Zaeem Javed
"Best technology is the one which gets your job done! Efficiently!"
WordPress has been a long-time king of the no-code space for websites but now there’s a new tool on the horizon that promises a much more intuitive, drag & drop & faster way to build websites or web apps. We will be discussing both of their pros & cons.
Bubble or WordPress? Which is the best technology? These are the kind of questions I keep hearing from my clients and colleagues but I always tell them to not go for what looks cool & I give them one answer that the technology which best suits your technical & business needs is the one you should go for.
WordPress is essentially a free & open source software that then requires a web server to run on. So to use WordPress, you would have to buy web hosting. While in bubble’s case, you get software + hosting in the same package. Bubble handles server-side things for you.
WordPress has been around here for a long time now & since its inception in 2003, it has evolved from a basic blogging CMS to a complete website generator & an e-commerce platform. However, bubble was built for only single-page web applications (SPAs) in 2012 but now after a decade, it’s also now being used to create web-wrapped mobile apps.
WordPress is best if you want to create static marketing sites for your company to convey some message or if you want to create a library or directory website. WordPress is currently powering 37% of all websites existing on the huge internet.
Bubble is best for building “complete” web apps that are highly dynamic & require a lot of custom building including APIs & external DBs but you don’t want to spend your time on writing codes for a long time. Bubble is currently the best alternative to creating complete web apps.
So if your project just requires a simple static website with some pages inside & a little dynamic stuff, like a pre-made blog page to then put dynamic content on, WordPress is the best option you can choose. However, if you want to make an app that will have multiple services which users can use & each service has its own custom flow with many conditions on when to do what task & requires API calls & connecting to external DBs etc, then you should consider bubble as a no-code solution. You should learn more about choosing the right technology for your project here.
Bubble
WordPressTechnology FoundationSoftware + ServerSoftware OnlyBest For ProjectsHighly Customised & Dynamic Web AppsStatic Marketing Websites or for Projects requiring SEO like EcommerceUI BuilderBubble’s own UI builderElementor or any otherPricingStarts from $25FreeAPIsEasy No Code SetupRequires CodingExternal DBsEasy No Code SetupRequires CodingCustom CodingEasy with pluginsEasy with pluginsPlugin EcosystemMediumHugeSEONot Good due to SPABest StructureBackend WorkflowsEasy No Code SetupRequires Coding
WordPress does not have a native UI builder but it has many 3rd party UI builders like Elementor which are super easy to learn, powerful & mostly free but some features may be paid for as well. Elementor is the most widely used UI builder for websites & using it for many sites, I can easily say it never disappoints you & you can create literally any web design with it that you are provided with.
Bubble has its native UI builder which cannot be replaced by a plugin. Recently, bubble launched a new responsive engine based on flex box from CSS while the older fixed/absolute engine is now depreciated. I have personally built mobile apps with many UI screens with this new responsive engine along with dashboards for big screens & I can say that it never lets you down & has all the features you would need to create a pixel-perfect responsive web page.
WordPress has a huge number of plugins available for almost any type of use case that you can imagine. I have developed many websites with WordPress & can confirm that you just have to think about a use case & WordPress would almost always have a plugin for that 🙂
Bubble’s plugin ecosystem is not rich to WordPress level but it still has a large number of plugins for many use cases already. Plugins are already increasing at a rapid pace & a lot of different private agencies & users are developing them now.
WordPress’s database is mostly efficient & you hardly have to ever go to PhpMyAdmin to access core DB because WordPress & plugins almost always create these tables & fields for you & you just have to use them accordingly. However, if you want to create DB tables on your own, you might have to use 3rd party plugins like Pods or write SQL queries in custom PHP code.
However, Bubble gives you complete control over what tables & fields you would like to have in your app & how every table will have relationships with each other. You can use their custom Database builder to make tables & relations easily & intuitively.
On WordPress, you have 2 ways by which you can call APIs. The first one is WordPress’s own API hook with coding & the other one uses a 3rd party no-code solution to APIs in WordPress which you can check here. While you can call these APIs & get the data but to actually transfer this data to a required destination such as a page requires a lot more knowledge of the WordPress ecosystem & how it works.
For Bubble, if you have ever used Postman, you would find bubble’s API Connector to be quite similar to it. You can install the API Connector by going into the plugins tab. Accessing its response & then displaying its response on a page is super easy.
WordPress has the best structure optimised for SEO & has a clearly structured hierarchy for pages following a top to down approach. WordPress also has plugins like RankMathSEO or YoastSEO which make the SEO much more powerful for WordPress websites.
For Bubble, SEO drops significantly down since search engines cannot differentiate between its different pages since its single page application (SPA) in nature. Also, most bubble applications hardly follow the recommended structure for SEO.
Adding custom code to WordPress just requires a plugin but you can also go inside your hosting server and make changes to files there as well while using FTP. You can always add custom HTML, CSS, JS & PHP to WordPress & customise it however you want if you know how to code.
On Bubble, if you want to add custom HTML, CSS, or any script tags, you can easily add that from bubble page’s property editor or by going into the SEO sub-tab inside the settings tab. You can also run JS in workflows by using plugins like Toolbox. However, adding backend code or language or changing some core functionality of bubble cannot be done but you would need to do it at all.
If for whatever reason WordPress decides to shut down, your website will not at all be affected because it’s open source software & you already have installed it on your server. If you are not able to migrate, you can go & develop the required changes in WordPress’s code since it’s open-source nature.
If Bubble closes for any reason, they have already promised that they will make the code of bubble open source so we would still be able to use bubble while making changes to its core code according to our needs. So we don’t need to worry about doomsday as well.
Use WordPress if you want good SEO or your project only requires some cool web pages to be live with maybe some dynamic content as well. Use Bubble, if you want to make highly customised apps like social media platforms, sale dashboards, or any wrapped mobile apps.
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