Mondovo vs WordPress
WordPress gives you everything. Including the maintenance.
Nothing in this comparison comes close to WordPress on ecosystem or on control. What comes with that is a site assembled from parts you now own, update, back up and secure — and on a client site, that lands on you. Both sides are set out below, sourced from WordPress's own documentation.
Facts checked 9 September 2026Free plan available. No credit card required.
The short version
Read this first, and you may not need the rest of the page.
This is the part most comparison pages bury. It is at the top here because it saves you a decision you were going to make anyway.
Choose Mondovo if
- You want three complete multi-page designs generated from a brief, rather than a theme to fill in.
- You would rather nobody on your team owned core updates, plugin updates, backups or security patching.
- You are moving a client off WordPress and want the existing pages and posts to come across.
- You want the enquiries, the forms and the per-page SEO settings in the same place as the site.
Choose WordPress if
- You need a specific plugin. Nothing here replaces "the largest directory of free and open source WordPress plugins".
- You want to own the code and be able to move the whole site to any host, any time.
- The site is a publishing operation: many authors, editorial workflow, thousands of posts.
- You already have a managed-WordPress practice, and total control is a feature rather than a bill.
What WordPress publishes
The facts this page is built on.
Every one of these is quoted or drawn from WordPress's own pages. The links are at the bottom.
WordPress.com publishes five tiers.
Read 9 September 2026Free, then Personal at $4 a month, Premium at $8, Business at $25 and Commerce at $45, all billed annually.
WordPress.com — PricingPlugins run on every paid WordPress.com plan.
Read 9 September 2026"Installing plugins is available on all WordPress.com paid plans: Personal, Premium, Business, and Commerce plans."
WordPress.com — Plugins supportOne theme is active at a time.
Read 9 September 2026"Only one theme from this directory can be Active." The directory itself holds "over 9,000 themes", and you switch between them from the Appearance menu.
WordPress.org — Work with themesKeeping a self-hosted install current is the operator's job.
Read 9 September 2026"You should always update WordPress to the latest version." The same page asks you to back the site up first, and the manual route runs through FTP, deactivating plugins, and replacing the wp-includes and wp-admin directories by hand.
WordPress.org — Updating WordPressThe plugin directory is WordPress's central advantage.
Read 9 September 2026WordPress.org describes it as "the largest directory of free and open source WordPress plugins". No claim on this page disputes that, and no feature of ours replaces it.
WordPress.org — Plugin directoryCapability
Side by side.
Quoted text belongs to WordPress. Rows are limited to things we could confirm from their published pages.
A dash means we could not confirm it from WordPress's own published pages, so we make no claim either way.
| Mondovo | WordPress | |
|---|---|---|
| Getting to a first design | Describe the business, approve a page-by-page content plan, and three complete multi-page designs are generated from it. Up to ten designs can live on one site. | Choose a theme from the directory or buy one, then fill it in. "Only one theme from this directory can be Active." |
| Hosting | Included. Pages publish as static files served from a global network. | WordPress.com hosts it. Self-hosted, you buy the hosting and run it. |
| Updates, backups and security | Ours. | The platform's on WordPress.com. Yours on a self-hosted install: core, themes and plugins, with a backup taken before each update. |
| Extending it | No plugin ecosystem. Forms, enquiry inbox, per-page SEO and version history ship as part of the platform. API access comes with the $99 a month Agency add-on. | "The largest directory of free and open source WordPress plugins." This is the reason to choose WordPress. |
| Owning it | Your content and your published site are yours, and you can export them. The platform itself is not yours. | Open source. The software, the themes and the database are yours to modify and to host anywhere. |
| Getting a client to review it before launch | A review link that works on desktop and mobile. The client clicks an element on the page and leaves a note against it, or approves the whole site. | — |
WordPress does far more than six rows can hold. These are the rows where the difference actually decides something.
The part that is easy to miss when you quote a project
The cost that never arrives as an invoice.
WordPress's price is not the licence — the software is free, and that is genuinely remarkable. The cost is the standing obligation that comes with it, and on a client site somebody has to carry it.
Updates arrive on somebody else's schedule
Core, themes and plugins each move independently. WordPress's own guidance is to back the site up before you update, which means there has to be a person whose job that is, every month, for as long as the site exists.
Every capability is another dependency
The plugin directory is the strength and the liability in one feature. Each plugin has its own author, its own release cadence and its own chance of being abandoned. That is the trade, and it is a reasonable one to accept knowingly.
The hand-off is not free either
A client who wants a change either learns the admin screens or rings you. Neither outcome is costless, and the second one is the outcome most of the time.
None of this is an argument against WordPress
It is an argument for knowing which of the two jobs you are quoting for. If the retainer covers maintenance, WordPress is a perfectly good business and always has been.
If you are moving one
What comes across, and what does not.
Paste the address of the client's WordPress site. Mondovo reads it, brings the pages and posts across, and rebuilds the design on top of them. You review what it found before any design is generated, so nothing is invented behind your back.
Comes across
- Pages, with their structure
- Posts
- The content on them, to review before anything is generated
- The site's existing page structure, so the design changes and the shape does not
Does not come across
- Anything a plugin was doing — a membership area, a booking engine, a forum
- A store's order history, and order processing generally
- Custom PHP, custom post types built by a developer, and theme code
- Anything that lives in a plugin's own database tables rather than in the pages
Check what the site actually depends on before you promise a date. A brochure site is a short job. A site holding a membership programme together is not a migration, it is a rebuild.
The honest part
When WordPress is the right answer.
In some cases this is not a close call, and pretending otherwise would waste your time and ours.
A plugin already does the thing
Memberships, courses, complex bookings, a specific payment gateway, a niche integration with a trade body's system. If a mature plugin does it, that is a shorter and cheaper route than any generated site, and it is not close.
You want to own the software
WordPress is open source. Take the files and the database and run them anywhere, forever, with or without the original agency. Mondovo is a hosted platform: your content and your published site are yours, the platform is not.
It is a publishing operation
Many authors, editorial roles, taxonomies, thousands of posts, a workflow with approvals in it. WordPress was built for exactly that and still does it better than anything else in this comparison.
You already carry the maintenance
An agency with a managed-WordPress practice, a staging process and a monthly patching routine has already paid the fixed cost of doing it well. Moving away would throw that investment out.
If any of those is true for the project in front of you, use WordPress. We would rather you came back for the next one than regretted this one.
What each one costs
Two different bills.
One is a subscription. The other is a small subscription plus an amount of your team's time that never appears on an invoice.
Mondovo
$20 per live site per month
Drafts are free — 50 of them on Pro — and one live site is included in the first $20. Each extra live site is another $20. Pages, visitors and form submissions are not billed. Three team members are included, then $10 a month each. White-label, API access and the outreach tools are a $99 a month add-on.
WordPress
$0 to $45 a month, plus your time
The software is free. WordPress.com's published plans, billed annually, are Personal $4, Premium $8, Business $25 and Commerce $45. Self-hosted, the invoice is hosting, and the unbilled cost is whoever keeps it patched and backed up.
We are not going to put a number on the maintenance. Any figure we invented would be exactly the kind of claim this page exists to avoid.
Real output
What comes out the other side.
Sites Mondovo generated from a brief, the same way a client's site would be.
Before you move anything
What agencies ask about this one.
Can I bring a client's existing WordPress site across?
Paste the address. Mondovo reads the site, brings the pages and posts across, and rebuilds the design on top of them. You review what it found before any design is generated.
What happens to the plugins?
They do not come with it, and there is no equivalent to install. If the site depends on a plugin for something a visitor uses — a membership area, a booking engine, a store — that dependency has to be replaced or the site has to stay where it is. Work that out before you quote.
Is the published site faster than a WordPress install?
Mondovo publishes static pages to a global network, so a page view does not run a database query. We have not benchmarked that against any particular WordPress install, and we are not going to quote a percentage we have not measured.
Can I edit the code?
You can edit a design's files directly, and every change lands in version history and can be undone. You cannot install a third-party plugin, and there is no PHP.
What happens to SEO on a migration?
Titles, descriptions, sitemaps and structured data are set per page. A redesign keeps the existing pages and their content, so the structure the site already ranks on stays in place while the design changes around it.
Can we keep WordPress for some clients and use this for others?
Most agencies that try this do exactly that. Brochure sites and redesigns move first; anything held together by a plugin stays where it is.
Sources
Check every claim on this page.
All pages read on 9 September 2026. Next review: December 2026.
- WordPress.com plan names and pricesWordPress.com — Pricing
- Plugins on all paid WordPress.com plansWordPress.com — Plugins support
- One active theme, over 9,000 themes in the directory, switching from the Appearance menuWordPress.org — Work with themes
- Update guidance, backup guidance, and the manual update procedureWordPress.org — Updating WordPress
- The plugin directory's description of itselfWordPress.org — Plugin directory
WordPress is a trade mark of its owner. It is named here to identify the product being compared. Nothing on this page implies any relationship with or endorsement by the WordPress project or Automattic.
The cheapest way to settle it
Point it at a client's WordPress site and look at the result.
The draft costs nothing, so you can see what a redesign of a real site looks like before you decide anything.