How CWA Compares

CWA side by side with WordPress, Storyblok, Contentful, Sanity, Payload, Drupal, Webflow and Wix Studio, and with the main ways to give clients an editable website.

Product by product

The table puts CWA beside three of the eight products teams often weigh it against (one on a phone). Choose each product from the menu at the top of its column; the other columns stay where they are. Accurate as of October 2026: products and prices change quickly, so check each one's current documentation and pricing before you decide.

Pick the products to compare with CWA from the menu in each column.

Feature	CWA
Editors work on the live page of your own front end	Yes On the live site, in edit mode	Partly In the block editor, styled like your theme; not for a separate front end	Partly Your site in a preview frame inside Storyblok; click a block to edit it	Partly Preview frame in Studio; overlays on your site open Studio to edit
Developers decide which blocks and styles editors can use	Yes Allowed components per component group, and preset styles	Yes Allowed blocks, block locking and theme.json presets	Yes Allow or deny blocks per field	Yes Allowed types in each schema field
Publishing clears only the pages that changed, out to the CDN	Yes Built in, by cache tag; Cloudflare's edge needs an API token	No Left to caching plugins or your host	No Its API cache updates; your site's cache is webhooks you write	Partly Automatic on the Next.js App Router; elsewhere webhooks you write
Drafts and scheduled publishing on the free version	Yes Drafts per component; scheduling for components and pages	Yes Drafts and scheduled posts in core	Paid plan Drafts free; scheduling on paid plans	Paid plan Drafts free; scheduled drafts on paid plans
One piece of content on many pages, edited once	Yes Shared components	Yes Synced patterns	Yes References	Yes References
Editors see each other working, in real time	Planned Changes already reach open pages live; showing who's editing is planned	No Taken out of WordPress 7.0, not on the 7.2 roadmap	Not checked Claimed in its marketing; not found in its docs	Yes Real-time editing and presence on every plan
Open source and self-hosted	Yes MIT, on your own servers	Yes GPLv2 or later	No Hosted service	Partly The Studio is MIT; your content is hosted by Sanity
How you pay	Free software; you pay for your own hosting	Free; Elementor Pro is per site, per year	Per plan, plus seats and API requests	Per seat, plus API requests
Sign-in, forms, image variants, SEO and deployment included	Yes All of them, with a deploy pipeline for Docker or Kubernetes	Partly Users and image sizes in core; forms, SEO and caching are plugins	Partly An image service; no visitor sign-in, forms or hosting	Partly An image pipeline; no visitor sign-in or forms

Partly means the product does some of it, as the note says. Paid plan means the free version doesn't include it. Not checked means we couldn't confirm it from the product's own pages.

Compared with other approaches

There are several ways to give clients an editable website. This table compares the approaches rather than products.

	CWA	Hosted visual CMS	Headless CMS with its own admin	Git-based editing	PHP CMS with its own templates
Where editors work	On the live page, in edit mode	In the vendor's editor, with a preview of your site	In a separate admin app	In an editor that commits files	In the CMS's admin, sometimes with a page builder
Draft, publish and scheduling	Per component, and per page through its route	Usually built in	Varies by product and plan	Through Git branches and merges	Usually built in
Hosting	Self-hosted	Vendor-hosted (SaaS)	Often both	Your Git host and your site host	Usually self-hosted
Licence and cost	MIT; you pay for hosting and developers	Subscription, often per seat or tier	Open source, source-available or commercial	Often free	Open source or commercial
Front end	Nuxt (Vue)	Any, through an SDK	Any, through the API	Usually tied to a static site generator	The CMS's own templates, or headless
Back end	Symfony and API Platform (PHP)	The vendor's	Varies (often Node.js)	None	PHP
Real-time updates to open pages	Built in (Mercure)	Varies	Varies	Usually after a rebuild	Varies
Production stack included	Docker, Helm, CI, page cache, Mercure	Hosted for you	You build it	You build it	Varies
Maturity	2.0 prerelease, heading for a beta	Often mature	Often mature	Varies	Often mature

Examples of each approach: hosted visual CMSs such as Storyblok; headless CMSs such as Strapi, Payload and Directus; Git-based editors such as Nuxt Studio; PHP CMSs such as Sulu, Statamic and Craft.

CWA's closest neighbours are Symfony content platforms. If your team already runs Symfony and API Platform and wants a Nuxt front end with page building, CWA is built for that.

Is CWA right for you?

The comparison shows what CWA does. Whether it fits your project depends on your team and your clients: see Built for Business › When to choose CWA and Built for Business › When not to choose CWA, or open the playground and edit a CWA site yourself.

Where the comparison comes from

Each product's cells come from these pages, read in October 2026.