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goodcore101 · 5 years ago

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9 Must Decisions in Web Application Development

So you’ve decided to create a web application? Great, welcome to a world without any easy choices. There is a vast amount of different great technologies in every step you are going to make. And for every option, you will find a notable company that used it with great success.The web development market is huge. It’s the biggest programming space by far, with never-ending technology options. Looking at the StackOverflow survey of 2019, 52% of all developers are full-stack developers, 50% are back-end developers and 32.8% are front-end developers.

As you can probably guess, 134.8% of all developers is a pretty big market.There are many popular technologies, databases, philosophies, design patterns and methodologies in the software world. They change drastically every few years, but somehow the old ones never seem to die. Cobol and ClearCase are great examples of something that shouldn’t still exist but clearly does.We will talk about 9 technological choices you have to make when developing a proper web application. Some will not be relevant to your product, but most will be. A lot of these choices give way to an entirely new group of choices, but that’s just modern-day development.I’m mostly a .NET developer, but I’ll try to stay objective and not to express too many personal opinions.This article is talking about web applications, not websites. The distinction is a bit hard to put into words. Blogs and standard e-commerce sites are websites, whereas interactive websites like eBay and Facebook are web applications. Pretty much anything you can’t build (easily) with WordPress is a web application.

1. Client & Server Architectural Pattern

Since the internet came to life, we developed many different ways to build web applications. We had CGI, PHP, ASP, Silverlight, WebForms, and a bunch of others. In the last 10-15 years, we came to agree on 2 architectural patterns: model-view-controller(MVC) on the server-side or single-page-application (SPA) on the client side and Web API on the server side. Out of those two, the second approach (SPA + Web API) is getting the most traction in recent years.The first decision in your web application is to choose an architectural approach.Single Page Application (SPA) and Web APIEver since AngularJS was released in 2010, SPA and Web API combination gradually became the most popular way to write modern web applications. And with some good reasons. With this pattern, the entire client side part of the application is loaded just once rather than loading each page from the server. The routing is done entirely on the client side. The server provides just the API for data.There are many advantages to this approach:

Sine the entire client is loaded once in the browser, the page navigation is immediate and the web application experience becomes more like a desktop application experience.

Separation between client-side and server-side. There’s no longer necessity for full-stack developers (that know both server-side and client-side).

Testing both the client and server is easier because they are separate.

Your Web API server is reusable for any type of application – web, desktop, and mobile.

And some disadvantages:

Initial project setup is slower. Instead of creating one "new project" in your favorite MVC framework, you now have separate projects for the client-side and server-side. You’ll have to deal with more technologies overall.

Slower first-page load. In a SPA we are loading the entire client-side for the first page.

You’ll have to use bundlers like webpack for a decent develop experience. This adds some overhead like having to deal with bundler configuration. However, this is also an advantage because the bundler allows to easily add more tools to the build chain, like babel and a linter.

Model-View-Controller (MVC)The server-side MVC pattern got popular in 2005 with the release of Ruby on Rails and Django frameworks.In MVC, each route request goes to a Controller on the server. The Controller interacts with the Model (the data) and generates a View (the HTML/CSS/JavaScript client-side). This has several advantages. It creates a nice separation of concern between the client, server, and the different components. As a result, more developers can work on the same project without conflicts. It allows to reuse components. Since the Model is separate, you can replace it with a testable data set.Some popular MVC frameworks are Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET MVC, Django, Laravel, and Spring MVCYou can somewhat combine between MVC and SPAs. One View can be a single page application on its own. This is best done with thin SPA frameworks like Vue.js.OthersThere are a couple of other ways you can go, which aren’t considered great options nowadays. They are old technologies, which were replaced for a reason. Some of those are:

Classic ASP

Classic PHP (without MVC)

WebForms

Static pages and Web API (this is still valid for static content, but not for a web application)

2. Server-side Web API (when choosing SPA & Web API)

If you chose to go with a single page application (SPA) framework, then the next step is to choose a server-side technology. The standard means of communications are HTTP requests, so the server will provide an HTTP API. This means the server-side and client-side are decoupled. You can also consider using a RESTful API pattern.There’s an abundance in great server side technologies. This is both a blessing and a curse. There are so many good choices that it becomes difficult to choose. Here are some of the more popular technologies:

Node.js – JavaScript

ASP.NET Web API – C#

Java – Spring, Jersey, Apache CXF, Restlet

Python – Flask, Django REST framework

Ruby – Sinatra, Ruby on Rails – Rails is mostly MVC, but Rails core 5 supports API-only applications.

All of these frameworks are free and most are open source.This is not an exhaustive list, but those are the most popular technologies. Choosing a popular framework is important. It probably got popular for a reason. A popular framework will have better support, better documentation, and more documented issues. Perhaps most importantly, you’ll find more developers that are familiar with that framework.Checking market popularity with Google Trends and surveys in this particular category was a bit difficult. Instead, we can see popularity by looking at Tags in StackOverflow. We can see overall usage according to the total number of questions asked. And we can see the trends according to the number of questions asked in the last month. This is not a perfect indicator of popularity, but I think it’s pretty good. Here are the results:

Node.js, for example, has 291K questions, 161K watchers and 5K questions asked this monthThe big 4 winners are Node.js, ASP.NET, Spring, and Ruby on Rails. Flask, Django REST and GO are much less popular. However, this is not a fair comparison. Spring, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails are primarily MVC and not API-only, so they really have a much lower value. Go is a programming language, so it’s overvalued as well. On the other hand, Django-rest, and Flask are server-side API technology only, so their value is "real". Node.js is also not an MVC framework, rather a technology to run JavaScript natively. But, it’s mostly used for Web API with something like Express.js framework.Keep in mind that even though Node.js is clearly the most popular, the other ones are still extremely popular technologies.Java Jersey, Apache CXF and Ruby Sinatra usage was so much lower in comparison that I didn’t even include them in the chart. There are probably hundreds of other lesser known frameworks that don’t appear as well.Besides popularity, here are some more considerations when choosing:

For web applications that provide big-data analysis, consider going with a Python backend.

Do you want to work with a strongly-typed programming language like C#, Java, and Go? Or weakly typed languages like JavaScript, Ruby, and Python? This is a big consideration. Make sure your development team is comfortable with the language.

With Node.js, you work in the same language in client-side and server-side. I claim that’s way too much JavaScript, but the world seems to think it’s a good idea.

Which development technologies are more popular in your area of the world? Prefer those.

If you love C#, but afraid to be stuck with a Microsoft proprietary tech that’s tightly coupled to Windows, then fear no more. The latest versions of ASP.NET (.NET Core) are open-source, work on Linux and have great performance on top.

If you have a team that’s already experienced with a framework or language, go with their known technology. This consideration trumps all others.

3. Server-side MVC (when choosing MVC)

Like with Web API, there’s a big selection of server-side technologies that use the MVC pattern. Up to a few years ago, the MVC pattern was by far the most popular way to build web applications. The most notable frameworks are:

C# – ASP.NET MVC

Java – Spring MVC, Apache Struts, Play Framework

Groovy – Grails Framework

Python – Django

Ruby – Ruby on Rails

PHP – Laravel

And here’s the popularity contest results according to Stack Overflow Tags:

This is a normalized chart. ASP.NET MVC, for example, has 183K questions, 63K watchers and 856 questions asked this month.These results were interesting and quite surprising for me. I expected Ruby on Rails, Spring and ASP.NET MVC to be on top. Instead, I found that Django, Ruby on Rails and Laravel were the most popular frameworks. Ruby on Rails has the most questions in all times. Django and Laravel seem to be rising in popularity with the most questions asked in the last 30 days.Besides popularity, the additional considerations when choosing a framework are similar to the ones for Web Api server side:

For web applications that provide big-data and statistics, consider going with Python Django.

The strongly typed vs weakly typed language is still a consideration.

If you have a team that already knows and loves a framework or a language, go with the already-known known technology.

On a personal note, I’m dumbfounded that PHP is gaining popularity.Performance Benchmarks – for Both Web API and MVCIf you’re building a small business web application, performance might not matter as much. But for big applications that should serve many requests, response times are crucial. The most notable performance benchmarks comparison site is

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

. Here, you can find a huge list of frameworks and various server configurations. Those are all benchmarked and compared into something like this:

The candidates in the above test include a server with a web framework, a database, and an ORM. In the benchmark, the framework’s ORM is used to fetch all rows from a database table containing an unknown number of messages.If we go by language, the fastest is Rust, followed by C, Go, Java, C++, PHP, C#, and Kotlin. If we go back to our "popular" frameworks and look for them, we’ll find this:

ASP.NET Core Web API (42.8% of best result)

Node.js variation (17.9% of best result)

ASP.NET Core MVC (17.2%)

Spring (4.4%)

Laravel variation (2.9%)

Django (1.9%)

Ruby on Rails (1.3%)

By the way, the #1 performance winner Actix is a Rust language framework that I didn’t include due to its very low popularity.

4. Choosing a Single Page Application (SPA) Framework

If you chose to use a Web API and SPA (not MVC), then the next decision is to choose a SPA Framework.Just a few years ago, a new JavaScript framework sprouted about once a week. Luckily, those days are behind us and the field stabilized a bit.The most notable SPA frameworks of all times (well, since 2010) are:

React

AngularJS

Angular (2+)

Vue.js

Ember.js

Polymer

Aurelia

Backbone.js

Let’s do our usual trick with StackOverflow:

So this chart shows a few conclusions at a glance:

All past frameworks except for React, AngularJS, Angular, and Vue.js are dead. If you’ve been following web development news in the past few years, that should come as no surprise.

AngularJS has the most questions but the least new questions. Even though there’s probably a huge amount of code written with AngularJS, it’s a legacy framework. It’s not recommended to choose it for new projects.

React and Angular dominate the market with Vue.js a distant 3rd. React in particular has the most interest.

This means your best choice in 2020 is between React, Angular, and Vue.js. These frameworks have the best community support, the most documented issues, and the best component/library support. With React and Angular having the most support.Here are a few more points to consider:

Angular was built as a sort of "enterprise" framework that considered everything and forces you into a particular mode of work. React and Vue.js are more separated into components and allow you to pick and choose development approaches.

React won the "Most loved web framework" title in StackOverflow survey of 2019, with Vue.js a close second.

5. Database

Every modern web application has some sort of database. Or several databases even. In the old days, there were just relational databases and the differences were in performance and features. Today, we’re in the age of "specialized databases". We need different databases for different purposes, which makes this decision pretty important. I’d say even more important than the previous decisions of server-side and client-side technology because those offer pretty much the same thing in different flavors.It’s important to understand your business needs when choosing a database. If your product needs high-performance Search capabilities, consider using Elastic Search. If you have a high-load of similar requests, whose response doesn’t change very frequently, consider using Redis for its caching. If you just want to store a bunch of JSON documents without much fuss, then go with a document-store database like MongoDB.Databases can be divided into several types:

Relational Databases – A classic table database that works with SQL queries like Microsoft SQL Server.

NoSql databases:

Document-store databases like MongoDB

Key-Value stores like DynamoDB and Redis

Wide column store like Cassandra

Graph-based database like Neo4j.

Before choosing a specific database, it’s best to decide on the type of the database you need.Like with other technologies, choosing a popular database is very important. You’ll have more forums, bigger community and more developers familiar with the technology. Besides, they probably got popular for a reason. According to Stack Overflow 2019 survey, the most popular databases are:

MySQL is by far the most popular database. Note that the all 4 first spots are filled with relational databases. This might serve as some kind of indication that relational databases are the best choice in most applications.Here are a few points to consider when choosing:

Some of the commercial databases like Oracle and SQL Server can be quite pricey. Consider using one of the many open-source databases if the cost is an issue and you have a lot of data.

Relational database stood the test of time. They are fast, reliable and have a ton of tools that work with them. You’ll also find more developers familiar with the technology.

If you’re using a certain cloud provider, see which databases they support as cloud-as-a-service. This can reduce some initial development time when starting out. You might not actually need your cloud provider because there are services that provide independent database-as-a-service services like MongoDB Atlas.

For small web applications, the considerations are different than for large enterprise applications. You’ll need databases with the ability to scale, possibly to multiple machines (sharding).

For distributed databases, consider the CAP theorem. It states that a database can provide only as much 2 out of 3 guarantees between Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance. Consider which two guarantees are most important to your needs and which database provides those two.

For big applications or apps with high-frequency requests, you’ll need to consider performance. One of the best places to find performance comparisons is DB-ENGINES. Here are the latest scores while writing this:

Database choice is obviously a huge topic and an important one. Unlike other decisions, I suggest giving this one more weight and do additional research.

6. Deployment

In 2020, we have a big variety of Cloud Offerings. I believe that deployment in the cloud is the best fit in almost all cases. With a few exceptions. So before comparing cloud service providers, let’s talk about why you would deploy to the cloud and what alternatives you have.There are actually 3 options available:

Cloud deployment – Instead of bothering with setting up your servers in the basement, you can rent compute power and storage from a company like AWS or Azure. In fact, ever since AWS was launched in 2006, the software world is changing in this direction. There are many advantages to this:

On-premise deployment – On-premise servers is the way organizations worked up to 2006. You had a server room and an army of sys-admins to keep them running. In 2020, we still have a lot of on-premise deployments. These companies either started on-premise and just didn’t move to the cloud or they have some good reasons to stay on-premise. You should consider staying on-premise if:

Hybrid cloud solution – The big cloud providers allow you to install a fully operational cloud server on-premise. That is, you’ll have an AWS or Azure portal installed in your own data center. Pretty crazy concept and not for everyone, especially due to the cost. Both Azure Stack and AWS Outposts require you to buy new customized hardware. Google recently released Anthos, which doesn’t require customized hardware.

With the Cloud, you can use dynamic scaling to cut costs. In low-pressure times, reduce the number of servers and in high-pressure times increase them. Since you pay-per-minute or per-hour, you can dramatically decrease costs.

The initial setup and deployment are much easier. In some cases, like with Azure App Service, deploying to a server for the first time is literally a few clicks.

You need to employ much fewer sys-admins (but a few DevOps engineers).

You no longer need to buy server machines, store them in the basement and upkeep them. It’s all in the cloud man.

You have some security or legal issues to place your server in the cloud. Maybe it’s software in the military and government sectors.

You’ve invested so much effort in your on-premise server farm that it no longer makes sense moving to the cloud. It can happen if you’re a big enough company and you’ve made your on-premise solution automated enough to justify the upkeep.

You’re big enough that it makes financial sense not to pay to the middle man. One example is Dropbox who aren’t in the cloud. They did the math and it makes sense for them to be on-premise.

Comparing Cloud Service ProvidersCloud services are divided into 3 categories: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). To deploy our web application, we’re interested in IaaS. The three dominant IaaS cloud providers are: Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Besides, it’s worth mentioning IBM Cloud, DigitalOcean, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute, Red Hat Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.Besides AWS, Azure, and GCP, the only real competitor in terms capabilities is Alibaba. Unfortunately for them, major western enterprises are not so willing to work with a Chinese company.The 3 big cloud providers have somewhat similar offerings. They all offer services like Scalable Virtual Machines, Load balancers, Kubernetes orchestrators, serverless offerings, storage as a service, database as a service, private networks & isolation, big data services, machine learning services, and many more.Competition is fierce. Prices are somewhat similar and when one of the providers comes up with a new popular product, the other providers will adjust and offer similar products.

7. Authentication & AuthorizationIn practically all web applications we have a Sign-in mechanism. When signed in, you are identified in the web application and can: Leave comments, buy products, change personal settings and use whatever functionality the application offers. The ability of your application to verify that you are who you say you are is called Authentication. Whereas Authorization means permissions mechanism for different users.There are a couple of ways you can go with authentication and authorization:

The manual solution – Most web frameworks have support for authentication and authorization (usually with JWT tokens). If not, there’s always a free 3rd party library available. This means you can manually implement basic auth mechanisms.

External Identity Server – There are several open-source and commercial identity providers that implement the OpenID Connect standard. This means that client-server communication will involve a dedicated identity server. The advantages are that these servers have already implemented a bunch of auth features for you. These might include:

Single sign-on and sign-out with different application types

Built-in support for external identity providers (Google, Facebook,…)

Role-based permissions (authorization)

Multi-factor authentication

Compliant with standards like ISO, SOC2, HIPAA,…

Built-in analytics and logs

Your cloud provider probably has an identity server, like AWS Cognito or Azure Active Directory B2C.Notable open-source solutions are: IdentityServer, MITREid Connect, Ipsilon.Notable commercial solutions: Auth0, Okta, OneLoginMake sure to do some price calculations before committing to a commercial solution like Auth0. They tend to get kind of pricey and using an open-source implementation is also a good option.

8. Logging

Server-side logging is pretty important for any type of software, and web applications are not an exception. Whether to implement logging or not is not really a decision – implement logging. The decision is where to send these logs and hot to consume them.Here are some logging targets to consider:

A database. Logging to a database has many advantagesThere’s a myriad of choices for a database to store your logs. We can categorize them as follows:

Error/Performance monitoring tools can also act as logging targets. This is very beneficial since they can display errors alongside log messages that were in the same Http request context. A few choices are elmah.io, AWS Cloudwatch and Azure Application Insights.

Logging to File is still a good logging target. It doesn’t have to be exclusive, you can log both to file and a database for example.

You can retrieve the logs from anywhere, without access to the production machine.

It’s easy to aggregate logs when you have multiple servers.

There’s no chance the logs will be deleted from a local machine.

You can easily search and extract statistics from the logs. This is especially useful if you’re using Structured Logging.

Relational Databases are always an option. They’re easy to set up, can be queried with SQL and most engineers are already familiar with them.

NoSQL Databases like CouchDB. These are perfect for structured logs that are stored in JSON format.

Time-series Databases like InfluxDB are optimized to store time-based events. This means your logging performance will be better and your logs will take less storage space. This is a good choice for intense high-load logging.

Searchable Solutions like Logstash + Elastic Search + Kibana (The "Elastic Stack") provide a full service for your logs. They will store, index, add search capabilities and even visualize your logs data. They work best with structured logging.

Once you have logging in place, I suggest doing a test run on retrieving them or searching them. It’s going to be a shame to wait until you have a bug in production only to find out that you have some kind of problem in your logging.

9. Payment Processor

In many web applications, you are going to be charging your customers. That is, receive credit card, PayPal or Bitcoin for services (well, not Bitcoin). Even though theoretically, you can implement payment processing yourself, it’s not recommended. You’ll have to deal with PCI compliance, security issues, different laws in different countries (like GDPR), frauds, refunds, invoices, exchange rates, and a million other things.There are several big commercial players in this field like PayPal, Stripe, 2checkout, and BlueSnap. Those have a rich API and you can integrate the payment in your own site.Here are some things to consider when choosing a payment processing company:

Security and PCI Compliance – Make sure your chosen payment processor has PCI compliance. Any company that handles credit card has to uphold this standard. All the major companies will be PCI compliant.

Fees – The standard fees in the industry are 2.9% of the transaction + 30 cents. Maybe some companies offer a cheaper rate.

Exchange Rates – If you have international customers, they will pay in their own currency. Check which exchange rates the payment processor charges.

Ease of API – One of the most important considerations is the ease of API. Be sure you will have a lot of interaction with the payment processor. You’ll want hooks on transaction events, modification of invoices, adding discounts or more fees, refunds, and so on. Stripe, in particular, is known for it’s excellent API.

Popularity – Big companies will have more forums and internet discussions. With PayPal or Stripe, that’s not going to be a problem. With big companies, you’ll also find more developers familiar with the framework.

Data portability – If you ever wanted to change payment processors, the current processor needs to allow that option. PayPal, for example, just won’t give you your customer’s credit card data. Whereas Stripe allows to export card data.

Summary

As you can see, web application development in 2020 is not getting any closer to a consensus. If anything, we have more technologies to choose from and as much controversy as ever. I guess this is good news for us developers since we can afford to have specialties and get paid extra for our respective narrow fields.In almost all decisions, all the choices are pretty good. That means you won’t make a terrible mistake by choosing the one over the other. On the other hand, by choosing one you’re usually stuck with them. Suppose you chose to go with AWS and then decided to move to Azure. That’s not going to be that easy.There were a lot more "Must" decisions I wanted to include like Error Monitoring, Application Performance Management tools, ORMs, Mobile support + PWAs, and Localization. Then, there are a bunch of client-side decisions like free or paid UI Controls, bundlers, linters, and so on. This article got a little bigger than I planned, so I’ll leave those to another post.Thanks for reading, Cheers.

Source: https://michaelscodingspot.com/web-application-development/

#web application development

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siliconwebx · 6 years ago

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WordPress Competitors – 19 Popular Alternatives to WordPress

WordPress is popular, and we love it, but it is not the only publishing platform. There are WordPress alternatives that you can use to build your website.

Each of these WordPress competitors are different and have their own pros and cons. You need to understand those differences and limitations when choosing a WordPress alternative.

In this article, we will show you some of the most popular alternatives to WordPress currently available on the market.

1. Wix

Wix is a completely hosted web site builder. It offers a limited free version to use for personal or small business website. Both free and paid plans come with pre-designed templates that users can modify using a drag and drop page builder.

Wix also has eCommerce support with its paid plans which allows site owners to accept online payments using PayPal or Authorize.net. See our article on Wix vs WordPress for a side by side comparison of the two platforms.

If you are already using Wix and want to transfer it to WordPress, then see our article on how to properly switch from Wix to WordPress.

2. Gator by HostGator

Gator is a fully hosted website builder created by HostGator. They are one of the top website hosting companies in the world and know their stuff when it comes to hosting websites.

Gator comes with ready-made website designs that you can customize with a user-friendly drag and drop website builder. Even absolute beginners can quickly familiarize themselves with the app without any learning curve.

Their Starter and Premium plans are suitable for small business websites. You will need their eCommerce plan to add shopping cart and other eCommerce features. Each plan also includes a free domain name and a free SSL certificate.

3. BigCommerce

If you are looking for an eCommerce ready alternative to WordPress, then BigCommerce could be the right platform for you. It is a fully-hosted eCommerce website builder with drag and drop tools and beautiful templates to get you started.

It supports many payment gateways including PayPal, Stripe, Appley Pay, and Pay with Amazon. One notable advantage of using BigCommerce is that they don’t charge you for transactions.

BigCommerce allows you to add unlimited products, view your store performance, and use built-in tools to optimize conversions and boost sales. It also comes with a native WordPress integration, so you can use BigCommerce for your store while WordPress for your main content website.

BigCommerce works with a lot of other third-party apps that you will need to grow your business.

4. Shopify

If you want to build an online store, then Shopify is a great alternative to WordPress. It provides easy to use tools to create your own online shop. You can sell your products and accept payments.

Shopify comes with a simple guided setup that helps you quickly get started with your eCommerce store. It has ready-made templates, apps, and lots of integration options.

Wondering how it compares to WooCommerce (the best WordPress eCommerce plugin)? ]

See our article on Shopify vs WooCommerce for a detailed comparison of the two platforms.

5. 1&1 IONOS Builder

1&1 IONOS Website Builder is another fully-hosted solution with simple drag and drop tools. You don’t have to worry about managing software, installing updates, or making backups. It comes with a guided setup that helps you choose a website design based on your website’s industry or topic.

All designs come with relevant placeholder content that you can then replace with your own. Each plan gives you hosting, a free domain name, and your own branded email addresses.

6. Weebly

Weebly is another completely hosted website builder. It allows you to create your own website using pre-designed templates and their drag-drop page builder.

Weebly has limited eCommerce support, but you can use custom domain names. For a full comparison see our comparison of WordPress vs Weebly.

If you are already using Weebly and want to switch to WordPress, then see our step by step guide on how to properly move from Weebly to WordPress

7. Medium

Medium is a popular publishing platform. It is different than WordPress in many ways. It is not a full content management system. Their focus is on blogging and the community aspect. It aims to connect people with stories and ideas that matter to them.

Medium is designed to provide a clutter-free writing area for publishers and similar reading experience for the readers. It looks beautiful on all devices and screen sizes. Users don’t have to worry about themes or plugins because there are none.

Instead of comments, Medium has in-line notes and responses. You don’t need to worry about the software as Medium is a completely hosted platform. Medium does not allow custom domain names anymore, which means you cannot use your own domain name for your publication.

See our comparison of Medium vs WordPress to see the difference between two platforms.

We also have a step by step tutorial for users who want to move their articles from Medium to a WordPress website.

8. Ghost

Several WordPress users who wanted to focus on blogging felt that WordPress was going in a different direction. This gave birth to Ghost, which is a NodeJS based blogging software.

The difference is that Ghost is entirely focused on blogging and keeping the clutter away. It provides a clean writing and browsing experience for bloggers and readers.

9. Joomla

Joomla is a popular CMS software and an open source WordPress competitor. It is a strong, multi-purpose, and flexible CMS platform with a large community of users and developers.

Joomla allows you to do many of the things that WordPress can do, and then some more. Like WordPress themes and plugins, Joomla comes with extensions and templates. It is already used by millions of users, small businesses, corporations, government and nonprofits all over the world.

Just like WordPress, Joomla has a community support system, extensive documentation, and it runs on most web hosting platforms.

Wondering how it stacks up against WordPress? See our article on WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal for a comparison of these three open source CMS platforms.

We also have a step by step tutorial for users who want to move from Joomla to WordPress.

10. Drupal

Drupal is another very popular open source CMS. Just like WordPress and Joomla, Drupal has a strong user base and developer community. It powers nearly 2.1% of all websites on the internet including The White House, The Economist, State of Georgia, and many more.

Drupal has modules and themes just like WordPress plugins and themes. It shares the same software requirements as WordPress and Joomla, so it can run on pretty much any web host that supports WordPress.

11. Jekyll

Jekyll is a static site generator. It is written in Ruby and requires NodeJS. It is a lot different than WordPress. For starters, it is a static site generator which means it takes your text and generates static HTML pages for your site (no database).

You can use free hosting provided by GitHub Pages with Jekyll. This means that if you are familiar with Markdown, SVN, Git, and command line, then you will be up and running in no-time. In other words, this is made for developers!

12. Tumblr

Tumblr is a popular free blogging platform. Tumblr combines blogging with social and makes it quite fun. It has a strong user base despite the fact that it was acquired by Yahoo in 2013.

Tumblr allows users to choose from free or premium themes. Users can also use custom domain names for their Tumblr blogs. Apart from your blog, you can also create pages. It is a completely hosted solution, so you don’t have to worry about installing or maintaining any software.

Tumblr has several limitations when compared to WordPress. You cannot easily monetize your content or run an eCommerce store. You also have to follow their content guidelines otherwise your website will be suspended.

We have a step by step tutorial on how to move from Tumblr to WordPress for users looking for a Tumblr alternative with more freedoms.

13. CMS Made Simple

CMS Made Simple is another open source CMS with similar features as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. It is written in PHP and uses MySQL for the database.

It also has themes and modules which allow users to easily extend built-in features. It provides on-screen instructions plus there is free community support and extensive documentation to get you started.

14. Squarespace

Squarespace is a paid site builder that can be used as a WordPress alternative. It is extremely easy to use and a completely hosted solution.

Just like Wix and Weebly, Squarespace also offers ready-to-use templates that you can customize. There are no plugins or additional modules to install. You can only use the features provided by Squarespace. See our comparison of Squarespace vs WordPress.

Due to its limitations, many Squarespace users eventually move to WordPress. For those users, we have a step by step guide on how to move from Squarespace to WordPress.

15. Textpattern

Textpattern is another open source content management system. It shares the same server requirements as WordPress. It is a much simpler and straight forward CMS with a limited following.

It comes with a built-in user log for statistics and a native commenting system. It uses Textile to convert plain text into HTML.

16. Expression Engine

Expression Engine is a PHP+MySQL based paid CMS. There is a basic free version with very limited features available for download. Unlike other open source CMS in our list, Expression Engine requires a license fee and most additional features are available as paid addons.

17. Google Sites

Google Sites is an easy and simple way to build small websites. It is extremely easy to use, free to host, and you can even use your own custom domain for your site.

It cannot be compared with CMS software in our list, but it can be compared with services like Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace.

18. Statamic

Statamic is a paid, and flat file CMS software. Unlike other CMS software in our list, Statamic does not store your site’s data in a database. Instead it uses PHP, YAML and Markdown to generate pages.

19. Blogger

Last but not least, Blogger is still alive. It is a free blog service by Google. It has most of the features you would need for blogging. A commenting system, built-in social capabilities, easy to use, templates, and the option to use your own domain name.

We have written a full comparison between Blogger vs WordPress (Pros and Cons). If you are using Blogger and want to switch to WordPress, then follow this guide.

We hope this article provided you a chance to look at some popular WordPress alternatives. While looking at these alternatives, you may want to take a look at our complete WordPress review and top reasons why you should use WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post WordPress Competitors – 19 Popular Alternatives to WordPress appeared first on WPBeginner.

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sheilalmartinia · 6 years ago

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WordPress Competitors – 19 Popular Alternatives to WordPress

WordPress is popular, and we love it, but it is not the only publishing platform. There are WordPress alternatives that you can use to build your website.

Each of these WordPress competitors are different and have their own pros and cons. You need to understand those differences and limitations when choosing a WordPress alternative.

In this article, we will show you some of the most popular alternatives to WordPress currently available on the market.

1. Wix

If you are already using Wix and want to transfer it to WordPress, then see our article on how to properly switch from Wix to WordPress.

2. Gator by HostGator

Gator is a fully hosted website builder created by HostGator. They are one of the top website hosting companies in the world and know their stuff when it comes to hosting websites.

3. BigCommerce

It supports many payment gateways including PayPal, Stripe, Appley Pay, and Pay with Amazon. One notable advantage of using BigCommerce is that they don’t charge you for transactions.

BigCommerce works with a lot of other third-party apps that you will need to grow your business.

4. Shopify

If you want to build an online store, then Shopify is a great alternative to WordPress. It provides easy to use tools to create your own online shop. You can sell your products and accept payments.

Shopify comes with a simple guided setup that helps you quickly get started with your eCommerce store. It has ready-made templates, apps, and lots of integration options.

Wondering how it compares to WooCommerce (the best WordPress eCommerce plugin)? ]

See our article on Shopify vs WooCommerce for a detailed comparison of the two platforms.

5. 1&1 IONOS Builder

All designs come with relevant placeholder content that you can then replace with your own. Each plan gives you hosting, a free domain name, and your own branded email addresses.

6. Weebly

Weebly is another completely hosted website builder. It allows you to create your own website using pre-designed templates and their drag-drop page builder.

Weebly has limited eCommerce support, but you can use custom domain names. For a full comparison see our comparison of WordPress vs Weebly.

If you are already using Weebly and want to switch to WordPress, then see our step by step guide on how to properly move from Weebly to WordPress

7. Medium

See our comparison of Medium vs WordPress to see the difference between two platforms.

We also have a step by step tutorial for users who want to move their articles from Medium to a WordPress website.

8. Ghost

Several WordPress users who wanted to focus on blogging felt that WordPress was going in a different direction. This gave birth to Ghost, which is a NodeJS based blogging software.

The difference is that Ghost is entirely focused on blogging and keeping the clutter away. It provides a clean writing and browsing experience for bloggers and readers.

9. Joomla

Joomla is a popular CMS software and an open source WordPress competitor. It is a strong, multi-purpose, and flexible CMS platform with a large community of users and developers.

Just like WordPress, Joomla has a community support system, extensive documentation, and it runs on most web hosting platforms.

Wondering how it stacks up against WordPress? See our article on WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal for a comparison of these three open source CMS platforms.

We also have a step by step tutorial for users who want to move from Joomla to WordPress.

10. Drupal

11. Jekyll

12. Tumblr

Tumblr is a popular free blogging platform. Tumblr combines blogging with social and makes it quite fun. It has a strong user base despite the fact that it was acquired by Yahoo in 2013.

We have a step by step tutorial on how to move from Tumblr to WordPress for users looking for a Tumblr alternative with more freedoms.

13. CMS Made Simple

CMS Made Simple is another open source CMS with similar features as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. It is written in PHP and uses MySQL for the database.

14. Squarespace

Squarespace is a paid site builder that can be used as a WordPress alternative. It is extremely easy to use and a completely hosted solution.

Due to its limitations, many Squarespace users eventually move to WordPress. For those users, we have a step by step guide on how to move from Squarespace to WordPress.

15. Textpattern

Textpattern is another open source content management system. It shares the same server requirements as WordPress. It is a much simpler and straight forward CMS with a limited following.

It comes with a built-in user log for statistics and a native commenting system. It uses Textile to convert plain text into HTML.

16. Expression Engine

17. Google Sites

Google Sites is an easy and simple way to build small websites. It is extremely easy to use, free to host, and you can even use your own custom domain for your site.

It cannot be compared with CMS software in our list, but it can be compared with services like Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace.

18. Statamic

19. Blogger

We have written a full comparison between Blogger vs WordPress (Pros and Cons). If you are using Blogger and want to switch to WordPress, then follow this guide.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post WordPress Competitors – 19 Popular Alternatives to WordPress appeared first on WPBeginner.

from WPBeginner https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/wordpress-competitors-23-popular-alternatives-to-wordpress/

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