If you’re a business or an agency thinking about using Statamic to build a new website project.

You may be wondering Is it advantageous to use Statamic compared to traditional CMS such as WordPress.

I have recently performed an analysis and deep dive in Statamic framework, and I have 4+ years of experience in working with and developing WordPress websites along with plugins and such. I have outlined an analysis below and I reached to the conclusion that depending on a project and business objectives the choice of framework depends.

Before going to comparison you have to know the main difference of Statamic framework compared to all other CMS. Is that it’s a static file CMS. That means it does not use a database. That means there is no dynamic features in Statamic website. If you do want to include a dynamic feature in a statamic website you have to build it outside of statamic, preferably in it’s underlying Laravel framework and then embed this laravel feature in it.

Also, it being a static file CMS it stores all content in files instead of database. It makes the site really fast. If your website is 99% static content, statamic will give the best website performance that there can be. because it does not perform any database queries as compared to traditional CMS such as WordPress that store content in MySQL and thus have to query database to pull content/information every time a user visits a website.

Statamic has some technical advantages over WordPress, which are mainly the following four

Statamic is easier to manage

The reasons for this is that, Statamic only provides blueprints and valuegroups that can be configured to create our own content formats and schemes. For example you can create a custom blog blueprint and use it for storing, adding and editing all blog entries of a website. Since we build the content structure and schema ourselves, in longer run it favors us by being very easy to manage by our developers and content team.

Statamic is easier to build advance features, because of all the underlying features available from Laravel framework such as Automated Email Notifications, Integration with CRMs, Robust User Authentication, etc.

Coding advantages

Statamic has simple query syntax, it uses template syntax called Antlers and alternatively we can use Blade templates which are part of Laravel Framework

Statamic works really well for categories and tags filtering, and filtering content in frontend

Statamic query features give more control on how content is filtered and rendered in frontend

Performance

Statamic runs faster than WordPress because of less overhead of plugins, clean resource files structure and static content based framework so there is no compute at the time of users visit

At the same time, there are some drawbacks that Statamic has in comparison to WordPress

Statamic is paid. Statamic charges

$275
per
site

Includes one year of updates. $65/year for updates thereafter.

In comparison, WordPress is free. But you end up paying for using the free framework in later twicking and modifying it’s codebase to build even minute features.

Technical Resources

You will need more than 1 technical resources to build a statamic website with full features and in one or two months time period

Conclusion

In the long run, spending the license fees and allotting more than 1 technical resources will pay dividends I think. Because the end website will be much easier to manage, develop features on, add advance capabilities and give a fast browsing experience while not compromising SEO metrics.

Your website visitors will be happy to use the website and interact with it.

I’m a professional Statamic website developer, feel free to reach out to me about your website project. If you have an existing Statamic website, still you can reach out to me.
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