A WordPress alternative that leaves nothing to patch

What core does not hand you is the shop floor: its own Blocks list contains no form, no booking, no ordering and no timetable, and its own handbook says WordPress does not support a multilingual site out of the box. Here is what opens on our side instead — 40 working trade sites, eleven operating modules, 111 components, two languages, and an export that is the whole codebase with nothing to patch under it. WordPress takes 2 of the 13 rows below and they are marked as such, which is the reason to trust the ones that go the other way.

In the browser: Storefront $49 a month, Storefront Pro $79. On your own machine: LocalSite Studio $59 a month or $699 once. Building and previewing cost nothing and take no card, with a 7-day refund. See the full price list

The 13 rows that decide it

Every row can be checked against the sources at the bottom of this page, and 2 of them go WordPress’s way. A comparison where the author wins every row is an advertisement, and you would be right to discount all of it.
What you are asking about	With Naratake	With WordPress	Who takes the row
What is actually inside one starting point	The number to ask about is not 40, it is what opens. The bakery starting point is four pages: nine priced items, a custom-cake enquiry form with a photo column, and a six-image portfolio — a working site before you have typed a word. All 40 open like that, drawn around what their trade puts on a page, with any of 15 design styles rebuilding the layout over the top rather than recolouring it.	The theme directory listed 8,513 themes when we read it (Aug 26, 2026), and the way they are catalogued tells you what a theme is there. The review requirements allow exactly nine subject tags — blog, e-commerce, education, entertainment, food-and-drink, holiday, news, photography, portfolio — and no more than three on any theme. There is no restaurant, salon, clinic, gym or studio to filter by. The rest of the vocabulary is layout and capability: column counts, sidebars, block patterns, full-site editing, translation-ready. The Pattern Directory’s 2,324 patterns are catalogued the same structural way — headers, footers, banners, calls to action, wireframe — so what you pick is page furniture, not a trade.	Ours
Changing the look without redoing the site	40 industry starting points across 15 design styles is 600 different-looking sites before anyone touches a colour — and the count is not the part that matters. This is: a style here is a different set of bones, not a different coat of paint. Switching one rebuilds the hero composition, every page header, the type, the corner radius, the motion and the photo treatment, and palettes are picked per trade, so the same style over a bakery and over a law firm does not come out the same colour. The pages come back rebuilt from the starting point and your content comes with it: the menu and its prices, the reviews, the staff, the class timetable, the property listings, the coupon codes and the opening hours all carry over, along with the business’s own details — name, phone, email, address, logo, social links. What does not: the headings and body text you edited inside a block, and the photos you swapped in, go back to the template’s. A single undo puts the whole switch back. And nothing is installed to do any of it: no theme, no child theme, and nothing to reconcile with a plugin afterwards.	Changing the look there means changing the theme, and a theme is an install: chosen from the directory, added to the site, and updated from then on alongside everything else you added. Whether the words and pictures you already put in survive that change depends on the theme, on the plugins beneath it and on your host — which is a question for their documentation rather than a claim we are going to make on their behalf.	Ours
The parts that actually run the business	Eleven of them, in the box: online ordering, table reservations, appointment booking by staff member and time slot, a class timetable, an order tracker, property listings, quote requests, a coupon banner and three menu layouts. Nothing to install and nothing to choose between — they were written together, they share one back office, and no separate author can abandon one of them. On the cloud line ordering and reservations go live on Storefront Pro, $79 a month or $758 a year; Storefront, $49 a month or $468 a year, builds and previews them. On the desktop line the export carries the lot.	None of this is in core. The official Blocks list — current for WordPress 7.1 when we read it on Aug 26, 2026 — has no booking, reservation, appointment, ordering or class-schedule block in any of its categories, and the page itself points you at the block directory for anything missing. So every one of these is a plugin decision: the directory returns 1,824 results for booking and 97 for restaurant online ordering, its own front page is featuring two booking plugins right now, and WooCommerce’s listing sells bookings as a developer-vetted extension from its marketplace. Somebody has written each of them. Choosing, wiring them together and owning the compatibility is the job.	Ours
Motion on the page	Nothing is installed to get any of it: 29 scroll and cinematic sections arrive finished, among them video that scrubs as you scroll, parallax, a scroll-told story, a horizontal scroller, a film strip, a cinema reel, a marquee, an image that reveals as it comes up, a scroll progress bar. A 3D hero and an animated background ship alongside them. One attribute sets the intensity for the whole site — subtle, lively, cinematic, or off altogether — across ten entrance signatures: rise, fade, slide, zoom, blur, clip, flip, letterbox, iris and swing. Change your mind once and every section follows. The words are readable with JavaScript off, and a visitor whose system asks for less motion gets the site holding still.	The motion core documents is the Cover block’s Fixed background toggle, which its own documentation describes as a parallax scrolling effect — the background stays still while the page scrolls over it. Beyond that, the Blocks list names no block for animation, motion, scroll effects, reveals or transitions in any of its six categories. The plugin directory returns 1,056 results for scroll animation, among them Blocks Animation: CSS Animations for Gutenberg Blocks and Greenshift. That is where this lives, and each of them is a plugin you pick, install and keep working.	Ours
What is in the editor before you install anything	111 components and 15 design styles, every one of them in the editor. Forms are among them, with the enquiries landing in the site’s own back office instead of an email you hope arrives, and so are menus, galleries, pricing tables, FAQs, maps, testimonials and timetables. None of it is a plugin, so none of it has a separate author, a separate update or a separate licence.	Core has grown, and it is worth saying so: the Design category now carries Accordion, Buttons, Columns, Group, Row, Stack, Grid, Separator, Spacer and Tabs, with Tabs new in 7.1. What is not in the list anywhere — not under Text, Media, Design, Widgets, Theme, Embeds or Other — is a form. The nearest core options are Custom HTML and Shortcode, and the plugin directory returns 7,437 results for contact form, with Contact Form 7 sitting on the directory’s own front page under popular plugins. The first thing a business site needs is the first thing you install.	Ours
How far you can push one element	Dragging a block onto a page is the doorway, not the product. What is behind it: 44 style properties on any single node, each of them settable four times over — desktop, tablet, mobile, and again for hover — which is 176 adjustable points on one element. Vertical CJK text for a hanging-scroll heading, a neon glow in a colour you choose, frosted-glass backdrop blur, a two-colour gradient at the angle you set, a tilt up to 45° either way, sticky positioning, z-index, and a per-node entrance of fade, slide, zoom or blur. None of it is a plugin, so none of it has a separate author, a separate licence or a separate update — and all of it comes out in the exported project as ordinary style props.	The block editor is free and it is real, and core has grown: the Design category now carries Accordion, Buttons, Columns, Group, Row, Stack, Grid, Separator, Spacer and Tabs. How far a single block goes is set by that block, by the theme underneath it and by whatever you installed for the rest — the Blocks list names no block for animation, motion, scroll effects, reveals or transitions in any of its six categories, and the page itself points you at the block directory for anything missing. Depth there is assembled, and every part of it has an author and a release schedule.	Ours
Running the business in two languages	A checkbox, not a project. English plus Chinese or Spanish, one site, with a real language switch rendered in the navigation and both languages living in the same file. No plugin to choose, no word quota, no price per language, and nothing extra on either plan.	Their own Advanced Administration Handbook says it outright: out of the box, a bilingual or multilingual blog is not something WordPress currently supports. It then lists five documented ways to get one — four of them plugins, and the fifth putting each language in its own WordPress installation with Multisite. Core multilingual is described on that page as belonging to the fourth and final phase of the Gutenberg project. Translating the software’s own interface into your language is a separate, free community effort, and that is a different thing from translating your pages.	Ours
How much assembly before it looks like your trade	The 40 industry starting points arrive with the sections of the trade already laid out — the ordering menu, the reservation form, the appointment slots, the class timetable, the quote request, the property listing grid. On the cloud side those sections go live on Storefront Pro, $79 a month or $758 a year; the $49 Storefront plan builds and previews them, and the card behind either one runs through your own Stripe keys. On the desktop line the export carries the lot and it is yours to host.	First the ground floor: the self-hosting route on the download page is written for anyone comfortable getting their own hosting and domain, and it wants PHP 8.3 or greater with MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.11 or greater. Then a theme, then the plugins you pick — the booking search alone runs to 1,824 of them. Whatever your trade needs, somebody has probably written it; choosing between them, wiring them together and owning what happens when two of them update on the same morning is the work our starting points are trying to remove.	Ours
What you can take away with you	The reason the desktop line exists. LocalSite Studio writes the whole site out as a Next.js project — pages, styles and components as source, in a folder you can open, build and host yourself, plus the database and back office when the site stores orders, bookings or enquiries. The code belongs to the customer, and it needs no account of ours to keep running. On the cloud line the same source download is on Storefront Pro; the $49 Storefront plan does not include it.	You can take your content. WordPress’s export documentation describes an XML file in WXR format holding your posts, pages, custom post types, comments, custom fields, categories, tags, custom taxonomies and users. The official Learn WordPress lesson on that same tool is blunter about the other half, listing what the transfer leaves out: the site’s design, themes and plugins, and any media sitting in the library that was never embedded in a post or page. Moving a whole site with the design intact is a job for a migration plugin — one more plugin to choose and keep working.	Ours
What is actually yours	LocalSite Studio is bought once rather than rented, and what you hand over is a folder of source. It runs on any host that runs Node, and nothing about it depends on us still being here.	Credit where it is due, and it is worth saying plainly: WordPress is free, GPL-licensed software, and its about page sets out the four freedoms — to run it, study it, redistribute it and modify it. A WordPress site is not welded to one company; it can be moved to another WordPress host, which is more than most hosted builders will let you do. But what moves is a WordPress installation. It still wants WordPress hosting, its theme, its plugin set and its update queue; it is not a codebase you can open, build and deploy on your own terms.	Ours
Who keeps it patched	There is no plugin layer, so there is no plugin queue: nothing was installed, so nothing needs updating. That is not the same as nothing to maintain. The exported project is ordinary Next.js and its dependencies age like any codebase; after the handover that upkeep belongs to whoever owns the site.	The software itself is free and GPL-licensed, and a managed host takes the server and the core updates off your desk — genuinely a softer problem than self-hosting, and worth saying plainly. What no host can take off your desk is the stack you had to assemble to make the site work: a form plugin, a booking plugin, an ordering plugin, a translation plugin, each with its own author and its own release schedule. That is the part core does not ship, so it is the part nobody else owns.	Even
Writing, publishing and the community around it	Our starting points build a business site: the pages a trade puts in front of a customer, with forms, bookings and a back office behind them. What is not here is a twenty-year publishing stack — no editorial workflow, no ecosystem of theme and plugin authors. Posts and pages, yes. A newsroom, no.	This is what WordPress is for, and by its own about page more of the web runs on it than on anything else. Two decades of publishing, free software under the GPL with the four freedoms written into it, and a community to match. We give them the row.	Theirs
Getting the tool running	LocalSite Studio is a desktop application, so there is an install: the installers are not code-signed, and macOS and Windows both warn you before they run. After that it is a local app, unlimited sites, unlimited exports.	Once a host has WordPress running, all of it is administered in a browser: nothing to install on your own machine, nothing to keep updated there, and you can work from whichever computer you happen to be sitting at.	Theirs

Everything said about WordPress on this page was last checked on Aug 26, 2026. Plans, prices and features change without telling us — confirm them on WordPress’s own pages before you decide anything.

What WordPress is shaped for

WordPress is larger and older than us, and here are the three places where that matters more than owning the code.

01The site is mostly writing — posts, a newsletter, subscribers, RSS. That is the job WordPress was built to do, and the job it still does best.
02Something you need already exists as a plugin — memberships, courses, a real store — and you would rather install it than have it written.
03You want one company hosting, patching, backing up and answering the phone — a managed WordPress host does exactly that. Support here is email, and the server is yours.

When we are the better answer

Move when the code, and not the plugin list, is what you are buying.

01You are handing a client a website, not a login. At the end of the job there is a folder of Next.js source, and it is theirs.
02You do not want a plugin stack under the site — a form, a booking engine, an ordering page and a translation layer are four separate authors, four release schedules and four things that can stop being maintained.
03You want the page shape of your trade there from the first screen rather than assembled from parts.

Plain about the fit

Where each of these fits best

Two shapes of site, and WordPress is built for one of them. If the site is mostly writing — posts, a newsletter, subscribers, RSS — that is exactly the job it was made for. If what you want is a feature you add by installing it, chosen from a directory with an author for every idea, that is theirs and it always will be; here the parts a business site runs on are already in the editor. For everybody else the trade is this: 40 industry starting points that open as working multi-page sites, 600 industry-and-style combinations that rebuild the layout rather than recolouring it, eleven operating modules that core does not ship at all, 111 components including forms that write into your own back office, 29 scroll and cinematic sections, and two languages without choosing a plugin. One note on this page itself: WordPress is free software, so what a site costs is set by whichever host you buy it from, and nothing below quotes a price for it.

Questions people actually ask

Can I move my site off WordPress?

Your content, yes. WordPress’s export documentation describes a WXR-format XML file with posts, pages, custom post types, comments, custom fields, categories, tags, custom taxonomies and users; the official lesson on the same tool says what the transfer leaves out — the site’s design, themes and plugins, along with any media in the library that was never embedded in a post or page. Moving a whole site with the design intact means a migration plugin — which is one more plugin for you to choose and keep working.

Does Naratake have plugins?

No, and no app market is planned — that is the trade this whole page is about. The parts a business site usually reaches for a plugin to get are already in the editor: forms, booking, ordering, a class timetable, an order tracker, quote requests, two languages. Anything past that is written into the exported Next.js project, which is possible because the code is yours and is more work than clicking install. If your site depends on one particular plugin that exists there and nowhere else, that is a real reason to stay.

So there is nothing to maintain?

There is no plugin layer to maintain, which is the part that most often breaks. There is still a codebase: the export is ordinary Next.js, dependencies age, and after the handover that upkeep belongs to whoever owns the site. We would rather write that here than have you find it in year two.

Look at what the export contains before you move anything

The ownership page explains exactly what comes out of the desktop line and what stays yours; the pricing page carries the current figure for the one-time desktop purchase. Build something, export it, open the folder, then decide.

See what you actually own Browse the industry starting points

What we checked

The pages this comparison was read from, all of them on WordPress’s own site.

WordPress is a trademark of the WordPress Foundation, and WordPress.org, Learn WordPress and the developer handbooks belong to the open-source WordPress project. Naratake is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the WordPress Foundation or Automattic Inc., and this page is not official WordPress material.