Statamic vs WordPress, which suits your business website?

Statamic vs WordPress posts tend to pick a winner before the first paragraph ends. This isn't one of those. The right content management system (CMS) for you depends on your budget, what the site needs to do, and who has the time to look after it.

The bots have made up their minds, though. Every Statamic site I look after gets a steady stream of requests for WordPress login pages, from scanners that assume every website runs it. On one site, probes like these helped fill the cache with more than 1,000 URLs the site never had.

It's a fair guess. WordPress ran around 40% of all websites in October 2026, according to W3Techs. I build every client site on Statamic and I've written four addons for it, so I'm biased. I'll still tell you where WordPress is the better choice.

Where Statamic and WordPress keep your content

Both are CMSs, the software your team logs into to edit pages and publish posts. Both are written in PHP, the programming language behind a large share of the web. The biggest difference is where the content lives by default.

WordPress keeps every page, post and setting in a MySQL database. Statamic is a flat-file CMS. It keeps them in plain text files, stored in Git, the version control tool developers use to track changes to code.

In March 2026, Statamic won CMS Critic's People's Choice award for Best Flat File CMS, for the fifth year running. The people who use these tools vote for the winners, not a panel of judges.

Statamic blog, March 2026

WordPress keeps revisions of posts and pages. Because Statamic's content is in Git, everything is recorded, including navigation, settings and the site's structure, not just the pages. I can see what a page said on any date, who changed it, and put it back. I cover how that works, and when a Statamic site does need a database, in what Statamic is and how it works.

Plugins, or features built in?

WordPress is quick to extend. Its plugin directory lists tens of thousands of plugins, and there's a theme for almost any kind of business. A typical business site adds plugins for custom fields, forms and caching.

On the WordPress sites I've worked on, the plugins were the weak point, not WordPress itself.

Statamic has a few hundred addons. It's a smaller community, but more comes built in. Forms, custom fields, navigation, image resizing, search and caching are all part of it. I give each type of content its own editing screen, so a case study has the fields a case study needs and nothing else.

Statamic addons are third-party too, with the same risks. In my experience, a Statamic site needs far fewer of them, because most of what a site needs can be built from what Statamic gives you out of the box.

The trade-off is that you need a developer to add most new features to a Statamic site. With WordPress, you can often install one yourself, but that's a double-edged sword.

Plugins are easy to add without any technical knowledge, so non-developers tend to not consider how several of them together will affect how fast the site loads. Every plugin you add is also one more thing to keep updated.

Which is more secure, Statamic or WordPress?

WordPress itself is well looked after. Most of the risk sits in what gets added to it. Patchstack, a WordPress security company, found that almost all the new WordPress vulnerabilities reported in 2025 were in plugins and themes, not in WordPress itself.

Statamic has fewer moving parts for an attacker to target, but it isn't immune. It has its own security releases, and it runs on PHP and dozens of code packages that each get fixes. This isn't unique to either platform.

Neither is safe or unsafe by default. What matters is whether someone keeps it updated.

On my Statamic maintenance plans, I apply Statamic, PHP and package updates every month and patch the server daily.

What Statamic and WordPress cost

Whichever you choose, you pay for hosting and for the developer who builds and looks after the site. Where they differ is licences and plugins.

WordPress itself is free, but corporate and business websites often need a few premium plugins, such as Advanced Custom Fields Pro or a paid forms plugin, many of them billed yearly. Support for each one comes from that plugin's author. Statamic has paid addons too, but a site usually needs fewer.

Statamic Core is free, but it allows one admin user and one form. Most businesses need Statamic Pro, which has a one-off licence fee per site and then a yearly fee for updates and support from the team that builds Statamic. Statamic's pricing page has the current prices.

For a custom-designed site, the licence is a small part of the budget either way. Most of the cost is planning, design and the build.

When WordPress is the better choice

• You're technical, you enjoy tinkering, and you have the evenings and weekends to choose plugins and keep them updated yourself.

• Selling online is the main job of the site, and you want the most established route. That's WooCommerce, the WordPress shop plugin, or a dedicated platform such as Shopify.

• Statamic has Cargo, a well-respected shop addon, but it takes more developer work to set up. Neither is quick. WooCommerce still takes time and patience to get working properly.

• You want plenty of developers to choose from at short notice. There are far more WordPress developers, although any developer who knows Laravel, the framework Statamic is built on, can pick up a Statamic site.

When Statamic is the better choice

• Your site needs custom features, such as a client portal. Statamic runs inside Laravel, so they can be part of the same project rather than bolted on.

• An in-house marketing team edits the site and wants editing screens that match its content, built in rather than added with plugins.

• You want every change recorded, not just page edits.

• You'd rather have fewer plugins to update and fewer parts for an attacker to target.

If you want to build and extend the site yourself, WordPress is the sensible choice. If your team edits the site and you want it built around your content, choose Statamic.

If you are looking at Statamic as a WordPress alternative for a site you have outgrown, I design and build Statamic websites and move your content across.