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.
- Choose Total CMS or Kirby if the client edits their own site and the design has to survive.
- Choose Grav if the client is price-sensitive and has a developer nearby.
- Choose Statamic if you already write Laravel.
- Choose WordPress if the client needs a shop, multi-language content today, or one specific plugin.
First, the case for staying. WordPress runs 39.5% of the web. Whatever a client asks for, a plugin exists. Your client can replace you, which sounds like a downside until you realize it also means they will hire you, because they are not betting their site on one person's favorite 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 licenses 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 a third 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.
At a glance
Four worth your time.
| Product | Price | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Grav | Free (MIT) | Small budgets, and clients who will not pay for software |
| 2. Kirby | €99 per site under €1M client revenue, otherwise €349 | Design-led studios building bespoke client sites |
| 3. Statamic | Free Core / $349 Pro per site, $99/yr for updates after year one | Laravel freelancers, and content-heavy client sites |
| 4. Total CMS Ours | $195–$395 one-time per domain, two years of updates | Freelancers handing sites to non-technical clients, including sites built in Stacks, Pinegrow or Bootstrap Studio |
The options
Each one, with its tradeoffs.
-
Free and open source — nothing comes out of your project budget.
getgrav.org, captured Strengths
- Costs nothing, per project, forever — no license 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 ready-to-run skeletons, most of them free, give you a fast start on a fixed-fee project
- Grav 2 ships a new admin, a first-party API and an MCP server for AI agents
Tradeoffs
- Support is a community forum unless you buy a support package from Trilby Media, the team behind Grav
- The core is free, but several of the most useful pieces for a client site (Editor Pro, Revisions Pro, SEO Magic) are paid premium plugins
- Grav 2 needs PHP 8.3 or newer, which some older client hosting does not offer yet
-
A per-site license and a bespoke admin panel for every project.
getkirby.com, captured 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 license
- 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 licenses
- Templates are plain PHP, so a client who hires a cheaper developer later can do real damage
-
Free until it goes live, then $349 — with the best editor experience here.
statamic.com, captured Strengths
- Pro runs free locally for as long as you like — you only pay when the client's site goes live on a public domain, 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; their docs point to a community list of hosts that do and don't work well with it
- Updates lapse after a year unless someone pays $99 annually — another recurring line item
- The APIs are read-only and Pro-only
-
Total CMS
Ours — we make thisOne payment per domain, runs on the client's existing hosting, no plugin stack to maintain.
totalcms.co, captured 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 framework, no database
- Works with the front end you already have: Twig in your own pages, or pages from a visual tool like Stacks, Pinegrow or Bootstrap Studio (how it works)
- Editors fill in the fields you modeled rather than composing layouts, so the design survives the handover
- Access groups, image processing, forms, SEO, automations and the API are in the box — nothing to assemble or keep patched separately (Automations and external API access are Pro)
- Local development on
localhostor a.testdomain is free with every Pro feature and no time limit, so spec work costs nothing until it goes live - Support direct from the developer, so there is someone to escalate to that is not you
Tradeoffs
- No free tier for a live site: after the 45-day trial, every public domain needs a license, where Grav and Statamic Core cost nothing
- 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 (Pro); no multi-site from a single install
- No e-commerce, so a client wanting a shop needs a different answer
How to choose
The longer answer.
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 you design in a visual tool like Stacks, Pinegrow or Bootstrap Studio: Total CMS. It turns the pages your tool makes into a site your client can edit. The other three want the design rebuilt in their own template format.
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. If you go with Total CMS, the freelancer kit has that proposal language written out, with a care plan model, a five-year cost calculator and a handoff checklist.
Questions
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 licenses 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 39.5% 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.
Sources
Where these facts come from.
Checked . Software and pricing change, so check each product’s own site for their current details.
Verified on 28 October 2026:
- W3Techs — WordPress usage, surveyed 28 October 2026
- Patchstack — State of WordPress Security in 2026, for the core-versus-plugin vulnerability split
- WordPress — plugin and theme auto-updates
- WordPress.org — versions in use, 28 October 2026
- getgrav.org and its requirements, getkirby.com/buy, statamic.com/pricing and its trial mode — pricing and license 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.
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Put it on your shortlist, then test it.
45 days, every Pro feature, no credit card. Install it next to the others and decide with a real site in front of you.