Free WordPress Alternatives
The best free alternative to WordPress is Drupal, which is also Open Source. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 100 alternatives to WordPress and loads of them is free so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting free alternatives to WordPress are Joomla, Ghost, Blogger and Grav.
WordPress alternatives are mainly Blog Publishing Tools but may also be CMS Tools or Website Builders. Filter by these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of WordPress.- Freemium • Open Source
- Blog Publishing Tool
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Online
- Android
- iPhone
- Android Tablet
- iPad
- Self-Hosted
- PHP
- Cloudron
- Free • Open Source
- CMS Tool
- Blog Publishing Tool
206 alternatives to Drupal- Online
- Self-Hosted
- PHP
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Linux
- Windows
- Apache HTTP Server
- NGINX
- Microsoft IIS
Drupal is a free and open source CMS that has been created “by developers for developers”, and is therefore slightly more complicated to learn than a solution like Wix or WordPress. It's intended for an audience with technical skills, which is why it is perhaps less popular. This drawback can also be an advantage: thanks to the great flexibility of Drupal, it is possible to obtain much more advanced results thanks to more in-depth functionality. And like WordPress, it can also be extended with thousands of themes and modules.
Features
Drupal vs WordPress opinions
Wordpress is a good framework for absolute beginners, Drupal for more advanced users, imo
franKEYextremely easy to get used to and pretty advanced features that can be used in a variety of options,
Drupal is really nice CMS
vladsmarrrchoice of mine! recommend to all
yellowvestFine tuning and tweaking features available to pros.
rishabhistwalIn Drupal you get more plugins than any other CMS provide in this list to customise site .Virgin like many big companies use drupal . Easy to install and customise. Have a big community support.
- Free • Open Source
- CMS Tool
- Blog Publishing Tool
- Website Builder
187 alternatives to Joomla- Self-Hosted
- PHP
Joomla is another free and open source popular CMS. It's a powerful, versatile, and flexible platform with a large community of users and developers. It is known to be more accessible than Drupal, but more complex than WordPress. Like the other two, it can be extended with themes and extensions. Joomla still requires some technical skills and is primarily intended for developers.
Features
Joomla vs WordPress opinions
Joomla is the only CMS that allows you to make a simple website to a complex website with an optimal learning curve.
Joomla is a CMS, Wordpress was more concepted for blogging - even if it's a CMS similar Sw today...
All in one installation with extensions I need improve the security. No problem of compatibility of extensions when I update.
- Free Personal • Open Source
- Blog Publishing Tool
- CMS Tool
264 alternatives to Ghost- Online
- Self-Hosted
- Cloudron
- Node.JS
Launched in 2013, Ghost is a modern blogging platform that you can self-host or pay for a hosted version (a bit like WordPress). But unlike the three CMS mentioned above, it's not based on PHP but on NodeJS, which can be a good thing for JavaScript developers. Ghost has a very sleek interface and offers useful tools like subscriptions, memberships, analytics, and integrations to easily grow your audience. You can also download beautiful themes from their marketplace to speed up the process of launching your website.
Ghost vs WordPress opinions
- Free • Proprietary
- Blog Publishing Tool
185 alternatives to Blogger- Online
- Android
- Chrome OS
- Android Tablet
Yes, the famous Blogger is still alive! Launched in 1999, and bought in 2003 by Google, it's the veteran of this list. It's a free blogging platform that offers most of the features you would need for blogging: a commenting system, built-in social features, ease of use, templates, the ability to use your own domain name… It's more limited than WordPress, but if what you're looking for is a simple solution to publish blog posts, this might be a good fit for you.
Features
Blogger vs WordPress opinions
Add JavaScript in post page easily.
ndlinnThis is really in no way comparable to WordPress
jgemmba9901Good ecosystem, blog builder
- Free • Open Source
- Blog Publishing Tool
- CMS Tool
- Static Site Generator
192 alternatives to Grav- Online
- Self-Hosted
- PHP
- Markdown
- Cloudron
Grav is a powerful and easy to use open source CMS written in PHP and based on the Symfony web application framework. Compared to other content management systems, it is a fast, simple and flexible file-based platform. This means that Grav doesn't use a database like MySQL or MongoDB, but stores all the information in YAML files. This also means that the learning curve is pretty straightforward, there are less security risks, and the websites are usually pretty fast. There's also a marketplace with themes and plugins, but don't expect to see as many as for WordPress, Joomla or Drupal.
Features
Grav vs WordPress opinions
It's not a messy pile of spaghetti code. It uses modern tools like Composer and Twig.
therojamGrav is easy to deploy by just extracting the downloaded archive. It got an terminal client where to install plugins/extensions like an administrative backend or other themes. It has spotless file structure.
The features you want, without the bloat you don't
AlanLeikenThe interface is cleaner and more modern, making for a much more pleasant experience than WordPress. Easier to set up as well.
It is more developer friendly. The project structure is very clean, easy to configure and deploy. Using flat files instead of a SQL database might be limiting for some, but it's perfect for most standard sites like blogs, agency websites and even E-commerce. Twig for templates leads to cleaner code and a better separation of concern (Almost impossible to mix business logic in your templates). I guess the only downside is lack of plugins and templates for now.
Grav does not save things to a database, and does not ship with the same functionality such as having posts with categories.
- Free • Open Source
- Blog Publishing Tool
- Website Builder
- Static Site Generator
117 alternatives to Jekyll- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Self-Hosted
Jekyll is a static site generator (SSG) created in 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, the founder of GitHub. It's coded in Ruby and requires NodeJS. It's very different from WordPress on many points. For starters, it's a static site generator, which means it takes your text and generates static HTML pages for your site (with no database).
Like Grav, it's pretty fast and simple to use, but it requires a bit more technical knowledge as you don't have access to an admin dashboard to manage your website. One advantage, though, is that you can use the free hosting provided by GitHub Pages with Jekyll.
Jekyll vs WordPress opinions
- Free • Open Source
- Static Site Generator
- Website Builder
- Blog Publishing Tool
76 alternatives to Hugo- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Self-Hosted
Hugo is a general-purpose website framework for generating static web pages. Hugo flexibly works with many formats and is ideal for blogs, docs, portfolios and much more.
- Free • Open Source
- Blog Publishing Tool
- CMS Tool
- Social Network
46 alternatives to WriteFreely- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Online
- Self-Hosted
WriteFreely is an open-source, minimalist, federated, self-hosted blogging platform. It was built for and by Write.as and can be used to power a similar community or just a single blog.
- Freemium • Proprietary
- Website Builder
- Online Store Builder
- Prototyping Tool
184 alternatives to Webflow- Online
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
Responsive web design tool, CMS and hosting platform.
- Free • Open Source
- Website Builder
- CMS Tool
106 alternatives to Silex- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Self-Hosted
Silex, is a free and open source website builder in the cloud. Create websites directly in the browser without writing code. And it is suitable for professional designers to produce great websites without constraints. Silex is also known as the HTML5 editor.
Features
Silex vs WordPress opinions
tuva-hayabiIt’s a website builder, a good one in my opinion, but not at all a blog system or CMS.