Websites & Hosting
Webflow
Designer-grade websites with hosting, CMS and no plugin maintenance
Websites & HostingSoftware
WordPress
by WordPress Foundation / open source
The open-source workhorse behind roughly 40% of the web (W3Techs)
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Best for: Businesses that need maximum flexibility — e-commerce, memberships, complex content — and will resource proper ongoing maintenance.
Self-hosted WordPress remains the most flexible mainstream way to build a website: open-source software, tens of thousands of plugins and themes, and no platform lock-in. Whatever niche requirement your business has, the odds are a WordPress plugin already addresses it — that long tail is the platform's enduring advantage, alongside full ownership of your stack and data.
Image: WordPress.org.
The equally enduring disadvantage is that WordPress is not a product but an ecosystem you assemble and maintain. Hosting, themes, page builders, security hardening, backups, and updates for every plugin are your responsibility. A well-maintained WordPress site is excellent; a neglected one degrades into the single most common source of small-business website breaches. The software is free — ownership is not.
Our working guidance: choose WordPress when you need its flexibility (complex content models, WooCommerce, membership, multilingual) or its ecosystem, and either commit to maintenance discipline or pay managed hosting to absorb it. Choose a managed platform like Webflow when the requirement is a fast, polished marketing site with minimal upkeep. Both are legitimate; the mistake is choosing WordPress for flexibility you will never use and then not maintaining it.
This profile covers self-hosted WordPress (wordpress.org), not the WordPress.com hosted service. Our assessment reflects long implementation experience; plugin-specific commentary is beyond its scope.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress core | Free | Open-source software; free forever |
| Typical shared hosting | $5 per site/month | Entry hosting (e.g. Hostinger, Bluehost) — indicative, varies (verify) |
| Managed WordPress hosting | $25 per site/month | Updates, security, backups handled (e.g. WP Engine class) — indicative (verify) |
| Custom / agency build | Custom | Design, build and retainer costs vary by scope |
Key features
- Plugin ecosystem — Tens of thousands of plugins covering almost any requirement
- Theme & builder ecosystem — From free themes to Elementor and full-site editing
- WooCommerce — The most widely deployed e-commerce system on the web
- Full data ownership — Your database, your files, portable between hosts
- REST API & hooks — Deep programmatic control for developers
- Multilingual & membership options — Mature plugin solutions for complex sites
Pros and cons
What we like
- Ultimate flexibility — if you need it, a plugin exists
- No licence fees and no platform lock-in
- Enormous talent pool of developers and agencies
- Scales from a blog to serious e-commerce
What could be better
- You own security, updates and backups — forever
- Quality of plugins and themes varies wildly
- Total cost of proper ownership is routinely underestimated
Integrations
Our verdict
Appears in
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