We build both. That is the only reason this comparison is worth reading — a shop that only does custom development will always find a reason your project needs custom development.
WordPress is the right answer when
- The site is mostly pages and posts, and the shape of that content is stable
- Non-technical staff will do the day-to-day editing
- A standard e-commerce flow covers your selling: catalogue, cart, checkout, shipping
- You need to be live in weeks, not quarters
- The budget is better spent on content and photography than on engineering
A custom build earns its cost when
- Your business logic is genuinely yours — pricing rules, approval chains, allocation, scheduling
- The system must talk to an ERP, an accounting package, or a warehouse in real time
- You expect load that shared hosting and a plugin stack will not survive
- Your data model does not fit posts and pages without a fight
- The application is the product, not the marketing for the product
The test that usually settles it
Describe the single most important thing the system must do, in one sentence, without using the words "page" or "post". If that sentence is comfortable, you probably need custom software. If you found yourself reaching for those words anyway, WordPress will serve you well and cost a fraction of the alternative.
The expensive middle
The costliest projects we see are WordPress installations pushed years past their natural limits — forty plugins, a page builder, and custom PHP wedged into a theme to make it behave like an application. It is slow, it cannot be upgraded safely, and rebuilding it costs more than building correctly would have.
If you are adding plugins to make WordPress stop behaving like WordPress, the decision has already been made for you.
- Software
- Decisions