When it comes to creating a website, there are a plethora of options available for individuals and businesses alike. Two popular choices are Bubble.io and Wordpress. Both platforms offer unique features and benefits, but it can be difficult to determine which one is best suited for a specific project. Many concern themselves with details such as security of their projects, whether they’re locked into that specific platform, the cost and opportunity cost of using each platform and most importantly, the scalability of their projects hosted in each platform. All of these concerns are valid and we will take a closer look at both Bubble.io and Wordpress, examining their key features, ease of use, and pricing options to help you make an informed decision inside this article.
This article shouldn’t be the end of your research but a big piece of it. At the end of the day, each project is different and each developer is able to accept different risks than others. Make your decision based on the facts of your projects and your risk tolerance levels.
What is Bubble?
Bubble is a visual web development platform that allows users to create web applications without writing code. It's a cloud-based platform that provides a drag-and-drop interface, and users can create, design and develop web applications using a set of pre-built elements (like buttons, text fields, groups, input fields and databases) and workflows. Bubble.io also allows users to connect their web apps to external APIs, and also manage and store data within the platform.
Bubble is particularly well-suited for creating web applications, as it offers a wide range of tools and features for creating dynamic, interactive experiences. It's also a cost-effective solution for building web applications, as it eliminates the need for hiring a developer and can help to speed up the development process.
What is Wordpress?
WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) that is used to build and manage websites. It is written in the PHP programming language and uses a MySQL database to store website content. WordPress is a popular choice for building websites because it is easy to use, flexible, and customizable. It is also free to use, and its source code can be modified and distributed by anyone.
With WordPress, users can easily create and manage pages, posts, and other types of content. It also has a large library of themes and plugins that can be used to customize the look and functionality of a website. Additionally, WordPress has strong SEO capabilities, allowing for easy optimization of website content for search engines.
Bubble.io vs Wordpress
Both of these softwares have their own use case and will provide certain advantages the other won’t. It’s important to highlight, they’re both the leading solutions for their own categories, open source software for Wordpress and no code tool for Bubble. While there might be some similarities, I would like to highlight both of their advantages before jumping into a head to head comparison.
Bubble Advantages
Bubble.io has several key advantages when compared to Wordpress:
No coding required
Bubble.io is a visual programming tool that allows users to build websites and web applications without the need for coding. This makes it a great option for non-technical users or those without coding experience. In order to build your site, you use Bubble’s components to make it happen. For example, to build the UI/UX, you will use their drag and drop builder, the logic / functionality is built using the workflows and the database is integrated making it easy to save and reference data.
Drag-and-drop interface
As mentioned before, in order to build your site’s design and layout you will use the drag-and-drop system Bubble provides. This is a great advantage over Wordpress as you don’t need to write code in order to build your design or make changes to your current one. The best way I can explain it is that in a way is like using Canva, you select the element you want in your design, stylize it and done.
Of course there’s some learning you need to do in order to change the design or build new designs and layouts but it’s not something that will take you months or years to learn or master. In fact, you can probably learn it in a few days or weeks.
Built-in database
This is a major advantage for Bubble over Wordpress, Bubble comes with a built-in database, making it easy to store and manage data for your website or application. It’s not that Wordpress doesn’t come with an integrated database, because it does come with a MySQL database, but the advantage here is how easy it is to build additional fields, data types and access the data.
As a non developer, it’s hard to understand how the data is stored in your Wordpress site. You know the data is there, somewhere, but you might not know how to access it other than what data is displayed on your site or dashboard backend. If you’re not a developer and need to add new data types or additional fields to save extra information? Good luck with that one. You would need to learn how to manage and use a MySQL database to get it done.
Advanced functionality
Another great capability in Bubble is the ability to create advanced functionality such as form validation, e-commerce integration, and the ability to create customized workflows with just a few clicks. You can create anything, from simple logic to complex workflows that involve data and animations. When it comes to workflows, this is the real magic behind every website, SaaS application and any other application out there. With Bubble, you can build it using your mouse rather than having to write PHP code as you would have to do in Wordpress.
Cost-effective
Bubble.io is a cost-effective solution for building websites and web applications, with pricing plans that are generally lower than those of Wordpress when compared features by features. While at first glance Bubble costs $29 per month, which is higher than most hosting plans out there, take in consideration what you get in return. By using Bubble, you don’t need to worry about backup plugins, neither security ones or costly SEO plugins. Everything you need in that regards comes with the hosting you pay.
No need to either hire developers or beg your theme developer to add the features you need
This one comes with a caveat, you will need to learn how to develop in Bubble but I promise, it won’t take long. How many times have you asked your theme developer to create features you need with no avail? How many times have you wished you knew how to code so you can develop those features? How many ideas have you had that couldn’t develop because you couldn’t find a theme with the functionality you need? I bet the answer to most of those questions is a lot of times. I know because that was me before.
With Bubble, you can use themes (in Bubble they’re called templates), just like the ones we create and sell, or you can start from scratch. The advantage of Bubble is that you can take a template, maybe even our own Directory Labs, enjoy the features that had been created and extend it’s functionality without begging anyone to do it for you. You can do it yourself.
Wordpress Advantages
Not everything is doom and gloom for WordPress. This software has several key advantages when compared to Bubble.io given it’s been around for a few decades longer. Wordpress definite have it’s place in the software and web development world, especially when it comes to launching blogs and the likes.
Widely adopted
WordPress is one of the most widely adopted website building platforms in the world, and has a large community of users and developers, which makes it easy to find support and resources. There are tens of thousands of YouTube tutorials for Wordpress as well as as many blog posts. This CMS is used by many giants such as Facebook and the White House among others.
Large library of themes and plugins
WordPress has a large library of themes and plugins, which makes it easy to customize the look and functionality of a website. There are a plethora of free and paid plugins that allow you to build most sites you might need, including e-commerce websites and business directories.
SEO friendly
WordPress has been built with SEO in mind, making it easy to optimize a website for search engines, and also provides a lot of useful SEO plugin. If you’re willing to pay, there are also many plugins dedicated to improve your site’s SEO such as RankMath and Yoast SEO.
Scalability
WordPress is a highly scalable platform, which means it can handle a large amount of traffic and can be easily expanded as the needs of a website or business grow. Your main limitation for scalability is your hosting plan, as long as it supports it, you’re good to go.
Strong security
WordPress, I’m not talking here about themes or plugins but the CMS itself, has a strong security track record, and is constantly updated to address any vulnerabilities that may arise. The dev team and the community has done a great job at patching security concerns and bugs in the CMS itself.
Large community
WordPress has a large and active community of developers and users, which means that there is a wealth of knowledge and resources available to help with troubleshooting and customizing a website. Like mentioned before, there are many videos, articles and forum answers to help you figure out the issue you need to solve.
Cost-effective
WordPress is a cost-effective solution for building websites and web applications. Since the CMS is free and open-source, all you have to worry about is paid hosting, custom domain and paid themes and plugins. Depending on your use case and your willingness of using free plugins versus paid plugins, this can be considerably cheaper.
Is My Project Locked In?
Now that we know both of these software advantages, I would like to discuss the elephant in the room, am I locked into using Bubble if I build in it? The short answer is yes, you’re locked into Bubble as you can’t export your code. But, before you zoom out and move on, let me tell you, you’re also locked into Wordpress if you decide to build using that CMS.
Now that I probably got your attention, let’s talk through this. Have you ever developed a site using a theme that got abandoned?, basically no updates or security patches for months or years. What about plugins that became a liability because of the same issues? Or, let’s talk about those opportunities you had where you wanted to have a mobile app just to find out you couldn’t do it because your theme didn’t support it? Have you or have you heard of someone who’s hosting company went down, taking with it your or their site?
While WordPress is open-source software, it still has some lock-in. WordPress websites are heavily dependent on themes and plugins, which means that if a user wants to switch to a new theme or plugin, they may have to rebuild some or all of their website, as the code is not always compatible. Additionally, WordPress can be difficult to move to a different hosting provider or platform, as the website's data and codebase are closely tied to the WordPress CMS.
One way or another we’re locked into the platform we decide to use to build our projects. The good news is that you own the most valuable asset of your site or platform when you use Bubble, the data inside your database. Bubble has made it extremely simple to export this data into JSON or CSV files so you can use it in projects built in other CMSs.
