Building a business website is no simple task. You need the right tools and interfaces to make website management possible for a non-tech team and to quickly enable upgrades or security measures on the go. Most of all, you need a smooth customer experience and ongoing content management. This is where content management systems (CMSs) — such as WordPress, Sitefinity, and many others — grew into the current niche.
A CMS is a website building platform that provides you with a functioning, content-hosting website design. For a modern business website, the two leading options for your starter CMS are Sitefinity and WordPress. WordPress is the leading CMS on the planet, occupying a market of over 455M websites, free and otherwise, while Sitefinity makes a powerful showing in the business sector, already occupying nearly 20,000 active business websites and growing.
So what are the major differences between WordPress and Sitefinity?
The Purpose of the Platform
The first and most important difference between WordPress and Sitefinity is their initial design purpose. Each does what they were designed to do very well, but those initial purposes are very different. WordPress was designed as a free tool for beginners, like a research tool in academics. It is highly customizable and community-built. Sitefinity was designed to quickly equip businesses with a functional website that immediately meets industry standards. It is scalable and modularized, but focused entirely on business performance.
WordPress
WordPress is a friendly, open-source website platform designed so anyone can start an easy and completely unsecured website. It’s free to build a file system that processes HTML and CSS into basic pages, and it’s free to build your own experimental website on top of the baseline model. In business, WordPress is a classic example of a consumer, even research-oriented, project being put to use as a business tool. Back when WordPress was new and the internet was not fully populated, this was a quick and practical way to get your business online with very little delay. Now, of course, WordPress has become a mixed eco-system of privately developed and paid plugins that must be carefully integrated to achieve modern business performance and security standards.
Sitefinity
Sitefinity, on the other hand, was designed recently with businesses specifically in mind. Today, businesses need speed, flexibility, performance, and rock-solid security, and that’s what Sitefinity is prepared to offer. Sitefinity is immediately functional out of the box with optional core-developed modules that can expand the functionality of your website to suit your sector and business model with reliable industry standards and performance.
What Are the High-Level Benefits of WordPress vs Sitefinity?
WordPress
- Flexibility and Freedom
- Established Support Community
- Endless Optional Plugins
Sitefinity
- Built-In .NET Security
- Drag-and-Drop Design
- 24/7 Multi-Channel Support
- Build Features With Modules
Getting Started
When it comes to making your very first web page, that is what WordPress is for. However, there is also a steep learning curve when it comes to integrating the right plugins to work together securely. Balancing features, security, and performance can quickly take WordPress from a “beginner” product to advanced development for a secure business website. Designing WordPress pages also requires an understanding of HTML and CSS code together.
Sitefinity has followed the quick-startup model favored by low-code professionals who don’t always have a developer on the team. Drag-and-drop page design, multi-site content support, and core-developed modules make it easy to quickly put together the site you need. However, it is not as welcoming for web-dev students looking to build something original from a framework.
Cost of Web Development
WordPress starts free but for businesses, it is not free. The plugins you need to enable product listings, shopping, purchasing, security, performance, and advertising require payment and often a monthly support subscription. Knowing the true cost of a complete and business-ready WordPress site is irregular to predict as function- and industry-specific plugins can make every website and its cost unique.
Sitefinity is not free either, but it approaches with this as a known factor. It is valuable software sold B2B from developers providing live support to businesses in need of a reliable, customizable, and high-performing website. It is represented as a clean, business-focused platform with available expansions like API integration and tool widgets. The cost of a Sitefinity website is by quote, bespoke to the features and modules you need.
Integration
WordPress is open source, extremely popular, and has been integrated with nearly everything. “There’s a plugin for that” could be its catchphrase, but not all plugins are created equal. WordPress is potentially compatible with almost anything for which an API has been written and favors Linux server hosting. There are some reliable, highly rated plugins that provide a reliable API to commonly used business programs and systems. However, companies building a website tech stack should be wary of untested APIs.
Sitefinity was built on the Windows business software model. It integrates easily with other Microsoft software. It is immediately compatible with Sharepoint and is progressively building a larger collection of APIs and integrations for the vast sea of business enterprise software available. If you need your Sitefinity to connect to a yet unmodularized program, talk to the live support team. Your voice may represent an untapped market.
Speed, Performance, and High Traffic
How does WordPress compare to Sitefinity in terms of performance, especially with high-traffic and heavy purchasing? WordPress can be built to fly along like a well-oiled machine, but only the best HTML and WP integration specialists can achieve this. WordPress often suffers from plugin conflicts dragging down performance, as they are all made in different ways by different teams.
Sitefinity cuts out some of the customization (not open source) in exchange for performance. The entire platform is built on modern principles of what makes a business website valuable, and that means fast-performing page loads. Sitefinity is also designed to distribute virtually, better handling the high traffic that every online business hopes to see.
Mobile Support
Can Sitefinity and WordPress both handle mobile support? Yes. Mobile responsive web browsing is native to Sitefinity development, and it was added as a wave of plugin upgrades to WordPress a few years back. Both platforms, properly configured, can handle smooth mobile representation where WordPress has more potential for native programming and Sitefinity has better performance out of the box.
Security and Framework
Lastly and very importantly, security. Cybersecurity is a serious issue today whether your business is big or small. Sitefinity prioritizes business website security and is immediately up to industry retail and supplier security standards out of the box. The framework of a Sitefinity site is also sturdier, built to be complete from the start compared to the wireframe that a WordPress website begins as. You can build great security into a WordPress website if you install and subscribe to the right security plugins and maintain all your settings carefully configured to deny instead of allow access to all users.
Which Companies Should Best Use WordPress or Sitefinity?
So which CMS is right for you, WordPress or Sitefinity? If you are a highly creative developer team with a lot of new programming ideas to offer, WordPress is your chance to shine. If you want to develop your own APIs and plugins, or if you want to strut your HTML design talents, WordPress has the full-featured functionality to accomplish that. WordPress is best for artists, developers, and people who want to practice working with an ever-changing tech stack of plugins. Startups in need of a first-web-page showing to build a web presence also benefit from early WP development.
For businesses that need to quickly secure a company website that looks right and does what it needs to do, Sitefinity is the clear winner. Sitefinity can be built from pre-selected and core-developed modules, and the pages designed by your marketing team with drag-and-drop features. Sitefinity was designed for small to enterprise businesses looking for an elegant yet no-nonsense website solution backed by Microsoft compatibility.
Which CMS is best for your company? It really comes down to your specific needs.
