It’s easy to see why many who choose to build their websites with WordPress. With an easy drag-and-drop block editor and thousands of plugins, and themes available. WordPress makes creating custom websites quick and easy for users on all skill levels.

However, WordPress cannot meet the needs of every website owner. If you are looking for a tool to build your website and host it in one place, or if you want to take the burden off of managing your website. You will need a WordPress alternative.

To help you find a solution that fits your needs and goals. This post details some alternatives to WordPress. But, before going through these alternatives, let’s start with an overview of the various options for creating web assets.

Choosing an WordPress Alternative

There are many options when searching for WordPress alternatives. You can choose another open source content management system. Alternatively, if you are looking for hosting CMS and website building tools in one place. You can opt for a proprietary CMS which usually offer more features like built-in SEO tools and security features.

However, if you don’t have the time to learn, explore, or use all of your CMS’s built-in features and add-ons, a website builder like Squarespace or Duda may be all you need. Get the tools to build your website and hosting in one place without paying for advanced features you don’t have time to learn or use.

No platform is easier or better than the other. They are just designed for different purposes. To understand which tools are right for your website, ask yourself the following questions:

• What is your budget?
• How often do you add new pages to your website?
• How much control do you have over the look of your website?
• What is the speed, security, and performance of your website?
• Do you want to use a hosted platform or choose your own hosting provider?
• Do you want to add a blog to your website?

CMS Alternatives to WordPress

We’ve covered some situations where a tool other than a CMS is better suited to you and your website’s needs. However, more than half of all websites are built using some type of a CMS. So we can see that most people choose to build his website using this platform.

Firstly, a CMS is a platform that allows multiple you to create and run a website without knowing how to code. You can easily customise the design of your website, add multimedia to your posts, organise your content with tags and categories, manage multiple users, edit the underlying code, and more.

When you decide that a CMS is the best solution for your business, you may research a number of platforms before settling on one. When choosing, you should evaluate the flexibility, cost, ease of use, security, and reliability of each platform. You need a website that allows you to build a website that meets your customers’ needs, fits your brand, and scales over time.

To find a CMS that ticks these boxes, think about what your website is trying to accomplish. This will help you decide what features you need. For example, if you want to create a video sharing site, you can choose WordPress, which offers a wide range of themes and plugins dedicated to this purpose. On the other hand, if you need to organise and back up large amounts of data, Drupal may be a better choice.

These are just a few examples of how site purposes and needs can vary. In this post, lets take a closer look at some of the most popular CMS platforms to help you decide where to build your website.

1. Drupal

Drupal is a free and open-source CMS platform that is coded in PHP. It was initially developed as a student community solution. But later evolved into a full-fledged open source PHP CMS. This CMS provides developers with the opportunity to develop flawlessly highly optimised websites. And this platform is preferred by most developers, due to its rich features of modern app development.

WordPress uses plugins, while Drupal provides modules to perform custom functions on websites. The platform has a wide range of features and other options. Making it one of the best PHP CMS on the market. Many large organisations around the world uses Drupal for their app.

A CMS is an application plan to make website development easy and simple. This allows you to add various functionality and monitor the content for your website. These type of sites are typically created by designers using various languages ​​and technologies such as PHP, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. So Custom Drupal modules are modules that you assemble yourself. Developing custom modules requires some knowledge of Drupal’s API and PHP coding.

2. October

OctoberCMS is another Laravel-based CMS which get used by thousands of digital institutions and businesses to build their websites. This CMS offers flexibility, simplicity, and a modern design for building high quality apps and websites.

As this is a self-hosted open source CMS. You can also install it separately on your hosting server. This CMS works well with third-party integrations. And boasts a large community supporting over 300 themes and plugins.

3. Craft CMS

Craft is a sort of new CMS platform written in PHP. As it has a low user base. But not because it’s missing something. But market penetration can take a while for everything. However, the developers acknowledge it. So you can seamlessly build front-end environments with Craft.

All you need is knowledge of HTML and CSS. The back-end is clean and the content editors won’t have a hard time working with it feature. In many cases, you can publish your content using the Craft PHP content management system.

As it’s lightweight. It can integrate with your hosting provider online and you won’t be abusing your server resources, so less performance issues. The only drawback that you the developers will notice is that it’s not open source. But it works well, supports a ton of features, is developer friendly, and provides effective security.

4. Publii

Publii is one newest Static CMS apps that run on the desktop. Rather than on a server. Simply download the app, and use it to build a static site. Then upload that site onto a hosting solution of your choice.

In particular, this platform seems to have modern and feature-rich CMS, that is open source and free to use. The platform seems to be more foucsed on blogging There’s a marketplace that has both free and paid theme design options.

Additional features include website syncing that supports FTP, GitHub Pages, Gitlab, AWS, Netlify, or Google Cloud, a preview function, WordPress importer, and a focus on SEO.

5. Flextype

Flextype is a simple, PHP based flat-file CMS platform that is designed to keep things flexible. Allowing you to create more or less anything you want. This CMS platform makes it dead-easy to define custom fields for any content entry and plus it has a built-in theme editor

Writing the actual content editing is easy, as it comes with a simple WYSIWYG editor, although Markdown support is available via a plugin.

But doing anything creative with the content will requires the use of shortcodes that you could find with the past WordPress style. Flextype is a solid foundation for a CMS to use.

6. Joomla

Joomla is yet another PHP CMS and its reputation precedes it. So if you want to set up a blog or publishing site, you should put Joomla in your shortlist. It’s like WordPress which isn’t a bad idea, so it is familiar. Using Joomla allows you to create multiple blogs and dynamic sites.

When it comes to data integration, Joomla PHP CMS can be integrated with different versions of SQL. It can be easily integrate with your PHP hosting provider and help you get started to build responsive websites. Joomla offers several themes and extensions that you can use to create beautiful web apps.

Joomla is packed with an intuitive user interface, scalability features and regular security patches to protect against hackers on the web.

One downside is this platform is it’s not the best when doing SEO, so you may face problems when doing SEO. There’s a better CMS options. Modules are somewhat lacking and if you have made some modifications to the CMS, plugins may not work correctly.

7. ExpressionEngine

If your website has a lot of content. Then you should consider using ExpressionEngine and it handle this load. Developers can modify the script by tinkering and tweaking it a bit. And more functionality can be added.

When updating your content it is immediately visible to visitors. This CMS platform is very versatile, fetching content from various databases and applying relevant formatting. Your visitors and users will get the best visual and reading experience on all devices.

So, take advantage of custom edit forms, HTML-agnostic templates, preview pane, SEO integration, security improvements and more. While on the downside the context boxes can make navigating and editing content a little bit difficult.

8. Squarespace

Squarespace isn’t the easiest WordPress alternative, as there are significant differences in platforms and how they work. However, from an end-user perspective. Both can do the same job and create functional websites.

It’s an all-in-one website platform. This means you don’t have to install any software. Just sign up for a Squarespace.com account and follow the steps to create a website – the DIY way! is the perfect tool for a blog, an eCommerce store or to showcase your portfolio of work.

In short, Squarespace does it all. It houses your site, manages the software running on it, and lets you focus on creating content.

9. Ghost

Ghost is a great tool if you want to create a content-only website or design your own online publication, it is perfect. While it isn’t famous as WordPress but you can use to customise your website to suit your needs.

For flexibility, Ghost allows you to host your site yourself or on the Ghost server. Get a fully managed and secure service that includes a wide range of powerful and effective publishing tools. The expandable editor also allows you to move and expand dynamic blocks of content such as videos, images and even text.

Dynamic routing and tagging capabilities let you create custom URL structures and multilingual content. Plus, you get the added benefits of a fully SEO-optimised website with AMP support, structured data, subscription capture forms, RSS feeds, and more.

Ghost prices fluctuate because you can host your own website for free, like WordPress, but PHP and programming knowledge may be required. If you choose Ghost to host your website, you can access their service for free for 14 days but then it comes with some pricing packages are $29.00,$79.00 and $199.00 depending on your needs and those pricing are per a month.

10. Webflow

Webflow is a nice website builder perfect for designing responsive websites. So If you are looking for a WordPress alternative like Drupal but that still offers a lot of cutting-edge features. This is a great tool to use. Unlike other CMS options, this CMS focused entirely on ensuring an easy experience while designing a website, how ever, Webflow requires some basic background knowledge.

Like I shortly mentioned about that you will ned some programming experience required to get the most out of all the features available in Webflow. You should be familiar with markdown, flat files, mySQL, etc. So basically if you are used to messing around with WordPress plugins and static websites, you’ll have no problems here.

Compared to options WordPress, WebFlow requires a lot of time and effort to get the most out of this tool. However, if you’re willing to do some extra coding work, you will end up with a truly unique website that’s nothing like what you’d get from a simple drag-and-drop site builder. Hosting is available through WebFlow, so you can manage all your needs in one place.

11. Shopify

Shopify isn’t a clearly a WordPress competitor unless you want to start an eCommerce business online.

It offers one of the most intuitive and user-friendly shop builders. With nearly 800,000 users worldwide, they must be doing something right. They give you access to cutting-edge, responsive designs designed to make your store look great. Plus, as it is so popular, you can reach out to the company’s community for help and guidance if you need it. And even the option to extend Shopify’s functionality through the App Store.

While it’s a great solution, it also has some drawbacks to consider, like dealing with multiple currencies at once. If you are using Shopify Payments as your primary payment processor, you’ll need to pay a transaction fee.

12. ProcessWire

Processwire is an easy-to-use and powerful open source CMS with a powerful API. ProcessWire gives you more control over fields, templates, and markup than other platforms. And ProcessWire’s API makes working with content easy and fun.

This CMS gives you more control over fields, templates, and markups than other platforms. And ProcessWire’s API makes working with content easy and fun.

While web developers love ProcessWire because it’s simple, easy, and fun to develop, powerful, highly scalable for sites large and small, consistent, predictable, and proven stable. and have the best community and support.

13. Concrete CMS

Concrete CMS is an open source content management system for teams. This is a solution that combines robust functionality with ease of use and low cost of entry.

Its features include secure, supported and powerful permissions. Concrete CMS gives you complete control over who can do what on which part of the page. Train your new content editor in minutes and edit mobile-optimised, responsive websites as easily as creating a document.

The concrete CMS is licensed under the MIT license and written in the PHP language.

14. PrestaShop

PrestaShop is another powerful eCommerce platform for a successful online store, but it differs from Shopify in two important ways. This means that you can use the core software for free and modify its code according to your needs. This also means that you will have to find your own hosting provider.

Also offers more features than Shopify. So while the dashboard looks complicated and the setup process is more involved than with Shopify, you can create a more custom website in no time.

If you want to customise the functionality and look and feel of your website, you can choose from over 3,600 modules and over 2,400 themes to install in the official add-ons marketplace. With so many customisation options, Prestashop appeals to large online stores with extensive product catalogs.

15. Grav

Grav is a modern open source flat file CMS perfect for non-developers looking to run a website. It requires no installation and, like WordPress, is relatively easy to customise and manage.

This CMS is in PHP language, licensed under MIT license. Which stores data and files in text files and folders instead of databases. It offers features such as one-click installation, robust API, dynamic content types, content filtering, multilingual support, image media processing, extended plugins, and easy backup and restore of theme customisations. Grav can be used to build short-lived websites, micro-sites, high-traffic campaign sites, single-page or small-page standalone sites.

The only downside is that you cannot use Grav if your site requires multiple account profiles, databases and dynamic web pages.