Haven't heard of Craft before? Weighing up different CMSes for your next project? Here are some of the benefits of using Craft over its main contender, Wordpress.
Security
Because Craft can accomplish just as much as Wordpress (or other open source CMSes like Drupal) can, without using third-party plugins, it’s much, much less susceptible to security vulnerabilities. Looking at the public CVE (security vulnerabilities and exposures) database shows there are 1034 exploits for Drupal, and 1412 for Wordpress. Compare this to only six for Craft CMS. Craft is routinely tested by third-party security tests, and is built in a way that values the security of you and your users’ data very highly.
Flexibility
Craft makes absolutely no assumptions about the kind of site you’re building – each site is built differently, depending on the content you have and how you want to present it. Wordpress, on the other hand, is great if you want to build exactly one kind of site (a blog). As soon as you start to diverge even a little bit from the generic Wordpress site, you either have to bog your site down with a bunch of memory-hungry, potentially insecure, overkill 3rd-party plugins, or else dive into writing a ton of code. Flexibility is built into Craft, and so creating a unique kind of site – or even a regular site with a couple of slightly different features – is much easier for your developer.
Lower Maintenance and Expansion Costs
Because it’s so much more secure, you’ll end up paying less to keep your site running – no need for your developer to spend a lot of time keeping up with or fixing security holes. Because it’s so much simpler to expand due to its flexibility, if you need a new feature or way of displaying your content some time after your site has launched, this can be done efficiently and quickly. With a Wordpress site, on the other hand, this might involve tacking yet more plugins on, rewriting giant sections of the codebase, or even in some cases completely rebuilding the site.
Better For Content Editors
The Live Preview mode is a feature of Craft that sells many editors on the platform as soon as they see it. It beats any other CMS hands down. See what your site will look like in real time as you edit a page. No more saving, checking, saving, checking. Because Craft is so flexible, the control panel and editing experience can be easily completely customized for the editor – keeping things simple and uncluttered makes editing faster and less confusing. This means that editors can be easily trained who don’t have a lot of technical abilities – so they can be empowered to create content that is on-brand and attractive, whilst still flexible enough to meet changing needs.
Robust Community
Sure, there are more Wordpress developers out there… which means it’s even harder to find a good one. The theme-based nature of Wordpress especially means that many of those billing themselves as Wordpress developers are not competent developers. Because each Craft site is built completely catered to your needs, you can be confident that agencies and developers who have built sites in Craft are technically competent. Craft CMS has an active, growing user base, and the Craft team themselves are active in the community. If you need a Craft developer in the future, it won’t be hard to find one – there are already a lot of top-quality agencies and freelancers who use Craft.
Summary
There are certainly cases where Wordpress makes sense – if you need a blog-type site up and running quickly which doesn’t need much individuality, doesn’t have to stick closely to a particular brand, and won’t change in the future, then Wordpress is a great choice. But if you have need of anything more complex, want to be able to move quickly and execute new ideas within the constraints of your brand system, and have a content strategy that’s more advanced than three pages and a blog, then Craft CMS is a great fit.
