October CMS vs Wordpress

October CMS vs Wordpress is a common question from developers considering a migration away from Wordpress onto another platform. To give a balanced and fact based answer rather than one driven by opinion, we will discuss a range of topics on both platforms to help you decide Which Is Best - October CMS or Wordpress.

The Senior Developers of Leader Internet have been building sites for over twelve years with Wordpress, MODx, Joomla and October CMS. We are completely impartial and choose the best CMS based on the job requirements when working with a new client. This means we have seen the internals of both Wordpress and October CMS, built sites with them, know their flaws and been active in both communities.

We compare October CMS and Wordpress based on our experiences, not our preferences.

Contents

• Installation
• Support
• Popularity
• Ease Of Use
• Backend UI
• Customization
• Updates
• Plugins
• Features
• Security
• Conclusion

1) Installation

Both offer an installer wizard but October also has a command line option. Wordpress claims to have a famous 5 minute install but we have never been able to do it in less that 30

Leader Verdict: October CMS

2) Support

Wordpress is a clear leader in support due to the sheer quantity of questions and answers available.

However, it has been around since 2003 so that is expected.

October has much less content on the internet but was only launched in 2014. We can do whatever technical task required on October without having to search for answers on the web. A noteworthy point is that in many of the threads and topics, the October founders will be commenting on them so you are getting the best answers instead of a developers opinion.

Leader Verdict: Wordpress

3) Popularity

According to Wordpress usage statistics, it’s streets ahead with significantly higher adoption. The Wordpress.com homepage states they power 27% of the web, which is an amazing feat.

The October CMS usage statistics show that it’s a long way behind in the popularity stakes and it's unrealistic to expect that it will ever catch up on Wordpress.

Leader Verdict: Wordpress

4) Ease Of Use

October CMS is very simple to use without searching to find what you need. On the backend there are tabs for pages, blog and settings with each one clearly identifying its purpose.

Wordpress is not always easy to operate as plugins can have their settings controlled within the plugin section instead of a general settings area. The default navigation items are also misleading. They insist on splitting menus into it’s own sub section of functionality that have to be configured separate from the rest of the site when all it needs to be is a chunk or include.

Leader Verdict: October CMS

5) Backend UI

October CMS has a slick and clean backend UI. It’s obvious they have spent time on the design as the interaction for backend users is a dream. The best feature is provided by the blog plugin that allows you to see what your post will look like as you are typing. This live preview is not 100% accurate but gives you a good idea of how the content will render on the front end.

Wordpress has a tired looking backend that hasn’t seen much change since it was launched in 2003. Some plugins and backend themes can brighten it up a little bit but it’s obvious that design was an afterthought.

Leader Verdict: October CMS

6) Customization

October is relativity new and has no legacy code so it’s very easy to customize in a manageable way with their plugin system. Using the Builder extension provides a nice GUI to automate the repetitive parts of creating your own plugins and lets you focus on the core business logic of your extension.

Plugins are separate from the October core so they can be installed and removed again without touching the framework code. Each plugin has its own namespace and database table so there are never any namespace collisions or plugins overwriting each other.

Customizing Wordpress on the other hand is a process fraught with error. You regularly have to go into the framework code there are so many versions, it’s almost impossible to create an extension that works across all releases. It doesn’t appear to follow any design pattern and is generally hard to read due to strange variable names and code style.

There are frequent problems with plugins overwriting each other which can cause major issues.

For example, most of the SEO related plugins offer the ability to set meta data like the site title or the meta descriptions for pages. The end result is that you set a meta description in the place where you think it will be read from but it doesn’t work as another plugin is overwriting the value that you changed.

Leader Verdict: October CMS

7) Updates

Both platforms have an auto update feature. October has a smoother process as we haven't had any issues updating the framework and only one or two when updating plugins. October has a wonderful feature where plugins are bound to a project ID and this is used on all environments where a site is running such as local, staging and production. When you add a plugin it is bound to the project ID so all versions of the site will auto update the next time you log in. This means you don’t need to deploy a plugin in multiple places and only have to do it once.

Wordpress auto update is also good but can have problems with permissions on the server, depending on the user. Plugins also have an update feature but this has to be manually approved from within the backend. When a plugin is added it must be pushed to all environments where a site is running.

Leader Verdict: October CMS

8) Plugins

October only has 745 plugins so lacks the depth of functionality available to Wordpress users. The October plugin system is much more cohesive in that extensions can be installed or removed without breaking anything. They can even be extended further if you want to bolt on additional functionality or change the default UI.

Wordpress has so many plugins that websites can essentially be created by users with no technical knowledge. However the quality of many is questionable and there are frequent examples of plugins breaking entire sites or malicious plugins being marketed as safe.

For example, we recently found a carousel plugin with over 20k installs that secretly inserted a backlink to the authors site to boost their SEO. We recommend that you stay away from the free plugins and stick to the paid versions but this is expensive as good ones can be upwards of $100 or operate a freemium model.

Leader Verdict: Wordpress

9) Features

When we talk about features, it is developer specific attributes that we are referring to.

October is out in front in this regard with lots of quality developer tools that go beyond basic website functionality and enable the creation of rich web applications.

Wordpress does little to attract developer attention and has a feature set targeted more towards non technical users such as ‘media management’ and ‘publish with ease’ as you can see on the official Wordpress feature page

Leader Verdict: October CMS

10) Performance

October CMS is built on Laravel so is naturally fast. They also add some nice performance features on top such as asset minification where CSS and JavaScript files can be combined and minified with just a single tag in your CMS templates. The Twig tempting engine generates static html pages on the front end and nothing is faster than flat html so response times are instant. It is possible to gain a 90+ Google PageSpeed score with relative ease.

The Wordpress manual states that:

‘The first and easiest way to improve WordPress performance is plugins’

That tells us all we need to know about Wordpress speed. It is slow and requires plugins to bring it up to a reasonable level, some of which cost over $100.

Leader Verdict: October CMS

11) Security

As October is built on Laravel, the only file that can be accessed directly is index.php in the root. This allows the framework to cut off any suspicious activity before it accesses the internals. Additionally and most importantly, plugins go through an approval process to verify their quality and security as confirmed by October co founder daftspunk in this Security thread.

This means you can be sure anything you add to your project is trustworthy and not opening a back door into your website. We can certify this is true as when submitting our OctoDoc plugin, we had to wait two days for approval to be granted.

Wordpress security is notoriously bad. Any PHP file can be accessed by an outside user in the browser if correct security measures are not taken on the backend. In many respects, Wordpress is a victim of its own success because it’s so popular that lots of people know the structure and can use this to exploit a weak site. Many websites have their login page at /wp-admin and if their username is their email address the attacker just needs to brute force the password to gain entry.

There are even bots set up to crawl the web searching for insecure Wordpress sites that leave their /wp-admin page open. We regularly scan the server logs of one of our Laravel powered sites and find requests for /wp-admin caused by a bot trying to work out if it’s a Wordpress backend.

Leader Verdict: October CMS

October CMS vs Wordpress Conclusion

We have dealt with the key features a CMS should be scored on and how October CMS and Wordpress fare on each one.

The market share of Wordpress means it has a clear advantage in terms of support, plugins and popularity. For many people these are the most important factors when choosing a CMS as their use case is often a simple portfolio site for a small business and in those instances Wordpress is the winner. It has a Google like domination of the CMS market and this is unlikely to ever change.

However for anything bespoke that requires more customization than an off the shelf CMS install, October CMS provides the flexibility to build feature rich websites and applications in a structured and maintainable way. It is simple to install, can be extended easily without touching the core and benefits from the code quality of the Laravel framework. It is very fast, gives you the basics to create a simple website and a secure foundation upon which advanced web products can be built.

In summary, the use cases of Wordpress and October CMS are different and they each perform well for their market segment. Therefore Leader Internet recommends you Build Portfolios with Wordpress. Built Platforms With October CMS.

If you liked this October CMS vs Wordpress review, let us know in the comments below. We reply to all of them. Make sure to check out our October CMS and Drupal comparison also

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