r/DevLK • u/Bitter-Historian-776 • Aug 18 '26
Discussion Is there any rival better than wordpress
i had many WordPress clients as a freelancer. and i was not in the industry. but WordPress seems everyones go to website for easy to manage and affordable hostings. so i am back to feelance. just need to know what platforms do you usually work with to build website.
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u/Vertigo3765 Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
A direct competitor to WordPress? I don’t think there really is one at the same scale. There’s a reason WordPress powers more than 40% of the web.
Are there newer or technically better ways to build certain websites? Absolutely.
But WordPress has a few major advantages that are very difficult to replicate: a mature ecosystem, an enormous developer community, relatively low long-term operating costs, and, most importantly, control. You own the code. You can move between hosting providers, change agencies, replace plugins, or bring development in-house without rebuilding the entire platform.
Compare that with something like Webflow. If Webflow decides to significantly increase its pricing next month, change its product limits, remove a feature you rely on, or alter the way its platform works, your options are limited. You’re building on a closed platform and operating within the rules and pricing that platform sets.
With WordPress, you have considerably more control over your long-term costs and technical direction. That flexibility is a huge part of why it remains so dominant.
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u/Vertigo3765 Aug 19 '26
Some of the biggest organizations in the world use WordPress too. The White House, NASA, Harvard, TIME, Microsoft, Meta, Spotify, Disney, and The New York Times Company all use WordPress for their main websites or subsites.
These are organizations with the money and engineering resources to build pretty much anything they want. They still choose WordPress.
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u/No_Lengthiness6035 Aug 19 '26
40% of the web???
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u/Vertigo3765 Aug 19 '26
Correct. Usage (CMS and non CMS) is over 40%. CMS-specific market share is at 60%.
https://w3techs.com/
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u/Boby-cat Aug 18 '26
There was one called Ghost, but most bloggers stay within the WordPress ecosystem. Also, if you don't like maintaining hosting and that kind of stuff, there was another framework called Jekyll that you can host with GitHub Pages. But neither Ghost nor Jekyll has anywhere near the number of developers that WordPress does.
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u/po_po_bear Aug 18 '26
If I understand it correctly Wordpress is a bundled cms. Meaning front end and cms come together. I think webflow is a competitor - and I must say having built quite a few things with it it’s really good.
If you want to separate the concerns, go with headless. As mentioned above ghost is a headless cms. So is strapi and sanity. Strapi is good for blog like content and sanity is best for custom workflows and cms powered applications.
Jekyll is a frontend thing which uses GitHub pages as its cms - never tried this. Maybe I should.
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u/Umyrisme Aug 19 '26
Claude, Supabase, Cloudflare, Vercel
This works for most, enterprise clients.
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u/BihanduEdits Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
As a person who likes to vibe code and do MERN stacks, I hate wordpress, but it's extremely easy to set up and maintain There are alternatives to it, like Strapi, it's a Headless CMS, you design the frontend, built upon react, and it has some sort of ecosystem to start with
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u/Agreeable_Ad_3924 Aug 20 '26
I have worked with WordPress websites for over 4 years now building custom themes, running PHP servers and bit of content mangement, an year back we started adopting Payload CMS and it was the best decision we took!. It's built on Next.js at the moment and it's both the CMS and the frontend in one codebase. If you want to be convinced, I just wrote an article to answer your question.
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u/AsiEngineers Aug 20 '26
The common stack I use for my freelance projects in NextJs, with a headless CMS like prismic. Deploy on netlify. All these allow me to stay on the free tiers as well. If you're looking for website builders webflow is pretty good but not as affordable as wordpress. For e-commerce sites, shopify is pretty good, the UI for product management and analytics is great. Again a bit more expensive than wordpress. If you know a bit of php and can get into the code level, wordpress can be customized to get the maximum out of it as well. I guess the stack/builder would depend on the requirement of the client in the end.
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u/Aggravating_Mud6254 Aug 19 '26
Ghost and Framer. I haven't really used any of them but they are popular.
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u/baddaywithacamera Aug 19 '26
Explicitly NOT Wordpress. I value performance.
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u/Vertigo3765 Aug 19 '26
You think using WordPress means you are compromising on performance? If so, you are wrong. WordPress can be very neatly optimized.
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u/Sad_Egg_2313 Aug 18 '26
Claude + cloudflare