Best European Alternatives to WordPress
Looking for a European alternative to WordPress? WordPress.com is run by Automattic, a US company, and the wider WordPress ecosystem carries a security and plugin-maintenance burden that a lot of teams would rather not keep paying.
Europe builds a disproportionate share of the world's serious content management systems — and most of them can be self-hosted outright.
How we rank these tools — 4-step process
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European ownership, verified
The company is headquartered and incorporated in the EU, EEA or Switzerland, and processes customer data in Europe. A US parent company disqualifies a tool from this page regardless of where its servers are.
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Category fit and hands-on review
What the tool actually does, who it suits, and where it falls short — checked against the vendor’s own documentation, changelog and pricing page rather than its marketing copy.
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Compliance and pricing check
GDPR posture, hosting location and the prices quoted on this page are verified against the vendor’s public pricing before publication, and re-checked when we revisit the category.
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Position on this page
Placement on this page can be paid, and that can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. It never buys a good review: a tool that fails the checks above is not here at any price, and payment does not change the shortcomings we write about. A vendor can ask us to correct a factual error — not to remove a criticism.
Vendors can pay for visibility on this page. It never changes what an entry says about a product, including the criticism, and we earn nothing when you click through to a vendor. Paid placement can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. Editorial policy
7 European Alternatives to WordPress
Storyblok
Headless CMS with a genuine visual editor
Strapi
Open-source headless CMS you fully self-host
Ghost
Open-source publishing with memberships built in
TYPO3
Enterprise CMS built for multi-site and multi-language estates
Contentful
API-first content platform for large distributed teams
Kirby
File-based CMS with no database at all
Contao
Accessible open-source CMS with fine-grained permissions
Key takeaways
- WordPress core is GPLv2 and self-hostable anywhere in Europe, so the usual jurisdiction argument does not apply to it — only to WordPress.com and the rest of Automattic's hosted products.
- In October 2024 the official plugin directory forked a commercial plugin and shipped it to millions of sites as an update; a court ordered access restored on 10 December 2024.
- Plugin installation is now available on every paid WordPress.com plan, but SFTP, SSH and WP-CLI still start at the Business tier.
- TYPO3 publishes dated support windows per major version and sells three further years through TYPO3 GmbH, four if you go through an official TYPO3 partner — a horizon you can put in a tender, where WordPress has no equivalent.
- None of these systems replaces WooCommerce, and treating a shop migration as a CMS migration is the most expensive mistake on this page.
Why people leave WordPress
Start by discarding the argument this site usually makes, because on this page it is false. WordPress is GPLv2 software.
You can install it this afternoon on a server in Frankfurt, never contact anyone in California, and no American company is a processor, a recipient or a party to anything. If a page tells you the CLOUD Act reaches your self-hosted WordPress site, close it. Automattic Inc. owns WordPress.com, Jetpack, Akismet, WooCommerce and WordPress VIP. It does not own the licence under which your site runs.
The real reason to look elsewhere is governance, and it was demonstrated in public over three weeks in the autumn of 2024. WP Engine was cut off from wordpress.org on 25 September, including security updates and the plugin repository.
On 12 October the project forked WP Engine's Advanced Custom Fields plugin into Secure Custom Fields, citing point 18 of the plugin directory guidelines, and millions of installations received the replacement as an ordinary update. A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction on 10 December 2024 ordering access restored.
Set aside who was right. What was shown is that the update channel your site trusts is a single point of control, and that restraining it required a court rather than a process. That is a structural property, not an incident, and it is the thing the seven systems below do not share.
- The update channel is a single point of control A WordPress site pulls core and plugin updates from one directory, run by one project, and accepts them with write access to itself. In October 2024 that mechanism delivered a fork of a commercial plugin to installations that had asked for an update to the original. Every alternative here distributes differently: Strapi through npm and your own repository, TYPO3 and Contao through Composer, Kirby as a file you download and commit. None of those can be repointed by a third party while you sleep.
- Sixty thousand plugins is the attack surface, not the feature list WordPress.com advertises access to over 60,000 plugins, and a self-hosted install can reach the same directory. Each one is code with database access, written by someone you have never assessed, updating itself on a schedule you do not set. This is where WordPress security incidents and GDPR problems actually originate — an analytics plugin that phones somewhere, a form plugin that stores submissions in the clear, an abandoned plugin that stops receiving fixes. The core is not the exposure.
- On WordPress.com the exit is the thing that costs extra Plugin installation now sits on every paid plan, from Personal upward, so the old complaint about being forced onto the Business tier to install anything no longer holds. What still sits on Business and above is SFTP, SSH, WP-CLI and Git deployments — in other words, file-level access to your own site. The capability you need on the day you leave is the one behind the higher tier, which is a very old pattern and worth noticing before you need it.
- The estate grows faster than anyone maintains it A WordPress installation is rarely one thing after five years. It is a theme somebody customised, a child theme on top of that, eleven plugins of which three are abandoned, a page builder holding the layout hostage, and a staging site nobody has patched since 2023. The systems below are not automatically simpler, but several of them cover forms, news, calendars and permissions in core, which is the difference between three plugins and none.
What you have to replace, not just match
Work out which WordPress you have, because the word covers four different situations and they have four different answers.
The first is a blog or publication, possibly with a newsletter stitched on through plugins — Ghost replaces the whole arrangement including the plugins.
The second is a brochure or corporate site an agency built and a marketing team edits; Contao, Kirby and TYPO3 all do that, at three very different weights. The third is a content source feeding an app, a website and maybe a display in a shop, which is what headless is for and what Storyblok, Strapi and Contentful are.
The fourth is a WooCommerce shop, and this page cannot help with it. Nothing here is an ecommerce platform, so that migration is a different project with a different shortlist. Be honest about which of the four you are in before anybody quotes you, because a headless CMS handed to a marketing team that wanted to edit a headline is the most reliably unhappy outcome in this whole market.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Storyblok | Linz, Austria | Free tier / from about €99/month for teams | EU (Austria) |
| #2 | Strapi | Paris, France | Free self-hosted / Strapi Cloud from about €29/month | EU (France) |
| #3 | Ghost | London, United Kingdom | Free self-hosted / Ghost(Pro) from about $9/month, no revenue share | United Kingdom (adequacy decision, outside the EEA) |
| #4 | TYPO3 | Basel, Switzerland | Free and open source; agency and ELTS support vary | Wherever you host it |
| #5 | Contentful | Berlin, Germany | Free tier / Lite from about $300/month / Premium on request | EU (Germany) |
| #6 | Kirby | Berlin, Germany | Free for local development / €109 one-off per production site | EU (Germany) |
| #7 | Contao | Germany | Free and open source; agency support varies | EU (Germany) |
How each alternative compares to WordPress
- Which law reaches it. EU (Austria). WordPress.com is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. EU region, default for European customers.
- Source code. Closed source, where WordPress.com publishes its code.
Best for: Marketing teams who want a modern stack without losing click-and-type editing
The reason most WordPress replacements fail is not technical. It is that the marketing team loses the ability to look at a page, click the wrong headline and fix it, and starts filing tickets instead. Storyblok is built around refusing that: the editing interface shows the real rendered page and the editor clicks into it, while the content still goes out over REST and GraphQL like any headless system.
Against WordPress specifically, it also removes the thing that broke in 2024. There is no plugin directory pushing code into your site, because there is no site of yours for code to be pushed into — the CMS is a hosted service and the front end is your own build in your own repository. The failure mode that put a forked plugin onto millions of installations has no equivalent path here.
The price is that you are now responsible for a front end. WordPress hands you a theme and a working website in an afternoon; Storyblok hands you an API and expects a developer.
Storyblok GmbH sits in Linz, the EU region is what European customers get without asking, the Visual Editor is present on every plan down to the free Starter tier, and self-hosting does not exist — which is a real objection if what you learned from the dispute is that you want nobody else in the loop.
What Storyblok does better than WordPress
- No plugin directory and no auto-updating third-party code with write access to your site
- Austrian company with an EU region as the default for European customers, where WordPress.com is an Automattic product run from San Francisco
- Editors keep visual, in-page editing, which most headless replacements for WordPress take away
- Content is component-based and reusable across a website, an app and any other destination, where a WordPress page is a page
- Several languages and several markets are modelled in the product itself, where a WordPress site reaches them through a translation plugin
Where Storyblok is a step down from WordPress
- No self-hosting, so you are trading one hosted dependency for another
- Not open source, so the guarantees are contractual rather than inspectable
- You must build and host a front end; WordPress gives you a running site on day one
- Costs climb with team size and traffic, where a self-hosted WordPress costs what the server costs
- Nothing resembling the WordPress theme market, so design starts from your own code
Standout against WordPress. It is the only system here that takes the plugin update channel away without also taking away the way your editors work.
- Which law reaches it. EU (France). WordPress.com is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your own infrastructure, or Strapi Cloud EU region.
- Source code. Open source, as WordPress.com is.
Best for: Teams whose objection is that a third party can change their site
If the 2024 dispute is what brought you here, Strapi is the most direct answer on the page. The core is MIT-licensed, the Community edition is free forever, and updates arrive as npm packages you choose, pin and commit to your own repository. There is no central directory with the ability to substitute one package for another, because there is no central directory.
What you get is a content API and an admin panel, both of which you run. Content types are defined through the interface and written out as code, so the schema travels through the same branches and reviews as the rest of your application — which is a materially different discipline from a WordPress install where a plugin can add a custom post type at three in the morning.
What you do not get is a website. Strapi has no front end, no themes and no page concept, and a marketing team handed a Strapi admin panel will be editing fields in a form. Strapi SAS is French, the paid self-hosted editions add SSO, review workflows and audit logs, and the running costs are the usual ones: you own the server, the upgrades and the backups, and major version upgrades are real work.
What Strapi does better than WordPress
- Updates come from npm into your own repository, so no outside party can replace a dependency on a live site
- MIT-licensed core that is free forever and self-hosted by default, rather than a hosted product with tiers
- French company under EU law, where WordPress.com is operated by Automattic Inc. in San Francisco
- Content schemas live in code and move through branches and review like everything else you deploy
- No plugin ecosystem to audit, because the extension points are your own code
Where Strapi is a step down from WordPress
- No front end at all, so this replaces the back half of WordPress and leaves the site to you
- Editors lose page-based editing entirely, which is the single biggest cause of failed WordPress migrations
- You own the server, the patching and the upgrades, and major version upgrades require migration work
- No theme or template market of any kind
- Wrong tool outright for a brochure site that one person edits once a month
Standout against WordPress. It is the only system here whose entire update path runs through your own repository, which is the exact property the 2024 dispute showed WordPress does not have.
- Which law reaches it. United Kingdom (adequacy decision, outside the EEA). WordPress.com is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your own server, or a Ghost(Pro) region of choice.
- Source code. Open source, as WordPress.com is.
Best for: Publications running WordPress plus a membership plugin plus a newsletter plugin
An enormous number of WordPress sites are a blog with a subscription business bolted onto it: one plugin for memberships, one for the newsletter, one for Stripe, one for the paywall, and a theme fighting all four. Ghost has memberships, paid tiers, newsletters and payments in the core product, so that entire stack of plugins disappears rather than being ported.
The governance contrast is the other half of the case. The software is MIT-licensed and self-hostable, and the entity behind it is a non-profit foundation rather than a company with investors waiting on an exit. For a publication whose income runs through the platform, the question after 2024 is who is allowed to change the rules and what happens to you when they do, and a foundation answers it differently from a venture-backed company in the middle of a lawsuit.
Two honest limits. Ghost is a publishing platform, not a general CMS: a corporate site with twelve section templates and a product catalogue is the wrong shape for it, and the theme and integration ecosystem is a fraction of WordPress's.
And it is British. The Ghost Foundation is in London, which since Brexit is outside the EEA and relies on an adequacy decision that is reviewed periodically — on a directory of European alternatives that belongs in the open, not in a footnote.
What Ghost does better than WordPress
- Memberships, paid tiers, newsletters and payments in core, replacing four or five WordPress plugins outright
- MIT-licensed and self-hostable, with no central directory able to modify what your installation runs
- A non-profit foundation behind it, so there is no investor waiting for an exit that would put your subscription business under new management
- Far less to maintain: no page builder, no theme-plus-child-theme layering, no abandoned plugins
- Editorial and subscriber data sit in one system instead of being split between the CMS and a mailing tool
Where Ghost is a step down from WordPress
- Based in London, so outside the EEA and dependent on a UK adequacy decision that is periodically reviewed
- A publishing platform rather than a general CMS: poor fit for a corporate site with many content types
- Theme and integration ecosystems are tiny next to WordPress's
- No ecommerce beyond subscriptions, so a WooCommerce shop has nowhere to go here
- Structured content and complex taxonomies are weaker than in any of the traditional systems on this page
Standout against WordPress. It is the only system here that deletes a whole plugin stack rather than replacing it, because the subscription business is in the core product.
- Which law reaches it. Wherever you host it. WordPress.com is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your own infrastructure.
- Source code. Open source, as WordPress.com is.
Best for: Public bodies and large organisations running many sites in many languages
TYPO3 answers the question WordPress has never answered in writing: how long is this version supported, and what does it cost to keep it supported.
Each major version gets roughly three years of free long-term support, and TYPO3 GmbH sells extended support on top of that with published dates — three more years for any organisation and a fourth reserved for official partners, so version 12.4 left free support on 30 April 2026 and has extended support available until 30 April 2030. For a procurement cycle that is a different kind of document from "keep it updated".
The governance is the other contrast, and after 2024 it is the pointed one. TYPO3 has been in continuous development since 1998, steered by the TYPO3 Association, which coordinates and funds long-term development, alongside a company that facilitates it. Direction comes from a membership structure with published processes rather than from an individual, which is precisely the property the WordPress community discovered it could not assume.
It is also a great deal of software. A single installation can carry an entire university or municipality — dozens of sites, several languages, editors who see only their own department's pages and only their own fields — and the same installation is absurd behind a twelve-page brochure site. The interface is dated next to anything modern, and in practice you need an agency that specialises in it — which is a cost WordPress rarely imposes.
What TYPO3 does better than WordPress
- Published, dated support windows per major version, with three further years purchasable from TYPO3 GmbH and a fourth through an official partner
- Steered by an association with members and published processes rather than by a single project owner
- One installation serving an estate of sites, languages and departments, where WordPress multisite is a compromise
- Editorial permissions down to the individual field, with staging and approval built in rather than added by plugin
- GPLv2+ and self-hosted only, so the content sits on infrastructure you chose and nobody else can update it
Where TYPO3 is a step down from WordPress
- Far heavier than WordPress, and genuinely hard to run without a specialist agency
- The editing interface feels dated to anyone arriving from a modern WordPress install
- Enormous overkill for a small site, where WordPress is genuinely the better answer
- Nothing like the WordPress theme market, so design work starts from scratch or from an agency
- Extended support is a paid product, so the long horizon has an invoice attached
Standout against WordPress. It is the only system here where you can name the exact date your current version stops receiving security fixes, and buy three or four more years of them.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). WordPress.com is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. EU region available.
- Source code. Closed source, where WordPress.com publishes its code.
Best for: Large organisations replacing WordPress VIP with governance and a support contract
Contentful is the option for the case where WordPress was never really the problem — the problem was that a large organisation had content in five systems, approval chains nobody enforced and a site that three agencies had touched. It brings approval routing, fine-grained rights and a governance model designed for teams spread across offices, together with a substantial partner network, and it can surface material held in other systems through the same API as its own.
The Berlin entity is Contentful GmbH, dating from 2013, and an EU data region is available, which puts the processing where a European buyer needs it. Against WordPress VIP, whose parent sits in San Francisco, that is a genuine advantage and the main reason this entry is on the page at all.
It is also the entry here that least resembles an escape. It is hosted only, closed source, and priced by tier with a steep step between the free plan and the paid ones — which means you have swapped a hosted dependency you disliked for a hosted dependency with a better address.
If the lesson you took from 2024 was that you want nobody able to change your setup but you, four other systems on this page answer that and this one does not.
What Contentful does better than WordPress
- German company with an EU data region, where WordPress VIP is an Automattic product run from San Francisco
- Approval routing and fine-grained editorial rights arrive with the product, where a WordPress site assembles them from two or three plugins
- Content federation, so a product catalogue in another system can be served alongside CMS content through one API
- No plugin directory and no third-party code updating itself inside your installation
- A support contract and a partner network of the kind a large organisation actually buys
Where Contentful is a step down from WordPress
- Hosted only and closed source, so it does not answer the control objection this page is built around
- The jump from the free tier to the first paid tier is the sharpest in this category
- No front end, so a WordPress theme does not port and the website has to be built
- Editors get forms and fields rather than pages, which is a hard change for a team used to WordPress
- Substantially more product, process and cost than a mid-sized organisation needs
Standout against WordPress. It is the only entry here that can put a WordPress site, a product database and a documentation system behind one API without first migrating any of them.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). WordPress.com is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your own server; content is files.
- Source code. Closed source, where WordPress.com publishes its code.
- Independently checked. Source-available, commercial licence.
Best for: Agencies and developers building sites they intend to still understand in five years
Kirby removes the two things that make an old WordPress site frightening. There is no database, so content is files on disk that a backup copies and version control tracks. And there is no plugin directory pushing code in, so nothing changes on your site unless you put it there.
Against a WordPress install that has accumulated a page builder, a child theme and eleven plugins, that is a different relationship with your own work. Blueprints describe the content structure, and the panel is assembled per project, so an editor opens a screen containing only what this particular site needs — the opposite of a WordPress admin where each plugin adds its own menu entry and an upsell banner.
The maker is Bastian Allgeier GmbH, based in Berlin, and the licence is commercial and charged once per production site, with local development free — source-available, then, rather than open source.
The design sets the boundaries: very large catalogues and heavily relational content do not belong in files on disk, the surrounding ecosystem is tiny, and somebody on the project has to write PHP templates. It is a tool for people who build sites, not a tool you hand to a marketing department.
What Kirby does better than WordPress
- No database at all, so the most common WordPress compromise route simply does not exist
- No plugin directory and no auto-updating third-party code, which is the mechanism the 2024 dispute exercised
- German company, one-off per-site licensing and no subscription, against WordPress.com's monthly tiers
- The panel is assembled per project, so an editor is shown this site's fields and nothing that belongs to another one
- Content is files, so backup, deployment and rollback are the same operation as for the code
Where Kirby is a step down from WordPress
- Source-available under a commercial licence rather than open source, so it is not the free-software answer
- Requires someone who writes PHP templates; there is no theme you install and switch on
- Flat files are a poor fit for very large catalogues or heavily relational content
- No comparable ecosystem of plugins, themes or agencies outside a small community
- Wrong choice for a non-technical team that wants to build pages without a developer
Standout against WordPress. It is the only system here with no database and no plugin channel, which removes both of the routes by which old WordPress sites are usually compromised.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). WordPress.com is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your own infrastructure.
- Source code. Open source, as WordPress.com is.
Best for: Public bodies and German-speaking agencies with an Accessibility Act deadline
Contao's case against WordPress is arithmetic. A form generator, news and a calendar are core modules, so the three plugins a typical WordPress brochure site installs on day one are simply already there — and three plugins you never installed are three update channels you never have to audit. Over 175,000 sites run on it, overwhelmingly in German-speaking Europe.
The second half is accessibility, and it is a legal duty now rather than a preference. Contao states that sites built with it can meet BITV 2.0 and the European Accessibility Act, and that the administration interface itself is largely accessible and works with assistive technology. That last part matters for a public body that has to employ editors who use screen readers, and it is not something a WordPress theme from a marketplace will give you.
It is developed by the Contao Association under LGPL-3.0, self-hosted only, built on Symfony, with regular releases alongside LTS releases carrying four years of support. The trade is reach: outside German-speaking Europe the community, the documentation and the pool of agencies are all much smaller than WordPress's, and that is a real risk if your developer leaves.
What Contao does better than WordPress
- Forms, news and a calendar in core, so the standard WordPress plugin stack is never installed in the first place
- Accessible output aimed at BITV 2.0 and the European Accessibility Act, with an admin interface that works with assistive technology
- LGPL-3.0, self-hosted only and steered by an association, so no external party can update your installation
- LTS releases with four years of support, which is a maintenance horizon a public body can plan against
- Built on Symfony, so a mainstream PHP developer can work on it rather than learning a bespoke codebase
Where Contao is a step down from WordPress
- The community, documentation and agency pool are concentrated in German-speaking Europe
- Nothing approaching the WordPress theme and plugin market, so most work is custom
- Less familiar to hire for, which is a genuine cost over the life of a site
- Heavier to learn than WordPress for a small site with one editor
- No hosted edition, so somebody has to run the server, the patches and the backups
Standout against WordPress. It is the only entry here where the three plugins a WordPress brochure site always installs were never needed, and where accessible markup is what the system emits by default.
What actually breaks when you switch
The content moves and the layout does not. Posts, pages, media, categories and authors come out through the REST API or a WXR export and can be scripted into any system here in about a week. Anything built with Elementor, Divi, WPBakery or the block editor is stored as builder markup that means nothing outside the builder, so every one of those pages is a rebuild. Count them before you scope the project, because that number is the project.
URLs are the second trap and the one that shows up in the traffic graph. A decade of permalinks, redirects, canonical tags and whatever the SEO plugin was doing all have to be reproduced or mapped. Export the top few hundred URLs by traffic, write the redirect map before the cutover, and check it the morning after rather than the week after.
The third is the people. Editors who have used WordPress for years are fast in it, and every system here makes them slower for a month — dramatically so if you move to a headless one. Train them on the real content before the switch, not on a demo, and pick your system knowing that an editor who cannot publish without help will go back to asking a developer, which is the situation you were trying to leave.
Is there a data protection reason to leave WordPress at all?
Not because of the software. A WordPress installation on a German or Dutch server has no American party in it: the code is GPLv2, there is no phone-home requirement, and Automattic is not a processor for anything you did not sign up to. Saying otherwise is the kind of claim that gets a whole category of advice dismissed, and it deserves to be.
There is a reason because of what gets installed on top. Jetpack, Akismet and Gravatar are Automattic services, and a very large share of WordPress sites run at least one without anyone having listed it. Add Google Fonts loaded from a theme, an analytics plugin, a form plugin posting to a US endpoint, and the processing map of a typical WordPress site has a dozen entries nobody wrote down.
So the honest version of the question is not "is WordPress compliant" but "do you know what your plugins do". If you do, staying is defensible. If nobody has ever audited the list, that is the problem, and it follows you to any system that has a plugin culture.
Does the WP Engine dispute actually affect me?
Directly, probably not, unless you were an Advanced Custom Fields user in October 2024 or a WP Engine customer during the blockade. The injunction of 10 December 2024 restored access and releases have continued since — WordPress 7.1 shipped on 19 August 2026.
Structurally, it should change how you assess the risk. Your site trusts a directory to hand it code, and that directory demonstrated that it will act on a commercial dispute by changing what a plugin is. Whether that was justified is a question for the lawsuit. Whether your site is exposed to decisions of that kind is a question for you, and the answer is yes for as long as you consume the directory.
The practical mitigation, if you stay, is unglamorous and effective: pin plugin versions, review updates rather than auto-applying them, and keep a list of which plugins are commercial and therefore have a party that could be in a dispute. Most teams do none of these.
Will my editors cope with a headless CMS?
Often not, and this is where WordPress migrations fail most reliably. The thing a marketing team means by WordPress is opening a page, clicking on the wrong headline and typing a better one. A typical headless system replaces that with a form full of fields and a preview that only exists once a developer has built it.
Storyblok is the one on this page that refuses that trade, which is why it ranks first: editors get a live view of the real page and click into it, while developers still consume a clean API. If your reason for looking is architectural rather than editorial, that matters less. If the people doing the daily editing are not technical, it is the whole decision.
The alternative is to stay traditional. Contao, TYPO3 and Kirby own the page as well as the content, in the way WordPress does, and an editor who moved from WordPress to Contao is doing a recognisable job. An editor who moved from WordPress to Strapi is doing a different one.
How much of a WordPress site actually migrates?
The text and the images, cleanly. Posts, pages, categories, authors and media come out through the WordPress REST API or the WXR export, and every system here can be fed from that with a script. That part is usually a week.
The layout does not migrate at all. If the site was built with Elementor, Divi, WPBakery or the block editor, the pages are stored as builder markup that means nothing outside the builder, and somebody is rebuilding templates by hand. Forms, redirects, SEO metadata and anything a plugin invented as a custom post type each need their own decision.
The third category is the one people forget: URLs. A WordPress permalink structure, a decade of incoming links and whatever the SEO plugin was doing with canonical tags all have to be reproduced or redirected. Map the top few hundred URLs before you cut over, not after the traffic drops.
Which one to pick
If your editors are the constraint, Storyblok is the recommendation, because it is the only modern option here that does not take visual editing away from them. Accept that you are trading one hosted dependency for another, and that you now own a front end.
If the 2024 dispute is what brought you here, the answer is one of the self-hosted four. Strapi if you want a content API whose updates run through your own repository, TYPO3 if you run an estate and need dated support windows, Contao if you need accessibility and fewer moving parts, Kirby if you want no database and no ecosystem at all.
If your WordPress is a publication with a subscription business taped to it, Ghost replaces the CMS and the plugins together, and its non-profit ownership is a genuine structural answer rather than a slogan. Go in knowing it is British, and therefore outside the EEA.
And if you are staying, stay deliberately. Audit which Automattic services are running on your site, pin your plugin versions instead of auto-applying updates, and keep a list of which plugins are commercial products with an owner who could end up in a dispute. That is most of the benefit of leaving, at none of the cost.
Frequently Asked Questions
Storyblok if you want a modern architecture without taking visual editing away from your editors. Ghost if your WordPress is a publication with a newsletter bolted on. TYPO3 if you run an estate of sites across departments and languages.
Contao if you are a German-speaking agency or a public body with accessibility duties. Kirby if you want a site with no database at all. Strapi if what you need is a content API you own outright, and Contentful if a large organisation is paying for governance and support.
No, and this is worth saying plainly. WordPress core is GPLv2 software you can run on European infrastructure with no American party involved at any point. Automattic Inc. becomes relevant only through its hosted products — WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, Jetpack, Akismet, Gravatar — which many sites do use without having listed them. The compliance work is auditing your plugins, not changing the CMS.
On 22 September 2024 Matt Mullenweg publicly attacked WP Engine at WordCamp US; on 25 September wordpress.org blocked WP Engine from its servers, including security updates and the plugin repository.
WP Engine sued Automattic and Mullenweg on 2 October, and on 12 October wordpress.org forked WP Engine's Advanced Custom Fields plugin into Secure Custom Fields, citing point 18 of the plugin directory guidelines. A preliminary injunction on 10 December 2024 ordered the blocking to stop, and a class action followed in February 2025.
Not any more. WordPress.com states that plugin installation is available on every paid plan — Personal, Premium, Business and Commerce — with access to over 60,000 plugins. The Business tier is still where SFTP, SSH, WP-CLI and Git deployments begin, which is the more consequential gate, because that is the access you need to move a site out.
Yes. WordPress 7.1, named "Mary Lou", was released on 19 August 2026, and the release cadence has continued throughout. Anyone telling you the project has stalled is describing a mood rather than a changelog. The question worth asking is not whether releases ship but who decides what ships and what happens to a plugin whose author falls out with the project.
No. Plugins are WordPress-specific code and nothing here runs them. What you can often keep is the capability: Contao ships forms, news and a calendar in core, Ghost has memberships and newsletters natively, TYPO3 has workflow and permissions built in. Make a list of what your plugins do rather than what they are called, and you will usually find half of them are core features somewhere else and a third are not needed at all.
Strapi under MIT, TYPO3 under GPLv2+, Contao under LGPL-3.0 and Ghost under MIT are all open source and self-hostable. Kirby is source-available under a commercial licence and runs on your own server as flat files. Storyblok and Contentful are hosted only — which, if the lesson you took from 2024 is that you want no third party able to change your site, makes them the wrong two on this page.
TYPO3 is the only one here that answers this with dates and an invoice. Each major version gets around three years of free long-term support, and TYPO3 GmbH sells extended support on top: three further years for any organisation, with the fourth year reserved for official TYPO3 partners.
Version 12.4 left free support on 30 April 2026 and has ELTS available until 30 April 2030. Contao publishes LTS releases with four years of support. WordPress has no comparable per-version window you can name in a procurement document, which matters more to a public body than to a blog.
No. Every system on this page is a content management system, and a shop is a different product with different requirements — payments, tax, stock, fulfilment, PCI scope. If your WordPress is really a WooCommerce store, this comparison is not the one you need, and treating the shop as a CMS migration is how these projects double in cost halfway through.
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