Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Craft CMS VS MainWP

Compare Craft CMS VS MainWP and see what are their differences

Craft CMS logo Craft CMS

Content management system built on Yii PHP Framework

MainWP logo MainWP

A Free, Open-source, & Self-hosted one-stop solution to manage Unlimited WordPress websites from a single dashboard. MainWP is the only management plugin with 2000+ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ reviews on WP.org
  • Craft CMS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-22
  • MainWP Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-02

MainWP is a suite of open-source self-hosted plugins & extensions for users that have multiple WordPress sites and want to control them from one central location. This includes sites on different hosts or servers.

Once you have connected your sites (called Child Sites) to your Dashboard, you can do almost anything from your MainWP Dashboard that you would be able to do from your Child sites wp-admin.

Combined with the MainWP extensions, here's a glimpse of what you can do to manage hundreds of WordPress websites effortlessly:

💰 Free Forever

🏷 White Label

♾️ Connect Unlimited Websites

👥 Organize Sites in Groups

🕒 Uptime & Site Health Monitoring

🚩 Lighthouse

🔄 Effortless Bulk Updates

🚧 Staging, Clone

📝 Client Reports

🔒 Full Privacy, Self-hosted

🔗 Security & Backup Integrations

😌 Bulk Content Management (Draft, Publish, Edit, Trash)

💬 Comments

🛠 Maintenance

🛡 Security

📈 SEO, Traffic, etc. Analytics

🚀 Rocket

And a lot more 👉 https://mainwp.com/mainwp-extensions/

The MainWP plugin is 100% FREE, forever! However, MainWP Pro offers a wide range of 30+ premium Extensions at a single price. The extensions aren't required, but they extend the functionality to improve your workflows.

During the subscription, you'll get Priority Support, Important security & performance updates, and access to all new extensions.

  • Monthly: $29/mon

  • Yearly: $199/year

  • Lifetime: $499 (One-time)

MainWP

Website
mainwp.com
$ Details
freemium $29.0 / Monthly (32+ Premium Extensions & Priority Support)
Platforms
Browser Web Wordpress WooCommerce
Release Date
2014 January

Craft CMS features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

MainWP features and specs

  • Monitoring: Yes
  • Backups: Yes
  • Staging: Yes
  • Google Analytics: Yes
  • Core Web Vitals: Yes
  • Client Reporting: Yes
  • SEO: Yes
  • White label: Yes
  • WordPress plugin: Yes

Craft CMS videos

What is Craft CMS 3?

More videos:

  • Review - A Tour of the Craft CMS

MainWP videos

How to Manage Multiple Websites with ManageWP on Wordpress (MainWP Alternative)

More videos:

  • Review - Manage and control all your WordPress sites with MainWP
  • Review - Using MainWP for Client Website Maintenance (a biased review)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Craft CMS and MainWP)
CMS
100 100%
0% 0
Tool
0 0%
100% 100
Blogging
100 100%
0% 0
Wordpress
0 0%
100% 100

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing Craft CMS and MainWP.

What makes your product unique?

MainWP's answer:

It's Open Source, Self-hosted, and privacy-focused WordPress plugin.

How would you describe your primary audience?

MainWP's answer:

Digital Agencies, Freelancers, Developers, in fact, everyone who has multiple WordPress websites.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

MainWP's answer:

It's Privacy-Focused and affordable—single pricing to get everything.

Who are some of the biggest customers of your product?

MainWP's answer:

Can't disclose that, however, as per our public stats on wp .org, 10k+ users are managing over 600,000 WordPress sites which makes 60 sites on average.

User comments

Share your experience with using Craft CMS and MainWP. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Craft CMS and MainWP

Craft CMS Reviews

Top 10 Web Content Management Systems
If you are not satisfied with non of these options, I encourage you to check out Craft CMS. An open-source powered all-in-one CMS, with highly active community for your needs. Cloudzy’s Craft CMS hosting, is a go to solution for all web admins and content publishers who are willing to manage their website with Craft CMS.
Source: cloudzy.com
34 Headless CMS That Should Be On Your Radar
Craft CMS features custom fields, drag-and-drop layout management, multi-site management, localization, asset management, live content previews, and a built-in image editor. Each user can also attain their own customizable dashboard.
Source: www.cmswire.com
9 Reasons I Think Craft is the Best CMS on the Market Today
Craft CMS is simple, minimalistic, agile and has every capability a modern CMS framework needs. Over the past ten years we have worked with every CMS you could think of (Wordpress, Drupal, Rails+ActiveAdmin, Ghost, Weebly, DjangoCMS, Jekyll, Joomla, Tumblr, Squarespace, Expression Engine, Statamic, Blogger)… here are the reasons why we’ve landed firmly with Craft as our №1...
Source: hackernoon.com

MainWP Reviews

We have no reviews of MainWP yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Craft CMS should be more popular than MainWP. It has been mentiond 31 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Craft CMS mentions (31)

  • Different flavors of content management
    The most typical approach is having a CMS admin panel sit somewhere on the server; everyone with an account uses this. This is a very convenient approach, especially when working with a team. This way, many people can work on different articles simultaneously without worrying about potential conflicts or overwriting stuff. The only con is related to security - everyone can try to get inside, and if you forget to... - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Go with PHP
    PHP has a lot of top tier CMSes. IMHO bunch of them are even better than Statamic. Craft CMS (https://craftcms.com/) is a lot more mature database based CMS. Kirby (https://getkirby.com/) is better at flat-file and has a lot better admin interface. Twill (https://twillcms.com/) is better integrated in Laravel and is fully open-source. Statamic mostly feels like it's sitting besides Laravel and they call themselves... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Stack to build and deploy a fully functional personal blog?
    You're basically looking for any CMS that supports headless mode. E.g. Strapi (https://strapi.io/, NodeJS based), CraftCMS (https://craftcms.com/, PHP based) or countless others. Source: about 1 year ago
  • A mate of mine built a cool little Tottenham Database showing the history of spurs.
    It's built on Craft CMS. Makes the relationships between elements (a match and a player, for example) super easy. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Creating a CMS with React, what should I look at?
    Is there a reason you aren’t using an existing CMS? There’s a lot that provide all the UI functionality you are talking about and then expose it via a API to be consumed in your front end. https://craftcms.com is one option I’ve had good success with. Source: over 1 year ago
View more

MainWP mentions (6)

  • Does WP-CLI have a command to detect out-of-date plugins?
    I've inherited about 40+ of wordpress sites and I need to produce a report on any plugins that are no longer maintained. I know that MainWP can do this but I would like to be able to run a search through the command line so that I can export into a spreadsheet. I need a centralized report that I can pass around other people in order to make larger decisions. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Website Developer Mentor - side job
    Each site is connected to MainWP. This allows us to monitor and patch all sites from a central place. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Nextcloud checking wordpress sites for updates?
    Currently I use mainwp.com from one WP site, but I thought it would be kinda neat to just see it on my daily Nextcloud homepage. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Run many WordPress websites, infrastructure issue
    Then get https://mainwp.com/ or sth similar to keep your sites up to date. Source: over 2 years ago
  • How to properly update a custom theme?
    Are you familiar with mainwp.com or EDD Software Licensing plugin? Not sure if I'm correctly understanding what you're asking, but those are the two I know of that devs use to manage and update themes & plugins on client sites. Source: about 3 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Craft CMS and MainWP, you can also consider the following products

WordPress - WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

ManageWP - ManageWP is a service for bloggers, site owners and web based companies helping them manage multiple WordPress sites from one dashboard.

Drupal - Drupal - the leading open-source CMS for ambitious digital experiences that reach your audience across multiple channels. Because we all have different needs, Drupal allows you to create a unique space in a world of cookie-cutter solutions.

InfiniteWP - Manage unlimited https://alternativeto.net/software/wordpress/ sites from a central admin panel.

Statamic - Build better, easier to manage websites. Enjoy radical efficiency. It's everything you never knew you always wanted in a CMS.

Project Panorama - Project Panorama is an elegant and reliable WordPress manager plugin that comes with exciting features and tools that will allow managing your multiple WordPress sites with ease.