WordPress and Sitecore are both CMSs that can comfortably serve mid-market and enterprise-level businesses. But the differences between the two need careful consideration alongside your own website’s unique requirements.
Here, we’ll compare the two, weigh up the pros and cons, and help you make the best decision for your business.
WordPress is an incredibly popular platform, renowned for its simplicity, ease-of-use, and ever-evolving set of features. Despite that popularity, many larger businesses still succumb to the misconception that it’s not sufficient for building a secure, reliable enterprise-grade website.
That’s because WordPress has typically been associated with smaller organisations and simpler websites for many years, but those days are now gone. WordPress has matured into a leading CMS that currently supports around 40% of the Internet, demonstrating just how many businesses trust its quality and reliability.
Sitecore, on the other hand, is a proprietary platform which uses the .NET framework and C# language created and controlled by Microsoft.
Building a website with Sitecore involves purchasing licenses for the platform for a long-term subscription with a private company. Once you’re locked-in, you have no influence over the platform or its functionality, so any changes the proprietor makes will affect your website whether you like it or not.
Because WordPress iss open-source, it has no license fees attached. So, not only can you build a great website quickly and easily, with constant support from a helpful community, but you can do it while saving significantly over the more cumbersome enterprise-grade solutions.
It should be mentioned that you probably will need some budget for WordPress plug-ins (more on these later), but that will be minimal when compared to the cost of purchasing a different platform.
Sitecore, on the other hand, is very expensive.
To be more specific, licenses for Sitecore can cost around £50,000. And it must be said that there’s little you can achieve with Sitecore that you can’t achieve with WordPress, which makes the cost even more difficult to justify.
You may also find that savings will be made between the different types of developers required to work with these platforms, as .NET developers (for Sitecore) are typically more expensive than PHP developers (for WordPress).
WordPress could be chosen for its usability alone, as its core functionality and content editing are both highly intuitive. You’ll tend to find that most of your employees will familiarise themselves with the platform almost immediately, even if they’ve never used a CMS before. This is crucial, because it will allow much higher levels of productivity and efficiency among your users.
Sitecore is far more challenging from a usability perspective. Before using the platform, your staff will actually need to go through specific training to familiarise themselves with its user interface. Of course, this training will add to the TCO, not to mention the time they’ll lose away from their actual roles.
WordPress is an ever-evolving platform rich with a range of dynamic features, and more than enough functionality to meet the vast majority of requirements for modern business websites.
Members of the community are constantly building new capabilities, and developing their own specific plug-ins which are designed to enhance what can done on the platform. Some particularly useful examples of these include integrations for SEO and Google Analytics.
Sitecore is also very strong when it comes to features and functionality, benefitting from a high level of customisation which allows you to build in workflows and automation.
It’s also versatile in terms of what it allows you to build into your website, from complex marketing and sales tools to e-commerce stores.
If you have any questions about anything mentioned here, or a digital project of your own, get in touch and we’d be happy to chat through with you.
Although you may think an open-source platform comes with more security issues, WordPress is actually a perfectly safe platform even for enterprise-level websites.
In between quarterly core updates, the developer community works hard to update the platform frequently with bug fixes and security patches. This becomes even more reliable when facilitated via the cloud with the advanced WordPress VIP service.
The high volume of WordPress users does give it a much wider vector of attack, creating the impression of more vulnerability, but your platform will be secure as long as you – or your partner – keep it maintained and updated.
Because it’s proprietary, Sitecore will inevitably have greater in-built security than WordPress, which is a key benefit of the extra cost, but there’s no significant difference overall here.
Even though WordPress is a free platform, it’s well equipped to meet requirements for scale.And while its proprietary nature makes Sitecore renowned for its scalability, WordPress has also been proven to build successful websites such as 538.com, White House, and Disney.
When bolstering the WordPress platform with a deployment via WordPress VIP, it provides seamless global scale for large enterprises with no limitations.
Here at Filter, we’ve been fortunate enough to deliver websites for large organisations using both WordPress and Sitecore. Sitecore is a fantastic CMS with plenty of its own strengths, but almost everything you can do with the platform is also possible, in a more cost-effective way, with WordPress.
While both are perfectly good options, capable of supporting enterprise-grade websites, we’ve seen first-hand that the lower cost and greater user experience make WordPress the best choice for most businesses.
Discover how our team helped Medivet’s digital transformation and provide an innovative, multi-channel digital experience for its users with the WordPress platform.
