WordPress vs. Enonic XP

Morten Eriksen on April 23, 2019

What are the similarities and differences between the content management systems WordPress and Enonic XP? Get the essentials in this comparison.

WordPress is the largest CMS in the world, with millions of blogs and hundreds of thousands of websites running on the platform. However, despite its large market share WordPress is not so often used by large businesses and organisations.

In your search for a professional alternative to WordPress, you might have come across a variety of brands—including Enonic XP. How does WordPress and Enonic XP compare?

Show, don’t tell: Try our free demo of Enonic XP

Quick WordPress facts

WordPress is a free and open-source CMS based on PHP and MySQL. The WordPress platform is commonly associated with blogging, but it also supports web content types like forums, media galleries, and online stores.

Features include a web template system, plugins architecture, permalink structure, tagging of content, and themes. The latter feature allows users to change the look and functionality of a WordPress website without altering the core code or site content.

Quick Enonic facts

Enonic XP is a free and open-source web application platform based on JavaScript and Elasticsearch. XP can be used to build progressive web applications, complex websites, or web-based APIs. The platform’s embedded CMS contains a visual drag and drop editor, a landing page editor, support for multi-site and multi-language, media and structured content, advanced image editing, responsive user interface, permissions and roles management, revision and version control, and bulk publishing.

Enonic XP uses an application framework for coding server logic with JavaScript, and ships with an integrated content repository—thus eliminating the need for SQL. Furthermore, Enonic XP is a hybrid CMS, which means that developers can create traditional websites and landing pages, while at the same time use XP in headless mode for distributing editorial content to any device or client.

WordPress pros and cons

Powering more than 60 million websites, WordPress is the most popular website management system in the world. Legions of developers and agencies know WordPress inside out, offering readily available support and a vast variety of different themes. The platform is therefore perfectly suitable for bloggers, private initiatives, and small organisations.

The user-friendly nature of WordPress makes the user interface easily understood. Any theme can be customised through sliders, switches, and visual preferences in WordPress—thereby enabling the creation of websites for fairly non-technical people.

This simplicity is a two-sided coin, however. The small core and the emphasis on website development without the need to code can pose significant challenges for medium and big-sized organisations with more complex needs in digital experiences.

If you want to expand functionality beyond the standard WordPress features of posts and pages, you need a more advanced theme and several plugins—and the proper deployment and maintenance of these are best handled by experienced developers. Also, the addition of more and more plugins itself pose a security and performance issue.

Enonic XP pros and cons

Although a small company, Enonic is used by major Norwegian organisations, including Norway Post, the insurance companies Gjensidige, Storebrand, and KLP, the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration, and the UK charity Scope.

In Enonic XP developers build applications and websites using JavaScript. The flexible platform allows fast prototyping of solutions and fast deployment. Also, the apps available through Enonic Market all work independently of each other and don’t create any dependencies, ensuring flexibility in a safe and stable framework.

But Enonic XP may feature a “too clean” user interface, as Mike Johnston of CMS Critic calls out for more help and support options within the dashboard. In the verified user reviews at Gartner.com reviewers miss a migration tool for migrating sites to XP. Another disadvantage of Enonic XP contra WordPress is a smaller user base and fewer third-party integrations.

Remember, Enonic XP is designed for professional development and continuous delivery from the ground up. XP is not meant for non-technical people to set up and maintain—although non-techies can use the embedded CMS without any trouble.

Comparison between WordPress and Enonic XP

	WordPress	Enonic XP
Coding language	PHP	JavaScript
Database requirements	Yes (supports MySQL and MariaDB)	None, embedded NoSQL
License	GPLv2+	GPLv3 with linking exception and commercial license for paying customers
Integrated search	No, third party	Yes, based on Elasticsearch
Headless/decoupled	Yes, with an extra component	Yes, based on GraphQL
Flexible content types	Yes	Yes
WYSIWYG page editor	Yes	Yes
Responsive UI	Yes	Yes
Image editor	Yes	Yes, including focal point
Customizable templates	Yes	Yes
SEO management	Yes, third party	Yes, app from Enonic Market
Version control	Yes	Yes
Video content	Yes, embedding	Yes, embedding
Hosting	Runs anywhere, marketplace, several vendors, most servers and OS	Run anywhere, Enonic Cloud, three tiers (developer, professional, enterprise), GCP Marketplace
Support plans	Third party and vendor	Yes, by vendor
Free support	Forum	Forum, Slack
Community	Yes	Yes
Training	Yes, third party and vendor	Yes, by vendor
Plugins	Yes	Yes, apps from Enonic Market

Example: Publishing a blog post in WordPress

In WordPress you have a dashboard with a menu to the left, which is where you will find “Posts” and the option “Add New.” You can alternatively use the “Quick Draft” feature on the “Home” screen. Once inside the post, you add the title and the content in the appropriate visual editor fields/blocks, before filling out information in the right menu, such as tags, featured image, and excerpt. Previewing and publishing options are in the upper right corner, and the post can be found in the “All Posts” section in the left menu.

Example: Publishing a blog post in Enonic XP

In Enonic XP you navigate through the content tree list to decide where a piece of content will be placed in the hierarchy—before you proceed to create it. When choosing a designated spot for e.g. the content type “blog posts” is prevalent, you’ll automatically get a suggestion to pick a blog post when creating a new content. Once inside the blog post, you can navigate through fields systematically, before saving, previewing, and finally publishing the blog post:

Don’t miss: What makes Enonic your choice?

What CMS should you choose?

As always, what CMS you should choose depends entirely on your use case and the requirements of your organisation. WordPress was originally and primarily still is a blogging tool, and can work perfectly for individuals, small organisations, or for companies where the digital experience isn’t business critical.

WordPress features a lot of themes and plugins, and many developers and agencies know the CMS well. However, the PHP architecture might not be what future-oriented developers are looking for in terms of flexibility, security, and omnichannel readiness. On the other hand, Enonic XP was designed from scratch in 2015 by a team with over a decade of web content management experience, and is a flexible and smart solution for building progressive web apps, complex websites, or APIs—exactly the tools more demanding organisations need for the future.