Filament vs WordPress

When do you choose Filament and when do you choose WordPress? Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. Both systems may be good to use to have your website or webshop made. Here we would like to explain the biggest differences and in which situation we would choose Filament or WordPress.

Different use cases Filament and WordPress

There are many differences between WordPress and Filament. Without going into too much technical detail, it is useful to look at the different use cases between the two systems. Well-known use cases of WordPress for example:

• You have a blog or website where you will mainly manage content.
• You want to be able to quickly add functionality to your website yourself without needing a web developer.
• You want a simple one quickly have a webshop made in for example WooCommerce.

For Filament the use cases are often different:

• You need a website with an environment where your users have an account and can do all kinds of things.
• Your website sometimes requires complex logic, for example because you sell subscriptions or need to be able to process bookings.
• You are looking for a system that allows you to easily keep the back-end and the front-end separate, for example so that you can headless website can set up.

Both WordPress and Filament are particularly suitable for content websites to make. In terms of user-friendliness, we prefer Filament ourselves. That is because with Filament you only add the fields in the CMS that you actually use. The bells and whistles that you get by default in WordPress sometimes make management confusing. Filament has a sleek and clear design in the back with clear fields. So you always know exactly which content belongs where.

In terms of user-friendliness, we prefer Filament. That's because with Filament you only add the fields in the CMS that you actually use. 

Advantages of Filament vs WordPress

Both WordPress and Filament are excellent choices to develop a website or webshop. Much depends on your situation, wishes and the use cases you want to support. As a Filament specialist, we see some advantages of Filament versus WordPress. Consider the following:

• Filament runs on Laravel: that is one of the most modern PHP frameworks of the moment. WordPress has been around for a long time and still has technical debt from the past. Laravel is scalable, fast, stable, open source and has a large and growing community.
• Quickly set up a backend with Filament: In Filament you can build the entire back-end of your website in no time. Pages, messages, categories (taxonomies), users and SEO settings are ready in no time. The advantage of this is that it is also completely customized. So no unnecessary bells and whistles that make your website slower and less secure.
• Better code quality and no lock-in: because Filament uses Laravel the structure of the codebase more logically set up according to Laravel standards. This also makes your website more transferable to other developers or other agencies. With WordPress, transferability is often more difficult because there are many ways to set up a WordPress site, which makes the codebase confusing and often unworkable.
• Rapidly develop new features: With Filament you can easily add custom features to your website. It is modular and has an open structure. Connections with other systems and complex features can be added quickly with a stable result.

A selection of the Filament websites we created

Medica

My Environment and Webshop with Laravel Filament

meetings.nl

Large booking website for meetings.nl with Laravel Filament

Is custom Filament more expensive than WordPress?

WordPress has a good reputation as a standard solution due to the availability of plugins. The user can add functionalities without the intervention of a developer. Filament and Laravel are used more for custom solutions. Does that make Filament or Laravel Development then also immediately much more expensive?

Not in our opinion. Although WordPress has the name of a standard solution, there is also a lot of customization involved. Plugins do not always do exactly what you need. Then you have to make adjustments in the plugin, but that is not preferable because then you have to use the plugins can no longer update. And then you still have to implement a custom solution in a WordPress website.

The same goes for content blocks. In both WordPress and Filament, you want to have unique blocks with their own functionalities as a user. These blocks are not standard in the box. So Customization is always needed in WordPress too for creating content blocks.

Adding custom code is sometimes more complicated to implement in WordPress than in Filament. This is because in WordPress you are more tied to the structure of the CMS under the hood. With Filament, that limitation does not existThe application is more from scratch built up so that you have more freedom to add new functionalities.

In practice, we see at our agency that the budgets for WordPress websites and shops do not differ at all from the budgets we make for Filament websites. And in some cases, Filament even more affordable because complex features are easier and faster to add!

The Filament Specialists

At Digital Agency Van Ons we have been working with Filament for a number of years. We know the system inside and out. We know exactly how to realize your project in Filament. Together with your marketers and sales department, we look at how we can optimally use the technology to achieve all objectives.

We are ISO certified and have been among the best Development Agencies according to the EmerceTop100 for some time now. Our customer satisfaction has been measured by FONK Magazine and we recently achieved a 9.2. Our projects regularly win prizes, including several Website of the Year awards.