When it seems like everyone else is using WordPress, why use anything else?

If you’re looking to just plop a generic theme on the internet and replace placeholder text with your company name and phone number, then maybe you should just use WordPress.

But if you're looking to build and maintain a website that can adapt the way your business adapts, keep reading. We'll explain how Statamic saves you money, keeps you safer, and makes changes faster than any other CMS.

Let's talk about money first.

WordPress is free. Statamic isn't.

WordPress has hidden costs. Statamic doesn't.

With WordPress you'll probably need to buy a premium theme and hire a developer to customize it, who might tell you last minute that what you're trying to do isn't possible with the "page builder" you're using and you'll need to switch to another theme and start over.

You'll need to buy Jetpack for $99/year because after all, it's "essential". Add Advanced Custom Fields for $49/year, a backup solution for $200/year, a forms module for $349/year, a search plugin for $149/yr, and premium "managed" WordPress hosting, and before you know it you've committed to over $1,000/year just to keep the site online.

Not to mention having to keep track of updates, billing, and customer support with a half dozen (or more) different companies.

Statamic costs $259, one time.

After that it's just an optional $59/year whenever you want updates and access to direct support from the team who built it. In most cases you can run Statamic on a $5/mo Digital Ocean server, or deploy a static site to Vercel or Netlify for free.

By paying for software, your money goes directly towards supporting and improving it. When software is free, you are the product. We're not in the data business, and we keep as little of it as we can.

Oh, and all those features that don't come with WordPress? They're all included in Statamic core.

And then there's security.

94% of the websites hacked are running WordPress (source). It is the most targeted and vulnerable CMS on the market.

If you don't have a developer dedicated to keeping your site up to date, you are vulnerable. Emergency developer support to recover or restore your site can be expensive, on top of lost business from an exploited site or data leak.

3 reasons Statamic is more secure than WordPress

1. Most website hacks are done through SQL Injection. Out of the box Statamic doesn't use a database, thus eliminating most forms of automated attack.
2. Statamic's developer team maintains all of the fundamental features most websites need. You will not need 50 plugins by 50 authors of questionable quality to build your site. This is why WordPress is so vulnerable.
3. Statamic is built on Laravel, widely regarded as the most secure and well-maintained PHP framework today. WordPress is new wine in an old wineskin (a legacy codebase from 2005).

The Flat File Approach

Statamic stores all of your content, templates, assets, and settings in files instead of a database. You can see them, touch them, edit them in any editor of your choosing, and even email them to a colleague.

This allows us to version control your entire website. You can roll the site back to any point in time, work on alternate "branches" without affecting the site and merge changes back when they're ready.

Your site is always "backed up" and every change can be audited. Anything can be copy & pasted or shared between multiple sites. Developers are more productive when working with version controlled code, and their changes can be deployed to your live site instantly without taking it offline.

The Content Editing Experience

Time and time again we receive emails from customers, agencies, and developers alike sharing quotes from their clients. The common sentiment is they are overwhelmingly impressed with how easy and intuitive the content editing experience is.

Each Statamic site is fine-tuned and configured for the sites actual content. You are not stuck with one giant "What You See Is What You Get" field, nor are you decieved by the over-promises of "page builders".

Statamic is trusted by world-class newsrooms like Der Spiegel, international tech companies like OpenTable, and thousands of small businesses. You can explore a curated list of them, if you're interested.

Simplicity First, Complexity Later

We find it’s much more efficient to turn on the things you need, enable features you plan to use, and name things the way you want, than spend precious time clicking about the control panel disabling everything you may never end up needing. This allows developers to jump into new projects faster than ever.

When the need for complexity arrives — whether driven by traffic or business needs — Statamic will scale with you. Swap the flat file approach for a database, or cloud data provider, switch into Headless CMS mode and use React/Gatsby, JAMStack, power mobile applications, or any number of other tech approaches.

And if you need to build a full-scale custom application, Laravel is under the hood, ready and waiting.