Craft CMS vs WordPress: the real costs
—If you're planning a new website, someone has probably told you to "just use WordPress". It powers a huge share of the web, there are thousands of themes, and the software itself is free. So why would you pay for anything else?
The honest answer is that it depends, and the sticker price is rarely the whole story. This post compares the two on the things that actually show up on an invoice or in your week: build cost, running cost, security, editing and speed. It also covers when WordPress is the better choice, because sometimes it is.
The short version
- WordPress is cheaper to start. For a simple brochure site from a template, it is usually the lower-cost option.
- Craft is often cheaper to own over the longer term once a site has custom content, integrations or several editors, because less of it relies on third-party plugins that need constant updating.
- Neither is maintenance-free. Both need updates, backups and monitoring. The difference is how much there is to keep up with.
- Pick on your requirements, not the brand.
Licence and software costs
WordPress core is free. Craft CMS has a one-off licence for a project (a Pro licence is $399), with an optional annual renewal for updates.
That gap looks big on paper and is small in practice. Software licences are normally a tiny fraction of the cost of designing, building and hosting a site. The costs that matter are below.
The plugin question
WordPress's flexibility comes from plugins, and a typical business site ends up with a lot of them: forms, SEO, caching, security, page builder, backups. Each one is:
- a separate piece of software written by a different team
- something that needs updating, sometimes with a premium licence (typically between $40 and $200 a year per premium plugin)
- a possible source of conflicts and security issues
Craft handles more out of the box (custom content structures, multi-site, user permissions, image handling), and the extra plugins we do use are fewer and chosen deliberately. Fewer moving parts means fewer things that break after an update. We covered the long-term angle in Why WordPress Isn't Really Free.
Maintenance and security
Any website needs regular updates. In practice the difference is volume and exposure:
- WordPress is the most targeted platform because it is the most popular, and most compromises come through outdated plugins and themes rather than core.
- With Craft, updates are fewer and more predictable, and the control panel can be locked down more easily.
Either way, someone has to own this. Our maintenance agreement plans always include cms and plugin updates (even on the minimum plan that we offer) to ensure that your website stays safe and secure.
Editing experience
This is where Craft usually wins for larger sites. Editors work with fields designed around your content (a case study has a client, a sector, a gallery; an event has dates and a price) rather than one big free-text box and a page builder. It keeps pages consistent and makes it harder to break the layout by accident. We went into this in Empowering Content Creators.
WordPress has a gentler learning curve for people who have used it before, which counts for something if your team already knows it.
Performance
Speed affects both visitors and search rankings. A WordPress site can be fast, but it usually takes caching and optimisation plugins to get there. On our Craft builds we use static caching and generated critical CSS so pages load quickly by default. If you want to see how, our developers wrote it up: Critical CSS, Blitz and Imager X: how we make Craft 5 sites fast
What it costs in practice
Assumptions: about 40 pages, five content types (for example services, case studies, news, team, events), three editors, a contact form, and one integration (a CRM or booking system).
Typical WordPress build
- Build - £8,000
- Licences and plugins per year - £500
- Hosting per year - £600
- Maintenance per year - £1,800
- Three-year total - £16,700
- Five-year total - £22,500
Typical Craft build
- Build - £12,000
- Licences and plugins per year - £300
- Hosting per year - £700
- Maintenance per year - £900
- Three-year total - £17,700
- Five-year total - £21,500
Over three years the two come out close, and WordPress is slightly ahead. The gap narrows every year because the Craft build costs less to run: the totals meet in year four, and by year five the Craft site is the cheaper of the two. The WordPress figure also assumes the plugin updates go smoothly. A single bad update or a security clean-up can add a four-figure bill that isn't in the table.
How to read this against your own situation:
- A simpler site (10 to 15 pages, one editor, no integrations) will be cheaper on WordPress, and the gap won't close.
- More content types, more editors or more integrations push the WordPress maintenance and plugin costs up faster than the Craft ones.
- Hosting here means managed hosting for each platform. Cheap shared hosting lowers the WordPress figure but usually costs you in speed and security.
When WordPress is the right choice
We'd rather tell you than sell you the wrong thing. WordPress is probably the better fit if:
- you need a simple site, quickly, on a small budget
- you'll manage it yourself and your team already knows WordPress
- your needs are covered by a well-supported theme and a handful of mainstream plugins
- the site is unlikely to grow in complexity
(We went into this in When Craft CMS is not the right choice.)
When Craft is worth it
Craft is usually worth the extra upfront cost if:
- your content is structured (events, courses, products, case studies, directories);
- you have integrations, such as bookings, ecommerce or third-party systems;
- several people edit the site and consistency matters;
- you care about security, speed and a long-term low-maintenance setup.
Not sure which is right for you?
Tell us what the site needs to do and we'll give you a straight answer, even if the answer is WordPress.
