Back in 2017, WP Mayor asked whether WordPress alternatives were worth your while, and answered with three website builders. Nine years later the question is the same, but the field looks very different.
I founded WP Mayor and I’ve built on WordPress for 20 years. I still do. These days my own sites run WordPress headless behind Astro front ends, and I build app screens in React. I get asked “should I still use WordPress?” more often than ever, and you deserve a straight answer from someone who uses it every day.
A lot has moved in 2026 alone. Webflow restructured and cut staff in May. Cloudflare bought the team behind Astro, then shipped its own CMS, EmDash, as a stable 1.0. AI tools now build a working marketing site from a paragraph of text. And WordPress went through two major releases and a very public leadership crisis at Automattic.
WordPress is still the most flexible option for most sites. But it isn’t the right tool for every job, and some of the alternatives got a lot stronger in the last few months. Here’s where each one fits, and where it doesn’t.
How the Alternatives Compare
| Platform | Best For | Starting Price | Lock-in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify | Online stores | €19/mo (EU, yearly) | High |
| Squarespace | Simple, good-looking sites | $19/mo (yearly) | High |
| Wix | Small businesses that want everything in one place | $17/mo (yearly) | High |
| Webflow | Marketing teams | $15/mo (yearly) | High |
| Framer | Designers building on a canvas | $10/mo | High |
| Ghost | Newsletters and paid publications | $18/mo (yearly) | Low |
| AI builder + Astro | Cheap marketing sites | Free to low | Low |
| EmDash | Developers trying a modern CMS | Free (open source) | Medium |
| WordPress | Almost anything | Free (plus hosting) | Low |
Prices are from each vendor’s pricing page in October 2026 and vary by region and billing cycle.
Shopify: Still the Default for Ecommerce
Ecommerce is where an alternative has taken the most ground from WordPress, specifically from WooCommerce.
Shopify is hosted and opinionated. You don’t think about servers, PHP versions or plugin conflicts. You add products and sell. Checkout, payments, shipping and tax all come built in, where WooCommerce asks you to assemble them from separate plugins, each with its own update cycle.
Shopify has also gone hard on AI. Its Winter ’26 Edition says Sidekick, the built-in assistant, can now build custom apps for your store, set up Shopify Flow automations from a plain description, and make theme edits.
Where WordPress still wins: content. If blogging, SEO-driven articles or complex information architecture make up half your business, WordPress with WooCommerce gives you more room. Shopify’s blog remains basic.
Cost: On Shopify’s European pricing page, Basic is €19/month billed yearly or €27 month to month. If you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments, Basic adds a 2% third-party transaction fee.
Squarespace: For Beautiful Simple Sites
Squarespace suits a portfolio or small business site that needs to look polished on day one, with no hosting or updates to manage.
The 2026 change here is price. Squarespace raised its US prices in July 2026, according to PetaPixel, and told customers by email. Billed yearly, Basic went from $16 to $19 a month, Core to $29 and Plus to $49, while Advanced stayed at $99.
Where WordPress still wins: the moment you need anything custom. There’s no plugin ecosystem to fall back on, so memberships, complex forms or unusual integrations quickly hit a wall. Your site also lives on Squarespace’s servers, and leaving means a rebuild. If you’re weighing the two directly, our WordPress vs Squarespace comparison goes deeper.
Best for: photographers, creatives and small businesses that want a great-looking site with minimal effort, and accept the rising monthly bill.
Wix: The All-in-One Builder, Now Led by AI
Wix covers more ground than Squarespace out of the box. Bookings, events, an online store and memberships all come built in, along with an app market, and Wix handles the hosting.
In January 2026 Wix launched Harmony as its new flagship builder. It combines prompt-based “vibe coding” with the drag-and-drop editor Wix users already know, and an AI agent called Aria builds and edits the site from plain-language instructions. Wix describes Aria as “an AI agent specialized in building high-quality websites.”
Where WordPress still wins: ownership. You can’t move a Wix site to another host, so leaving means a rebuild, and anything Wix and its app market don’t cover means working inside Wix’s own development platform. Our Wix vs WordPress comparison goes through the differences in detail.
Cost: there’s a free plan with Wix branding. In the US, Light is $17/month billed yearly, Core $29 and Business $39, and selling online starts on Core.
Best for: small businesses that want bookings, a store and a site in one place, set up largely by AI, with nothing technical to manage.
Webflow: A Builder Rethinking Who It’s For
Webflow’s pitch used to be visual, designer-level control over a site without writing code. That pitch is weaker in a year when AI tools build sites from a prompt, and Webflow says so itself.
On May 27, 2026, CEO Linda Tong announced a restructure in which “many of our Webflow teammates are leaving the company today.” She didn’t give a headcount. In the same post she wrote:
“AI tools and lightweight builders are providing a faster path to launch for those with simple website requirements.”
She set the company’s direction as an “agentic web marketing platform” for marketing teams that need more than a website.
Webflow is moving upmarket. For a marketing team running experiments and personalization across a connected stack, it’s still a serious option, and its plans now include AI credits and an MCP server. If you’re a freelancer building a simple brochure site, Webflow is telling you that you’re no longer its focus.
Cost: site plans start at $15/month billed yearly, and $25/month billed yearly for the plan with the CMS.
Best for: in-house marketing teams and agencies serving them.
Framer: For Designers Who Want to Build on the Canvas
Framer has kept growing as the builder designers reach for. It raised a $100 million Series D at a $2 billion valuation in August 2025, and reported more than $50 million in annual recurring revenue at the time.
What keeps Framer relevant in the AI era is the design tool itself. Avoiding code matters less now that AI can write it for you. What designers still want is to lay out a page visually, tweak spacing and motion on a canvas, and publish exactly what they see. Framer gives you that, plus a CMS your team can edit without filing a ticket.
Where WordPress still wins: anything beyond marketing pages. Complex content models, memberships, stores and integrations still favor WordPress and its plugin directory.
Cost: paid site plans start at $10/month for Basic and $30/month for Pro.
Best for: designers and small teams building landing pages and marketing sites they want to keep editing visually.
Ghost: Built for Publishing
Ghost strips everything back to writing, newsletters and paid memberships. Ghost 6.0, released in August 2025, connected Ghost sites to the fediverse through ActivityPub, so your posts can reach people on Mastodon, Threads and other networks. It also added native web analytics.
Your content is portable and self-hosting is free, so lock-in is low.
Where WordPress still wins: everything outside publishing. Ghost doesn’t do stores, directories, courses or the long tail of things WordPress plugins handle.
Cost: Ghost(Pro) starts at $18/month billed yearly for Starter. You need Publisher, at $29/month billed yearly, for paid subscriptions and custom themes. A few years ago Ghost started at $9.
Best for: writers and publishers who want a fast site and a newsletter in one place.
AI Site Builders and Static Astro Sites
This category didn’t exist when we last covered the topic, and for marketing sites it’s now a real alternative.
Tools like Lovable, Bolt and v0 let you describe a site and get working code back. What you should check is where that code ends up. Lovable, for example, syncs your project to a GitHub repository you control, or lets you download the whole codebase.
Once the code is yours, lock-in is low. You can move it, host it elsewhere, or hand it to a developer.
The pattern I find most useful is to describe the site, get a static build on a framework like Astro, and host it cheaply on a static host. Cloudflare’s acquisition of the Astro team, announced on January 16, 2026, with a commitment to keep Astro open source, makes that stack feel a lot less like a side project.
Where WordPress still wins: editing. A static site has no admin panel unless you add one. If your client wants to update a blog post on a Tuesday afternoon, asking them to write a prompt or touch a Git repository is a hard sell. That’s exactly why I keep WordPress as the editing layer and put Astro in front of it. If you want to try that setup, start with our guide on when and when not to use headless WordPress.
Best for: marketing sites that change rarely, launch pages and developer-run projects.
EmDash: Cloudflare’s New CMS
EmDash is the newest name here and the one aimed most directly at WordPress. It’s an open-source CMS written in TypeScript, built on Astro and released under the MIT license. Cloudflare shipped it as an early developer preview on April 1, 2026, and released the stable 1.0 on September 28, 2026.
The headline feature is its plugin model. Plugins run in sandboxed runtimes and start with access only to their own storage. Anything more has to be declared by the plugin and approved by a site admin, which addresses the plugin security problem WordPress has lived with for years. Plugins are published through a decentralized registry built on the AT Protocol, and EmDash runs on Cloudflare Workers or Node.js.
Search Engine Journal argues that most of the 1.0 features rely on Cloudflare-specific infrastructure, which makes EmDash harder to host elsewhere than WordPress. The ecosystem is also brand new.
If you want to try it without setting up new infrastructure, WPMU DEV now offers one-click EmDash hosting next to your WordPress sites. We covered it in our look at EmDash Hosting.
Best for: developers and agencies who want to experiment with a modern CMS on a low-stakes project.
Where WordPress Stands Right Now
WordPress shipped 7.0 “Armstrong” on May 20, 2026, with an AI Client in core, a new connections hub for AI services and a refreshed dashboard. WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou” followed on August 19, the current release is 7.1.3, and 7.2 Beta 1 came out on October 20.
W3Techs puts WordPress at 39.6% of all websites and 58.3% of sites with a known CMS. The plugin directory lists more than 72,000 plugins, an ecosystem every alternative here is still far from matching.
Governance is the weak spot. On September 9, 2026, Automattic’s board placed Matt Mullenweg on paid leave and named CFO Mark Davies interim CEO. Two days later, Mullenweg announced he was back in control, and Automattic confirmed his return as CEO. The WP Engine lawsuit is still going: in September 2025 the court allowed most of WP Engine’s claims to proceed against Automattic and Mullenweg.
Your WordPress site kept running through all of it. Still, it means more of WordPress’s direction depends on a small number of people than most of us would like. I wrote more about who’s actually building WordPress in Who’s Left to Build WordPress?.
Which WordPress Alternative Should You Choose?
- You’re selling products: Shopify.
- You want a beautiful simple site with no maintenance: Squarespace, if the new prices work for you.
- You want bookings, a store and a site in one place, mostly built for you by AI: Wix.
- You run a marketing team with a complex site and stack: Webflow.
- You’re a designer who wants to build and edit on a visual canvas: Framer.
- You’re a writer or publisher building a paid audience: Ghost.
- You need a cheap, fast marketing site and can live without an admin panel: an AI builder plus a static Astro build.
- You’re a developer who wants to try what a modern CMS looks like: EmDash.
- You need flexibility, plugins and an editor your client already knows: WordPress, still.
The advice from our 2017 post holds up: pick the platform that fits your business goals, then weigh convenience. A cheap launch that forces a rebuild in two years ends up costing you more.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Move My Marketing Site to an AI Builder?
If the site rarely changes and someone technical will maintain it, it’s worth trying. Make sure you can export the code to a repository you control. If non-technical people need to edit content often, keep a CMS in the picture, either WordPress or a headless setup.
Is EmDash Ready to Replace WordPress?
It’s stable as of 1.0. But the plugin ecosystem is tiny compared with WordPress, and much of its feature set leans on Cloudflare. Treat it as something to test on a small project first.
Does the Automattic Leadership Crisis Affect My Site?
Your WordPress install keeps running and updating as before. The risk is longer-term: decisions about WordPress.org infrastructure sit with very few people, which is worth factoring in if you’re choosing a platform for the next ten years.
Over to You
Have you moved a site off WordPress this year, or brought one back? I’d love to hear which platform you picked and why. Leave a comment below and tell us what’s working for you.
