For most business websites, WordPress is the better choice: it’s quicker to build, easier for your team to edit, and there’s a huge pool of developers and hosts who know it. Django CMS, or a site built on the Django framework more generally, makes sense when your website is closer to a web application, with complex data, user accounts, integrations or rules that WordPress would need heavy customisation to handle. The deciding question is what the site has to do.
The line can be blurry, so it helps to know how each platform behaves once someone has to run it.
What’s the difference between Django CMS and WordPress?
WordPress is a content management system written in PHP. You install it, choose or build a theme, add plugins for extra features, and your team edits pages through a familiar dashboard.
Django is different in kind. It’s a web framework written in Python, first released in 2005, that developers use to build applications. django CMS is one content management system built on top of it; Wagtail is another popular one. With either, you get an editing interface for pages, but the site around it is code your developers write and own.
Should I use Django or WordPress for my website?
Take two hypothetical businesses.
The first is a professional services firm in Richmond. It needs service pages, team profiles, case studies, a blog, a contact form that feeds its CRM, and a marketing team that wants to publish without calling a developer. That’s what WordPress does well. A custom theme gives the firm its own design, a short list of well-chosen plugins covers forms and SEO, and editors can work in the block editor from day one.
The second is a property investment platform. It needs to pull pricing data from several external feeds, show it alongside details of each asset, give registered users their own dashboards, and keep an audit trail because a regulator is watching. You could force that into WordPress, but you’d be writing a custom application inside a CMS that wasn’t designed for it. Django gives you a proper data model, an admin interface, user authentication and a well-tested way to build APIs, with page editing added through django CMS or Wagtail where the marketing pages need it.
This isn’t purely hypothetical for us. Our website for IPSX, a regulated property exchange, had to integrate and display market data from multiple sources, and Python and Django were part of that build.
Choose WordPress when the site is mostly content. Choose Django when the site is mostly an application that happens to have some pages.
Is Django CMS better than WordPress?
Neither is better across the board. Here’s how they compare on the points that usually decide it.
- Editing. WordPress is easier for non-technical editors, and most people who’ve managed a website have used it before. django CMS and Wagtail both have good editing interfaces, but your team will need some onboarding.
- Cost to build. A WordPress site is usually cheaper and faster to launch, because so much already exists. A Django build needs more developer time up front, since more of it is written for you.
- Cost to maintain. WordPress needs regular updates to core, themes and plugins. Django sites need updates too, mainly to the framework and its Python packages, and you’ll need a developer who knows your codebase.
- Security. Both cores are well maintained. Most WordPress compromises come through outdated or poorly written plugins, so the risk depends on how carefully the site is built and kept up to date. Django has strong protections built in, and a smaller attack surface because there’s no plugin marketplace to pull from.
- Hosting. WordPress hosting is widely available, from cheap shared hosting to managed platforms. Django needs a Python hosting environment, which is easy to arrange but narrower in choice.
- Hiring. WordPress developers are easy to find. Experienced Django developers are fewer and usually cost more.
When does a business need a custom CMS?
You need something beyond standard WordPress when any of these are true:
- your content is really structured data (products with dozens of attributes, listings, financial instruments) that has to be searched, filtered and reused;
- users log in to see their own information;
- the site has to exchange data with other systems in real time;
- there are compliance rules about who can change what, and when.
There’s also a middle path: a headless CMS. Editors manage content in one system, which serves it through an API to a front end built separately. WordPress can run headless, and so can Wagtail. It’s useful when the same content feeds a website, an app and other channels, but it adds complexity, so it needs a reason.
If you’re weighing up more than these two options, our guide to choosing web development technologies covers the wider decision, and the pros and cons of Python for web development goes deeper on the Django side.
How we approach the choice
We build on both. Most of our clients’ marketing sites run on WordPress, and we host over 200 WordPress sites, so we know what it costs to look after one properly. When a project needs data, integrations or user accounts that WordPress would struggle with, our in-house team builds it as a custom application instead. You can read more about our software and web development work, and we’re happy to give an honest view on which platform fits before you commit to either.
FAQs
Is Django CMS free?
Yes. django CMS, Wagtail, Django itself and WordPress are all open source and free to use. The costs are in the build, hosting, maintenance and any paid plugins or services, and a Django project usually needs more developer time than a comparable WordPress site.
Is Django harder to use than WordPress?
For developers, Django is a powerful framework that takes some Python knowledge to use well. For editors, a Django site with django CMS or Wagtail is straightforward once set up, though most people will find WordPress more familiar. The day-to-day editing experience depends heavily on how carefully the site was built.
What is the best CMS for Django?
The two most widely used are django CMS and Wagtail. django CMS suits page-based sites with drag-and-drop editing, while Wagtail is popular for structured content and headless builds. Both are actively maintained, so the choice usually comes down to how your content is organised and what your developers prefer.
