Platform comparisons

The Platform comparisons series covers these match-ups: Next.js vs React, Flutter vs React Native, Webflow vs WordPress, WordPress vs Wix, Framer vs Webflow, Shopify vs WooCommerce, Squarespace vs WordPress, and Payload, Strapi and Sanity as headless CMS options. Each part is written by the Boffin Coders developer who builds on those platforms and ends by saying which one to choose for which kind of business.

Choose a hosted builder such as Wix or Squarespace when you want the site live soon, edited by your own team, with hosting, security and updates handled for you. Choose WordPress when the site has to grow through plugins, hold years of content or move to any host you pick. Underneath, the split is ownership: a hosted site runs on the builder's servers, while WordPress is software you install, own and keep up to date.

You can move a website later, but not every part leaves as a file. In the checks behind this series, a Squarespace export was one WordPress .xml file without store pages, drafts or a second blog, and a Shopify product export was a CSV file without the images. Find out what you can take with you before you build, because it decides what a future move costs.

Next.js is the safer choice for SEO, because the text of each page is already in the HTML before any JavaScript runs. A React app built the default way sends an almost empty page and fills it in inside the browser. Search engines can still index that, but only after an extra step. React on its own suits an app behind a login, where search engines never look.

Plan an upgrade about every three months on Flutter and about every two months on React Native. From October 2025 to October 2026, Flutter shipped four new stable versions and React Native six, and React Native maintains only its latest three, so a version is out of support about six months after it ships. Test each upgrade on real phones before it reaches the store.