TYPO3 Vs. WordPress: Choose The Best CMS For Business

Are you eager to join the global trend and have your website flashing conspicuously among millions of other? Not sure? How about building your company presence, increasing revenue, ramping up your sales, developing your brand identity? Sounds great, isn’t it? Just take the first step and make the right choice of your future website basis, that is your future content management system. The question arises, which content management system suits to your needs and wishes best of all?

Following Google Trends, we’ll weigh up characteristics of WordPress that has already occupied a prominent place among other CMS platforms against TYPO3 that is currently gaining ground:

Installation

Both website building tools are free and easy to install, the installation time takes about 5-10 min, both can be installed by an amateur. Though, one installation of TYPO3 opens up an opportunity to host several websites/domains.

Usability

WordPress has already earned a worldwide recognition as CMS with high usability. Since this CMS working field focuses mainly on uncomplicated small websites, business web pages, and personal or corporate blogs, it stands to reason why it is used by more than 40% of websites. TYPO3 market share so far doesn’t exceed 2%. In contrast to WordPress, TYPO3 is highly scalable and flexible therefore a great fit for large websites, advanced portals with all kinds of content and many pages.

Technical Proficiency

TYPO3 is quite difficult to learn while limited technical expertise is required to customize WordPress. Furthermore, WYSIWYG editor is a life-saver for those who lack skills in HTML-marking and other languages. Though I’d say, it is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, TYPO3 has a steep learning curve, on the other hand, it is worth the effort.

Responsive Layout

WordPress is highly customizable with numerous extensions but it is ‘Theme’ based: the user is bound to choose from a variety of offers but individual adjustments are rather limited. WordPress Themes are functionally linked. Not every extension works in each ‘Theme’, certain features are core-dependant, limited to the layout choices. By contrast, TYPO3 templates (layout grids) are largely core-independent. With more than 6,000 freely available extensions, TYPO3 provides almost unlimited possibilities with more than 6000 extensions that are available for free from the TYPO3 Extension Repository (TER).

Layout Structure

Tree-like pages structure TYPO3 offers is clearly visible with pages resembling folders of a file system that can be copied, moved, sorted by drag and drop. WordPress lists all pages one under the other and once the list starts extending only the first few pages remain visible. With WordPress, it is all too easy to lose the overview when several plugins are installed.

User-Friendliness

TYPO3 offers a comprehensive management for front-end to back-end users, with multiple identifiable administrator and non-administrator users and very subtle differences in access permissions. Such option is not available for WordPress. Furthermore, with the click of one button you can return to previous versions, even more, all complex layout or structural changes can be made on the fly.

System requirements

Since TYPO3 is a professional and robust tool with a rich variety of options and features, it requires advanced server parameters and powerful system resources.

Security

To maintain the best functionality and ensure security, it’s advised to upgrade WordPress versions regularly. TYPO3 has already all required features built in. Security Bulletins get information about possible vulnerabilities in TYPO3 core and extensions.

We can extend this list further and further but, as some say, comparing content management systems or open source CMS is like comparing cars. Thinking in terms of numbers, Bentley cars will never beat Opel because they simply aim for different purposes. The same with viable web solution, consider carefully your expectations before going ahead with either CMS. Or you can always engage professionals to get the most of your future website.

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