxes, DreamHost, SmartWP, Gutenberg Times, and dozens of hosts and educators within weeks. Countless Udemy/YouTube courses, books, and blogs cover every skill level. No plausible scenario where a self-hosted operator lacks learning material.
- **SEO tooling** (55 vs 82 for Craft CMS vs WordPress): WordPress + Yoast SEO or Rank Math is the best-in-class SEO stack in the CMS market: meta title/description management with validation, XML sitemaps, JSON-LD/Schema.org structured data, redirect management, canonical URLs, breadcrumbs, and real-time content optimization scoring. Clean permalinks and semantic HTML output are inherent. This is self-hosted WordPress's single strongest use-case differentiator and is identical in capability to any managed WordPress deployment since it lives entirely in the open-source plugin layer.
- **Recommendations** (12 vs 35 for Craft CMS vs WordPress): Related-content plugins such as YARPP, Contextual Related Posts and Jetpack Related Posts recommend by keyword and taxonomy similarity, and WooCommerce offers related products, up-sells and cross-sells. Not higher because none is an ML or behavior-driven engine with configurable weighting.

## Questions Buyers Ask

### Is Craft CMS free like WordPress?

Partly. Craft Solo is free forever with unlimited entries, sites and GraphQL, but only one user account. Team ($279) and Pro ($399) are one-time per-project licenses with an optional $99 yearly renewal. WordPress core is free under GPLv2 with no user limit, so you pay for hosting and premium plugins instead.

### Can Craft CMS or WordPress handle healthcare or payment card data?

Not on the vendor's paper. Pixel & Tonic holds no SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA or PCI DSS attestation, and its Acceptable Use Policy bars protected health information and cardholder data. WordPress software carries no certifications either, and mainstream hosts such as WP Engine and Kinsta will not sign a Business Associate Agreement. Regulated buyers usually look at WordPress VIP or Acquia.

### Is Craft CMS more secure than WordPress?

Neither is safe without an owner. Craft patches fast through a funded disclosure program, but self-hosted installs saw several critical vulnerabilities in 2026 and never auto-update. WordPress core applies security fixes within hours, yet plugins accounted for 91 percent of 11,334 ecosystem vulnerabilities in 2025. Craft Cloud, or a managed WordPress host with a firewall, reduces the burden on either.

### Will Craft 6 force us off Craft 5?

No. Craft 5 is a long-term support release with active support through 2030 and security fixes through 2031. Craft 6 moves to Laravel, and a Yii 2 adapter is meant to keep Craft 5 plugins running on it. WordPress has no forced migrations either: it ships three releases a year with strong backward compatibility.

### Is it easier to find developers for Craft CMS or WordPress?

WordPress, by a wide margin. It is the most requested CMS skill in web development job postings, with freelancers and agencies at every price point. Craft developer listings number in the dozens on Glassdoor and Indeed, and there is no certification program, though the Craft Partner Network verifies agencies by reviewing their code and interviewing their clients.

### Which is better, Craft CMS or WordPress?

Craft CMS and WordPress are level on overall suite capability (55 vs 56). Craft CMS wins 4 of the 10 scoring categories and WordPress wins 5, with 1 too close to call. Choose Craft CMS for a bespoke, structured site or a small portfolio of related sites, built by developers who want schema as code, GraphQL in every edition and a perpetual license. Choose WordPress for speed to launch, marketer-built landing pages, the strongest SEO plugins and the deepest hiring pool. Neither gives you personalization, approval workflows or compliance certifications from the vendor. The choice depends on whether you value a disciplined content model or an off-the-shelf ecosystem, and on who will own patching.

### Which costs less to own, Craft CMS or WordPress?

WordPress scores higher on total cost of ownership (76 vs 70), which weighs licensing, implementation cost and running cost; a higher score means lower cost for what you get. Confirm current pricing with each vendor.

### Which is easier to implement and run, Craft CMS or WordPress?

Craft CMS scores higher on build simplicity (68 vs 63), which covers the learning curve, implementation complexity and how easy it is to hire for. Craft CMS scores higher on operational ease (59 vs 54), which covers upgrades, day to day overhead and vendor support.

### Which is better for marketing teams, Craft CMS or WordPress?

WordPress scores higher on fit for marketing sites (54 vs 42), which looks at how well each platform serves campaign pages, landing pages and editor self-service.

### Which has stronger AI features, Craft CMS or WordPress?

WordPress scores higher on AI enablement (53 vs 42), which covers AI content creation, workflow automation, AI search and personalization, and how open the platform is to your own AI tools.

## Related

- [Liferay vs WordPress](https://www.dxpscorecard.com/head-to-head/liferay-vs-wordpress)
- [Best Statamic Alternatives in 2026](https://www.dxpscorecard.com/editorials/statamic-alternatives)
- [Best Concrete CMS Alternatives in 2026](https://www.dxpscorecard.com/editorials/concrete-cms-alternatives)
- [Best Webflow Alternatives in 2026](https://www.dxpscorecard.com/editorials/webflow-alternatives)
- [Best Craft CMS Alternatives in 2026](https://www.dxpscorecard.com/editorials/craft-cms-alternatives)
- [Best WordPress Alternatives in 2026](https://www.dxpscorecard.com/editorials/wordpress-alternatives)

---

Scores follow public evidence only. Platform inclusion and scorecards are unsponsored. Interactive version with every criterion's reasoning and evidence: https://www.dxpscorecard.com/head-to-head/craft-cms-vs-wordpress