Every founder building a website eventually has to answer the same question: what should it run on? The honest answer is that "best CMS" doesn't exist — there's only the right fit for how technical your team is, how much the site needs to do, and who's going to be editing it at 11pm on a Tuesday.
WordPress: the default, for a reason
WordPress still powers a huge share of the web, and that's not an accident. Plugins exist for nearly everything, hosting is cheap, and most freelancers and agencies already know it. The tradeoff shows up over time: plugin conflicts, slow admin panels, and a security surface that grows with every extension you add. It's also not naturally an API-first system — pulling WordPress data into anything else, or syncing it out to another platform, usually means custom glue code or a plugin that half-solves it.
We ran into that gap directly on a dance-school client's site: their public class schedule lived in a booking platform with no API, so keeping the WordPress site in sync meant someone copying sessions across by hand every week — and the site still drifted out of date. We ended up building an automated pipeline that scrapes the booking calendar on a schedule and publishes straight to WordPress, closing the gap without touching the CMS itself. It's a good example of what WordPress is genuinely great at — publishing — and what it needs help with once your data lives somewhere else.
Wix: fast to launch, hard to outgrow
Wix (and platforms like it — Squarespace, Webflow at the higher end) trade flexibility for speed. If you need a clean, presentable site next week and you're not planning to bolt on custom logic, it's a reasonable call. The ceiling is real, though: once you need a genuinely custom booking flow, a role-based admin panel, or content structured your way rather than the platform's way, you're fighting the tool instead of using it.
Sanity: structured content, your own frontend
Sanity is a headless CMS — it stores and serves structured content over an API, and you build the actual website yourself (in our case, with Next.js). That split is the whole point: content editors get a clean editing interface with real field types — not a blob of HTML — while developers keep full control over how the site looks, performs, and scales. This site runs on Sanity for exactly that reason: every page's copy, the case studies, the blog you're reading now — all of it is authored in a structured schema, with a built-in fallback so a CMS hiccup never takes the site down.
The honest tradeoff: Sanity assumes you have (or are hiring) developer time. There's no drag-and-drop page builder. You're trading a lower ceiling for a much higher one, and paying for that with setup complexity a Wix site would never ask of you.
So which one?
If you're a solo founder who needs a site live this week and won't touch the code again, Wix or Squarespace is the pragmatic choice. If your site is a marketing surface with real content velocity — a blog, case studies, a team publishing regularly — but you don't need custom application logic, WordPress remains hard to beat on plugin ecosystem and editor familiarity. If the "website" is really a product with business logic behind it — bookings, a customer admin panel, workflows that need to talk to other systems — a headless setup like Sanity + a real framework is where that logic actually gets to live.
The mistake we see most often isn't picking the "wrong" platform — it's picking a platform sized for where the business is today and being surprised, eighteen months later, that it can't hold what the business became.