NationBuilder vs. WordPress

If you are managing a nonprofit agency, advocacy group, or political campaign, NationBuilder is likely the best tool available for the job. It has everything you need in one package, excellent support from NationBuilder reps, and plenty of reputable case studies that show its effectiveness. There is also a robust network of capable partners that build custom solutions and provide consulting.

Incentivized

If your business relies heavily on content creation, and particularly on blog posts, then WordPress is really the best option you have. But if you don't have a blog, you only need static pages, or you want to build an eCommerce site, then you might want to explore other alternatives.

Incentivized

• Great platform for managing website, social media, and donations in a single dashboard.
• Some particularly helpful features includes turf maps for walking door to door.
• I really appreciate the included voter files.

• WordPress is incredibly easy to set up and get running with little to no technical knowledge. Most web hosts will do it for you, since it's so easy.
• With thousands of themes available for free and for low cost, WordPress can accommodate any design you can imagine.
• The community behind WordPress is generous, and there are loads of educational opportunities both online and in person to learn and connect with other users.

Incentivized

• NationBuilder lacks the ability to create a message board.
• NationBuilder needs to add threaded comments so you can respond to people who comment on your page.
• NationBuilder needs to make it easier to offer tiered memberships.

Incentivized

• WordPress breaks often so you need to have someone who understands how to troubleshoot, which can take time and money.
• Some plugins are easier to customize than others, for example, some don't require any coding knowledge while others do. This can limit your project if you are not a coder.
• WordPress can be easily hacked, so you also need someone who can ensure your sites are secure.

Incentivized

My rating is based on the knowledge I have of the community that WordPress has had built around it for years now. It's as solid as it comes when you talk about community involvement and expansion. There's no other CMS out there that can match-up with it, hands down.

It's a sophisticated but easy to use piece of software. Many of the content addition pieces are familiar from other pieces of software so there isn't a huge learning curve. And for new areas, there is a lot of info on WordPress.org as well as other WordPress help sites.

Anyone can visit WordPress.org and download a fully functional copy of WordPress free of charge. Additionally, WordPress is offered to users as open-source software, which means that anyone can customize the code to create new applications and make these available to other WordPress users.

Mostly, any performance issues have to do with using too many plugins and these can sometimes slow down the overall performance of your site. It is very tempting to start adding lots of plugins to your WordPress site, however, as there are thousands of great plugins to choose from and so many of them help you do amazing things on your site. If you begin to notice performance issues with your WordPress site (e.g. pages being slow to load), there are ways to optimize the performance of your site, but this requires learning the process. WordPress users can learn how to optimize their WordPress sites by downloading the WPTrainMe WordPress training plugin (WPTrainMe.com) and going through the detailed step-by-step WordPress optimization tutorials.

WordPress itself only has community service so your experience will depend on where you turn. Online, through forums and community boards, support is rudimentary but effective. You can easily turn to your local community and find exceptional individuals who know and use WordPress regularly for more advanced, inexpensive, support. I'm rating this less than 10 because of the lack of any formal support provided by a company.

Varies by the person providing training. High marks as it's incredibly easy to find experienced individuals in your community to provide training on any aspect of WordPress from content marketing, SEO, plugin development, theme design, etc. Less than 10 though as the training is community based and expectations for a session you find may fall short.

It is very easy to find online resources to learn how to do just about anything with WordPress.

WordPress is not a great solution if you have: 1) A larger site with performance / availability requirements. 2) Multiple types of content you want to share - each with its own underlying data structure. 3) Multiple sites you need to manage. For very small sites where these needs are not paramount, WordPress is a decent solution

I'm not sure. I was not involved at this stage of the decision-making process

Incentivized

We have considered and operated within Shopify and Squarespace. Both serve their purpose for niche clients, but we do recommend WordPress as being the superior option. We find that WordPress is easier to use and offers maximum scalability while the others are more challenging to design, code, configure and launch.

Incentivized

WordPress is completely scalable. You can get started immediately with a very simple "out-of-the box" WordPress installation and then add whatever functionality you need as and when you need it, and continue expanding. Often we will create various WordPress sites on the same domain to handle different aspects of our strategy (e.g. one site for the sales pages, product information and/or a marketing blog, another for delivering products securely through a private membership site, and another for running an affiliate program or other application), and then ties all of these sites together using a common theme and links on each of the site's menus. Additionally, WordPress offers a multisite function that allows organizations and institutions to manage networks of sites managed by separate individual site owners, but centrally administered by the parent organization. You can also expand WordPress into a social networking or community site, forums, etc. The same scalability applies to web design. You can start with a simple design and then scale things up to display sites with amazing visual features, including animations and video effects, sliding images and animated product image galleries, elements that appear and fade from visitor browsers, etc. The scaling possibilities of WordPress are truly endless.

• The NationBuilder ecosystem is a well-connected, supportive bunch and it has been great to be a part of that
• Most inquiring clients are already aware of NationBuilder's benefits and know what they want to accomplish. This saves time during the on-boarding process
• NationBuilder's sales team is undereducated about the platform and I have received feedback from clients that they are sharks/difficult to work with. This is a big problem and I have lost business from it

Incentivized

• WordPress helps us reduce website management costs because we can oversee updates in-house.
• WordPress is easy to use, reducing the amount of time we spend on website management.
• The ease of use enables us to offer website management for clients, helping us grow our capabilities/business.