Bubble vs Wordpress: the biggest differences & who are they most suited for

Battle of the platforms Bubble vs Wordpress. Which is better? It's helpful to flesh this out with an example. Say a local business approaches me and they say, "What's the best way to advertise my business online? We want a home page and about US page, a services page and contact page.

When to build with WordPress

For that sort of website I would be advising something along the lines of either WordPress or website because it's got to load really quickly, it's got to be efficient, it's going to look really good and there's really not much else from that apartment maybe core SEO on page SEO principles being built into it. I wouldn't be advising they go down the route of Bubble. Let's say that same business comes to me and they say we want to be able to track our inventory, we want to send an SMS notification to our customers when their order is ready. We want a bespoke piece of software effectively.

That's when I'd be saying yeah, I would build that with Bubble. But I might then even advise that they have a Bubble up on a subdomain like app.theirdomain.com compared to having the brochure website on their root domain, like their businessnames.com. That's because is the brochure site, they might want to make small changes to that, it needs to have a really good page load time for on page SEO benefits. WordPress or website would be a really good fit for that.

When to built with Bubble

But the inventory tracker or a CRM or kind of any bespoke web app then that's when I go down the Bubble route. In fact, an example that I read about on the Bubble forum was someone who ran a mobile phone repair shop and they wanted to be able to log when they received the phone in from a customer, the customer's details, track it through the different stages of the repair programme, maybe the different repair options that they have available. Email or SMS notified the customer when the repair was ready and they want to be able to track the process from start to finish when they receive the phone into returning it to the customer.

Bubble app example (CRM)

And they've built that with Bubble and actually I believe they've gone on to have some success because they have now monetized this app because it's really niche, it's only for mobile phone repair shops, it's built completely around that niche industry and this guy now sells access to this app probably for a subscription to other mobile phone repair shops.

Quick web design with WordPress

So going back to the example of a local business who wants to just promote themselves online. You can very quickly. Very inexpensively. In fact, a lot of web post in the WordPress space offer this now is effectively a WordPress install that has got Elementor which is a WordPress page builder preinstalled other preinstalled apps and you can effectively drag and drop a blog post with a sidebar header footage. You can build up using the templates that provided a website very quickly.

Limitations of WordPress compared to Bubble

But you will find that there are some limitations there. If you want to enhance a WordPress site and you're not a coder, then you're going to be looking for someone who's built a plugin that will allow you to do that. And let's say you want to add like a booking feature or ecommerce...there are plenty of your plugins that will let you add that feature onto your website. But if you want to extend that plugin even in the smallest way, say for example, you want to have a shopping cart icon hovering on the bottom right corner of the screen that takes your user straight into a shopping cart for your website. Unless you have any coding knowledge or you find an additional plugin that's going to allow you to do that, then you can't, you're stuck. Whereas with Bubble you can build an ecommerce platform and you can use a floating group to add that button in and you can control exactly what that button does all without writing a single line of code.