WordPress is an open-source content management system. Specifically, it's focused on usability and getting users up and running quickly. It's flexible enough to create any website that you want, whether that's a website for a small business or larger enterprise websites.

WordPress does a great job of keeping up with new technology, ensuring that it continues to be as usable as possible for whoever their audience is— and their audience is vast. At the moment, thirty-five percent of internet websites use WordPress for their websites.

Wix is an intuitive drag-and-drop website builder. There is no free plan – pricing starts at $14/month for a basic personal Wix site, and $18/month for entrepreneurs and freelancers. The cost goes up for premium plans. There are plenty of free themes, along with the ability to make limited CSS customizations. Wix offers e-commerce and online store creation, an app market, templates, blogging, and website customization. The ease of use of the editing platform is high, and the learning curve is low, not to mention Wix has customer support.

There is a wider variety of WordPress themes, search engine optimization efforts can be larger and more effective on WordPress for larger WordPress websites, WordPress offers a great deal of flexibility and customization through an enormous variety of free WordPress plugins, in addition to an integrated e-commerce solution called "WooCommerce" that again provides more flexibility than a Wix website.

Although WordPress doesn't require a hosting company or hosting provider, the option is actually desirable for some companies in that you actually own your code and can easily take it elsewhere to any web host at any time.

Both are great platforms for bloggers, with plenty of customization options, a drag-and-drop editor, and can serve as a basic e-commerce platform for e-commerce sites. You can easily add your own domain name (a custom domain) to each with SSL, easily make webpage edits, and tweak HTML and page components. Both are user-friendly, although Wix is easier for beginners. Both have premium themes, but WordPress has a larger variety.

Web design on WordPress can be much more custom, although Wix allows you to create custom interactions and functionality for your project with JavaScript and Wix APIs. You can also integrate with third-party services, connect to internal or external databases, and create many pages from a single dynamic page layout. You can easily add Google Analytics to both platforms, integrate social media, and both make website building quite easy.

It all depends on what you want from your site. Let's say you're a small business that simply wants to have a presence on the internet. There are many tutorials that you could jump into and learn how to get going with a WordPress site quickly. Then, as your site grows, WordPress is flexible enough where it can still be the right choice for more complex needs. The new Gutenberg editor offers easy drag-and-drop functionality.

At that point, you might need to hire a developer or agency to make sure that you're going down the right path. But if you just wanted to learn more about WordPress, they make it very easy to do that. Wordpress.com is an excellent place to start. You're able to visualize how you could set up a site hosted on their website.

You can get much more complex than a simple blogging platform as you go along, with add-ons, advanced features, backend development, contact forms, e-commerce plugins, SEO plugins, SEO tools like Yoast, and other tools to make your own website all you hoped it would be.

Watch our YouTube playlist on WordPress:

WordPress.com and Wordpress.org are different in that Wordpress.org is where you'd actually set up your own site and host it elsewhere. There's a lot more functionality in terms of where you go with Wordpress.org— editing, development, etc. You will most likely want to have your own hosted WordPress site through Wordpress.org for more complex sites.

If you're just looking for a blog, for instance, and don't need that big of a branded presence, Wordpress.com would be great. You can essentially host your blog on their servers for a much lower cost and can set up extremely quickly. This requires less technical know-how, similar to a platform like Squarespace where web hosting is done for you in the cloud.

As previously mentioned, WordPress is used on thirty-five percent of the internet. Many companies using this WordPress tend to be smaller because it is a simple website builder.

Even though we would recommend WordPress for a lot of smaller companies, it can be flexible enough to be the right CMS for larger enterprise companies as well. But if you're a larger B2B company, we would work with you to compare and contrast different CMS options such as Drupal to find the right fit for your site's needs.