Mondovo vs WordPress
Three designs from one brief. No plugins to update.
Describe the business and Mondovo generates three complete multi-page designs from one content plan you approved, then publishes to your client's domain with hosting and SSL included. There is no core, theme or plugin to keep current and no backup to take before you touch it. A client's existing WordPress site brings its pages and posts across, and you see everything it found before a design is generated.
Free 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 want to own the software outright: take the files and the database to any host, forever, with or without the original agency.
Capability
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 directory, and less need for one: forms, the enquiry inbox, bookings, payments and a store, a customer area behind a login, courses, events, downloads, per-page SEO and version history are 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 is maintenance, WordPress is a perfectly good business. If the retainer is the site, the maintenance is a cost you are carrying for nothing.
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.
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
Two briefs, three directions each.
The top row is one estate agent’s brief in three directions; the bottom row is one shop’s. Within each row the pages, the words and the offer are the same — what changed is the composition, the type and the colour. All of them are demonstrations, not customers.
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?
Plugins do not come across, and there is no plugin directory. Most of what agencies install plugins for is part of the platform: forms, the enquiry inbox, bookings, payments and a store, a customer area behind a login, courses, events, downloads, per-page SEO and version history. A plugin that does something bespoke — an integration with a trade body's system, say — has to be replaced, and that is worth knowing 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. There is no plugin to install and no PHP, because the things plugins are usually installed for are part of the platform.
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.
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.