WordPress vs Storyblok, monolithic or headless CMS: Which is the best CMS for fast-growing companies?
Choosing the right content management system (CMS) is crucial for meeting your marketing team's requirements and ensuring the scalability of your website. While WordPress is a widely used CMS with great popularity, more and more businesses are opting for a headless CMS like Storyblok.
We compare the pros and cons of WordPress and Storyblok.
What is WordPress?
You might know WordPress already but if not: WordPress is the most widely used CMS worldwide, offering a wide range of plugins, themes, and widgets for customizing your website. The open-source platform is especially suitable for beginners, as they can install a theme themselves with the help of numerous tutorials and offers flexible options for creating and managing content.
What is Storyblok?
Storyblok is a headless CMS that enables marketers and content teams to publish content on various digital channels. Whether you want to publish content for an e-commerce shop, a mobile app, or a website, Storyblok provides you with the necessary tools.
Storyblok also offers a visual editor that allows content editors to preview the changes made on the website. With custom workflow capabilities and commenting features, Storyblok's visual editor provides marketers with the features they need to manage website content.
1. Scalability and Performance
WordPress:
The scalability of WordPress can be limited, especially with a large number of plugins and a growing amount of content. This can lead to slower load times and reduced user-friendliness. To solve this problem, additional customizations and optimizations are often required.
Storyblok:
By separating backend and frontend, Storyblok is better suited for scaling the website. The Jamstack architecture enables fast load times and consistent performance, even with extensive websites and high traffic.
2. Flexibility and Customization
WordPress:
WordPress has an impressive selection of plugins and themes that allow you to customize and extend your website. However, using pre-made themes and plugins can make your website less unique and may not meet all of your requirements. In such cases, extensive modifications to the CMS structure are necessary, which are typically carried out by PHP developers.
Storyblok:
By using individually created components, Storyblok offers greater flexibility in designing your website. You can tailor the user interface and design of your website precisely to your company's needs without relying on pre-made solutions. The best thing about a headless CMS like Storyblok is that you can choose your favorite frontend JavaScript framework, such as Nuxt, Next, or Gatsby.
3. Integration with Existing Systems
WordPress:
Integrating an existing system into WordPress can be time-consuming and complex. However, it is possible to connect various applications and systems through the use of plugins and custom developments.
Storyblok:
Storyblok's API-first architecture is designed to facilitate integration with existing systems and applications. You can seamlessly connect your Storyblok CMS website to CRM, e-commerce, and other platforms and services.
4. Internationalization
WordPress:
By default, WordPress does not provide built-in support for multilingual websites. In order to make your website available in various languages, you are reliant on using paid additional plugins such as WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin) or Polylang. While these tools can effectively assist in making your website multilingual, additional maintenance and increased complexity that come with the integration of these plugins into your WordPress website should be considered.
Storyblok:
In contrast, Storyblok provides an integrated solution for the internationalization of your website that operates entirely without the use of plugins or extensions. Storyblok supports localization at both the field level, which allows you to translate each content element individually, and at the folder level. By localizing at the folder level, you can create different and independent page structures within each language folder.
With Storyblok, you have the option to create as many language versions of your website as you want, with each language version having its own specifically localized content.
Recently, there's even the option to perform an AI-based translation of the entire page using Deepl with the help of a plugin. This feature significantly speeds up and simplifies the translation process.
5. Cost Comparison
When comparing the costs of WordPress and Storyblok, you should consider both direct and indirect costs, including hosting, licenses, development, maintenance, and support. Below we have compared the most important cost aspects for both platforms:
WordPress:
As WordPress is an open-source platform, there are no direct costs for using the software. However, there are costs associated with hosting your website, which can vary depending on the provider and scope of services. Additional costs can arise from purchasing premium themes, plugins, or hiring developers for customizations. The biggest cost trap with a system like WordPress can arise when the website scales, and special integrations and features are required that generate large amounts of programming effort. Often, companies then use multiple different CMS systems to meet all the requirements of the marketing team.
Storyblok:
Storyblok offers various paid plans that are based on the number of projects, users, and API requests. The plans range from a free basic offer with limited features to custom enterprise solutions. Similar to WordPress, Storyblok also incurs additional costs for hosting, which can vary depending on the provider.
Especially for rapidly growing companies with a large team of editors, the right CMS choice can save costs in the long run. Storyblok not only increases productivity in content creation but can also reduce the development time for new features and integrations compared to a .php-based WordPress system. Based on a study by Forrester Consulting, companies that use Storyblok achieve an ROI of 582% within three years.
6. Hosting
While it is possible to self-host a WordPress CMS website, it can be difficult and expensive. A major advantage of Storyblok is that hosting is done in the cloud and is provided by Storyblok itself. This means that companies do not have to worry about setting up, maintaining, or scaling servers to maintain a website. The easy hosting of Storyblok websites allows companies to focus on creating great content and experiences, rather than infrastructure. When it comes to hosting the frontend application, so-called Jamstack hosts like Vercel and Netlify offer attractive options.
WordPress vs. Storyblok: Which CMS is best for scalable websites for rapidly growing businesses?
The choice between WordPress and Storyblok depends on the individual requirements and goals of your business. WordPress offers an ecosystem with a wide selection of plugins and themes, but requires adjustments and optimizations to ensure better scalability, performance, and security.
On the other hand, Storyblok offers a more flexible and scalable solution, which is particularly suitable for companies that require individual design and seamless integration into their existing systems. The separation of backend and frontend allows for better control over design and user experience, easier scalability, better performance, and easier integration with other platforms and systems through the API-first architecture.
Those who want to scale long-term and choose a future-proof website from the start should familiarize themselves with the topic of headless CMS and Storyblok.
take it_ is your partner when it comes to Headless CMS with Storyblok
A professional web development agency can help you make the best decision and develop a customized solution for your success in the digital space.
take it_ is a certified Storyblok partner and the first agency to specialize entirely in the development of scalable Storyblok CMS websites.
When Sennder, Europe's leading transportation company, wanted to switch to a Headless CMS to improve topics such as personalization, localization, and content editing, we recommended Storyblok as the content management system.
Read here how we helped Sennder migrate their website to Storyblok.
How can you switch to a headless system?
A website relaunch can bring with it many complications, and those who have no experience with the new technology run the risk of making the project unnecessarily complex and lengthy. Therefore we recommend to be well prepared for the migration.
Should the new website get a redesign? Do you need a new concept for the user flow and content structure? Is there a blog that should be migrated from the old CMS to the new one? These are all important questions that we discuss with our clients and then present them with a detailed plan so that time and effort can be estimated.
As a certified Storyblok partner, we're here to help if you need help developing your new website. You can schedule a free initial consultation with us here.
