Kirby, Wix or WordPress: how I choose the tool for a bespoke website
When people get in touch about a website, they often ask which tool I work with. I almost always answer with another question: what do you expect from this site? Depending on the answer, the right tool becomes obvious pretty quickly. Here's how I think it through, after building websites since 2008, and working with Kirby since 2015.
"Couldn't we just do this on Wix?" "Why not WordPress, everyone uses it?" These are good questions, and I won't pretend these tools are bad. They're popular for a reason. But as soon as you want a site that's genuinely designed for you, you end up running into their limits.
How I work
Before talking tech, we lay the groundwork together: who the site is for, what it needs to say, what you want visitors to do. It's the least visible part, but it's what keeps you from redoing the homepage three times.
Then I design the mockup in Figma, starting from your identity and your content. I don't start from an existing theme.
Finally I build the site on Kirby, with a back-office designed around your content. You only see the fields you need, and you can update things yourself without any training.
Wix: easy at first, frustrating later
Wix is pleasant for the first few days. You drag, you drop, it feels like you're in control. Things go downhill when you want to step outside the box: spacing that won't line up, a slightly unusual animation, a different behaviour on mobile. You spend far more time than planned, and in the end it still looks like a Wix site.
There are also limits you don't see right away. The code it produces is heavy, you have little control over the finer points of SEO, and the day you want to leave, your content doesn't follow you easily.
For a personal site or a quick launch, it does the job. For a site that has to carry a brand image, I don't recommend it.
WordPress: great, but often badly used
WordPress runs a huge chunk of the web, and there are excellent WordPress sites out there. The problem is more about how it's used.
Most of the sites I come across rely on a purchased theme (Divi, Avada…) or a page builder like Elementor, plus a good fifteen plugins. Visually, everything ends up looking alike: same grids, same scroll animations. A developer will often spot the theme at first glance.
On the technical side, every plugin is one more way in for the bots that scan the web looking for vulnerabilities. Everything has to be updated regularly, and sometimes one update breaks another. As for the back-office, it quickly gets cluttered, especially for someone who just wants to change a line of text.
For a large media outlet, a busy blog or some e-commerce projects, WordPress makes sense. For a business website or a portfolio, it's often a lot of machinery for very little.
For the technical details, see my comparison Kirby CMS vs WordPress: 5 differences that matter.
Kirby: the tool I use, and why
Kirby works without a database: content is stored in plain text files. It sounds like a detail, but it changes a lot. I version the site with Git like any other code, deploy it in seconds, and there are far fewer points of attack than on a plugin-heavy WordPress.
I build the back-office for each project. On class40.com, for example, the team manages skippers, races and boats, each with its own fields, without ever seeing what doesn't concern them.
But what I like most is that the final HTML is exactly what I wrote, nothing more. No plugin adding code behind my back. That's what lets me match a mockup pixel for pixel and build smooth GSAP animations without fighting the tool.
A bonus, and not a small one: Kirby is an ideal playground for working with an AI like Claude Code. The back-office, the templates and the content are all plain files, stored in one place and linked together. The AI gets a full picture of the project, and it works wonders: creating a new page along with its content, reviewing every meta tag on a site in one pass, or translating an entire site without breaking its structure.
What about the budget?
A Kirby site usually costs more upfront than a WordPress site built on a purchased theme. Better to say it straight away. On the other hand, it costs less to run: few security updates, no plugins breaking, and a design that doesn't look dated after two years, because it was designed for you and not for a thousand other sites.
If you have a strong identity and your site needs to carry it, that's where Kirby really makes sense. And if you're still unsure, let's talk: I'll tell you honestly whether it's the right choice for your project, or not.