Guide
WordPress alternatives for freelancers
If you build client sites for a living, the CMS decision is really a decision about the next three years of your evenings. Here are the serious alternatives, judged on the things that actually affect a freelance business.
First, the case for staying. WordPress runs 41% of the web. Whatever a client asks for, a plugin exists. Your client can replace you, which sounds like a downside until you realise it also means they will hire you, because they are not betting their site on one person's favourite tool. If those things matter more to your business than what follows, stay on WordPress — you will not be wrong.
Now the case for leaving, stated as the economics rather than as a complaint:
- Recurring plugin licences come out of your margin, or your client's patience. A page builder, forms, SEO, caching and backups commonly run $50–$120 each per year. Somebody renews those every year, and explaining that line item annually is its own kind of work.
- Maintenance is real work whether or not you are paid for it. Plugin auto-updates are opt-in one at a time, and each update carries a chance of breaking a site you built two years ago. Roughly 38% of live WordPress installs are a major version or more behind, which tells you how that usually goes.
- The security surface is the stack, not the software. Across 2025, six vulnerabilities were found in WordPress core — all low priority — against 11,334 across the ecosystem, 91% of them in plugins. WordPress itself is well built. What you are maintaining is everything you bolted onto it.
- Design integrity. If you have ever rebuilt a layout a client dismantled with a page builder, you already know this cost.
What follows is scoped to self-hosted PHP alternatives — the ones that fit an existing freelance workflow of build, hand over, host somewhere ordinary. Hosted platforms like Squarespace and Webflow are a genuinely different business model, with their own recurring costs and their own handover story, and are worth evaluating separately.
The options
4 to consider
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Free and open source — nothing comes out of your project budget.
Strengths
- Costs nothing, per project, forever — no licence to explain in a proposal and no annual renewal
- No database, so client backups are a folder and handover is a copy
- Twig templating, so the skill transfers to other Twig systems
- 56 free ready-to-run skeletons give you a fast start on a fixed-fee project
Tradeoffs
- No commercial support — when something breaks at 11pm, you are reading a forum
- Access groups ship empty, so client user permissions are hand-written YAML on every project
- The admin is a separate plugin, and its replacement is still in Alpha, which is awkward to explain to a client
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A per-site licence and a bespoke admin panel for every project.
Strengths
- Blueprints let you build a different admin panel per page type, so the client sees only what they should touch — genuinely good handover
- Development installs are free indefinitely while they stay private, so unpaid or spec work costs nothing
- Three years of updates included per licence
- Fourteen years of shipping means the thing you build today will still run
Tradeoffs
- The €99 tier depends on your client's revenue being under €1 million, which means checking, and sometimes an awkward conversation
- Per site and per domain, so a client with a staging subdomain and two microsites is several licences
- Templates are plain PHP, so a client who hires a cheaper developer later can do real damage
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Free until it goes live, then $349 — with the best editor experience here.
Strengths
- Pro runs free indefinitely on non-public domains — you only pay when the client's site goes live, which fits how project billing actually works
- The control panel is excellent, with live preview and revisions; clients tend to like it
- Free Core covers a genuinely small site with one editor at no cost
- If you already write Laravel, you are not learning a new stack
Tradeoffs
- You are handing the client a Laravel application — Composer on the server, a cron entry, and a cache rebuild on deploy
- That rules out a lot of cheap shared hosting; they publish a list of hosts it does not work on
- Updates lapse after a year unless someone pays $99 annually — another recurring line item
- The APIs are read-only and Pro-only
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Total CMS
OursOne payment per domain, runs on the client's existing hosting, no recurring stack to maintain.
Strengths
- One purchase per domain, billed into the project — no annual renewals to chase and no plugin subscriptions to explain
- Runs on whatever PHP hosting the client already pays for: no Composer, no cron, no framework, no database
- Editors fill in the fields you modelled rather than composing layouts, so the design survives the handover
- Access groups, image processing, forms, automations and the API are in the box — nothing to assemble or keep patched separately
- Commercial support, so there is someone to escalate to that is not you
Tradeoffs
- Paid up front with no free tier — a 45-day trial, but you cannot build spec work indefinitely for free the way you can on Kirby or Statamic
- The smallest talent pool here, so a client replacing you has fewer options — be upfront about that
- Multi-language is handled with locale-keyed fields; no multi-site from a single install
- No e-commerce, so a client wanting a shop needs a different answer
How to choose
Work backwards from the client, not the feature list.
If the client will edit their own site and you want the design to survive: Total CMS or Kirby. Both constrain editors to defined fields rather than handing them a page builder. This is the single biggest difference from WordPress in day-to-day freelance life.
If the client is price-sensitive and technically capable: Grav. It is free, and if the client has any developer nearby, MIT-licensed open source is the safest thing to leave behind.
If you already write Laravel: Statamic. The framework overhead everyone else pays is free for you, and the control panel is the best of the four for a content-heavy client.
If the client insists on cheap shared hosting: Total CMS, Kirby or Grav. Statamic realistically wants a VPS.
If the client needs a shop, multi-language content today, or a very specific plugin: stay on WordPress. All four of these will cost you more time than the WordPress plugin you are trying to avoid.
One thing to be straight with clients about. Moving off WordPress means moving away from the biggest talent pool in the industry. That is a genuine risk for them and it belongs in your proposal, not in the small print. In our experience the honest version — "this will be cheaper to run and harder to replace me on, here is why I think it is the right trade" — wins more work than pretending the tradeoff does not exist.
FAQ
Common questions
Will my client be able to edit their own site?
Yes, on all four — every one has a browser-based admin. The real difference is how much they can change. WordPress's block editor lets clients compose layouts, which is a feature until it is a support call. Kirby and Total CMS both constrain editors to the fields you defined, so the content changes and the design does not.
Are these actually cheaper than WordPress?
WordPress core is free, so at launch it usually wins. Over a few years the comparison shifts: a typical commercial WordPress build carries several annual plugin licences plus the maintenance time to keep them updated. Grav is free outright; Total CMS is a single payment per domain; Kirby and Statamic are per site with an update window. Price the whole term, not the launch.
What happens when I hand the site over?
With any of the flat-file options, handover is genuinely simpler: no database credentials to transfer, and a backup the client can understand because it is a folder. What you should think hardest about is who maintains it afterwards — and whether your client can find someone else who knows the system if you are unavailable.
Am I locking my client into a niche tool?
Somewhat, and you should say so. WordPress has by far the largest pool of developers; a flat-file CMS narrows that considerably. Two things reduce the risk: their content stays in readable files they own, so it can always be exported, and Grav specifically is MIT-licensed open source, which is the least lock-in of any option here including WordPress plugins.
Is leaving WordPress actually more secure?
It reduces surface area rather than making anything inherently safer. WordPress core is well engineered — six low-priority vulnerabilities in 2025 across 41% of the web. But 91% of the 11,334 ecosystem vulnerabilities that year were in plugins, and a typical build runs a dozen of them. Fewer moving parts means fewer things to patch, which for a freelancer mostly means fewer emergencies.
How hard is it to migrate a client off WordPress?
The content is the easy part — Total CMS ships a WordPress importer that reads a standard export, and the others have community tooling. The work is in the rebuild: themes, page-builder layouts and plugin-specific data do not transfer. Quote it as a redesign that happens to bring the content along, not as a migration.
Head-to-head comparisons
- Total CMS vs Kirby Kirby is one of the best flat-file CMSs there is, and if its philosophy suits you it is a great choice. The question was never whether Kirby is good — it is whether plain PHP templates and a per-site licence match the way you build. Total CMS answers that differently.
- Total CMS vs Statamic Statamic is excellent, and if your team already lives in Laravel it is probably the natural pick. The real question is whether you want a CMS with a framework attached — because that is the trade, and it cuts both ways.
- Total CMS vs Grav Grav is free, fast, MIT licensed and genuinely well built. If budget decides this, go and use it — you will not be cutting corners. What is left to compare is not capability but how much you want to assemble yourself.
- Total CMS vs WordPress WordPress runs 41% of the web and it earned that. This is not a page about WordPress being bad — its core is well built and its ecosystem is unmatched. It is about what you sign up to maintain, and whether that trade suits the site you are building.
- Total CMS vs Craft CMS Craft is a genuinely good CMS with a free tier we cannot match. It is also the closest thing to Total CMS on this site — same language, same templating, same kind of structured content modelling. Which leaves one real question: should your content live in a database?
- Total CMS vs Webflow Webflow's designer is the best visual building tool there is, and nothing here replaces it. But two questions are worth asking before you commit a client's site to it: what can you actually take with you, and who is Webflow building for now?
- Total CMS vs Squarespace Squarespace is very good at what it does, and for a lot of people reading this it is the right answer. This page is not an argument that you should leave it. It is about what happens if you ever want to.
Details verified on . Software and pricing change — check each product's own site for their current details.
Sources
Verified on 26 July 2026:
- W3Techs — WordPress usage, surveyed 26 July 2026
- Patchstack — State of WordPress Security in 2026, for the core-versus-plugin vulnerability split
- WordPress — plugin and theme auto-updates
- getgrav.org, getkirby.com/buy, statamic.com/pricing — pricing and licence terms
- totalcms.co/pricing — our own
All product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners. We have no affiliation with WordPress, Grav, Kirby or Statamic. If anything here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will correct it.