Craft CMS does not have the household name of WordPress or the drag-and-drop appeal of Webflow, yet it keeps turning up behind the websites of agencies, studios, cultural organisations and brands that care a great deal about how things look and read. That is not an accident. Craft was built around a few decisions that suit design-led work particularly well.
This article explains what those decisions are, what working with Craft is like day to day, and where it is honestly not the best choice.
What Craft CMS is
Craft is a PHP-based content management system made by Pixel & Tonic. It runs on your own hosting, like WordPress, and uses the Twig templating language for the front end. It can also run headless, serving content through a GraphQL API to a separate front end built in something like Next.js or Nuxt.
It comes in editions. Craft Solo is free and suits single-user sites. Craft Pro adds features such as multiple user accounts, user groups and permissions, which most business sites need. Online shops are handled by Craft Commerce, a first-party add-on that is licensed separately.
It starts with no opinions about design
Most WordPress themes come with a design baked in, along with markup and styles you then work around. Craft ships with nothing on the front end. There is no theme. Developers write templates from scratch in Twig, and every piece of HTML on the page is there because someone put it there on purpose.
For a design-led brand this matters in practice:
- The finished site matches the design closely, without compromises forced by a theme or builder.
- The markup is lean, which helps with performance and accessibility.
- Typography, spacing and motion can be handled exactly as the designer intended, with no competing styles from elsewhere.
The trade-off is clear: you need a developer to build the front end. There is no marketplace of ready-made themes to start from, and that is by design.
Content modelling is built in, not bolted on
In WordPress, a rich content model usually means a combination of custom post types, taxonomies and a field plugin. In Craft, it is the core of the system. You define sections, entry types and fields directly in the control panel, and fields can be reused across types with different labels and instructions in each place.
The Matrix field deserves a mention. It lets you define a set of content blocks, such as a text block, a quote, an image gallery or a video, each with its own fields. Editors build long-form pages by stacking these blocks in any order, but they can only use blocks that the design supports. This gives marketing teams real flexibility without letting pages drift away from the brand.
When planning a Craft build, design your Matrix blocks as a small, deliberate set. Eight to twelve well-designed blocks usually serve a site better than thirty that overlap.
An admin that fits the team, not the other way round
Because every section, field and layout is defined for your project, the Craft control panel only shows editors what they need. A news editor sees news fields with clear help text. A shop manager sees products. There is no long sidebar of menus left behind by plugins nobody remembers installing.
Other things editors tend to appreciate:
- Live preview that shows changes in the real front-end design as you type.
- Drafts and revisions on entries, so changes can be prepared and reviewed before going live.
- Multi-site and multi-language support in the core product, with content managed per site or per language from one install.
- Asset management with image transforms, so editors upload one image and the templates output the right sizes.
Where Craft compares well, and where it does not
Craft is not the right answer for everyone. Here is an honest comparison with the platforms it is most often weighed against.
| Factor | Craft CMS | WordPress | Webflow |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design freedom | Complete, built from scratch | High with custom theme, lower with off-the-shelf themes | High, within Webflow’s visual tools |
| Content modelling | Excellent, core feature | Good with ACF or similar | Good for simpler models, with collection limits |
| Plugin ecosystem | Smaller, curated | Very large | Limited, relies on integrations |
| Developer availability | Smaller talent pool | Very large talent pool | Growing |
| Hosting | Self-hosted or Craft Cloud | Self-hosted, many options | Webflow hosting only |
The smaller plugin ecosystem is a double-edged point. You will find fewer ready-made plugins for niche features, so some things need custom development. But the plugins that exist are generally well maintained, and there are far fewer of them on a typical site, which means fewer conflicts and a smaller security surface.
The smaller developer pool is a fair concern for some organisations. If you want to be able to hire from a very large market at short notice, WordPress is the safer bet. If you value a carefully built site and a long-term partner who knows it, Craft is a strong choice.
Who Craft suits best
- Brands and studios where the website is a central expression of the brand, not just a brochure.
- Editorial and content-heavy sites with varied article layouts and lots of structured content.
- Organisations running several sites or languages from one place.
- Product brands that want a fully designed shop with Craft Commerce rather than a templated store.
- Teams who want a clean admin and do not want to manage dozens of plugins.
Who might be better elsewhere
- Small businesses on a tight budget who would be well served by a good WordPress or Webflow site.
- Teams who want to make major layout changes themselves without a developer. A visual builder such as Webflow may suit them better.
- Stores that need a very wide range of off-the-shelf sales channel and app integrations, where Shopify often has the edge.
What a Craft project looks like
A typical Craft build follows a clear order. Content modelling and design happen first and inform each other. Templates are then built in Twig directly from the approved designs, and the control panel is configured with field layouts and help text tailored to the editors. Training is usually short because the admin only contains what the team needs. You can see how we run these stages on our process page, and more about our approach on our Craft CMS development page.
Thinking about Craft for your next site?
If you would like an honest view on whether Craft suits your project, get in touch and we will talk through the options.
