Comparison Guides

Compare Your Options

Data on how your technology choices affect SEO rankings, conversion rates, and revenue. Each guide goes past the feature table to the business impact.

CMS

Custom Development vs WordPress

Your website should work like your best salesperson. When it loads slowly, ranks poorly, or breaks at the worst moment, you lose leads you'd otherwise have won. Here's how custom development and WordPress compare on the measure that matters most: revenue.

8.4% conversion lift from a 0.1s mobile speed gainDeloitte × Google, 2020

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E-Commerce

Custom E-Commerce vs Shopify

Shopify gets you selling fast. As you grow, so do the transaction fees and app subscriptions, and the theme's design limits start holding back conversion. At what point does building custom cost less and earn more?

$2K-$20K a year in third-party payment fees at $1M revenue (0.2%-2% by plan) when you skip Shopify PaymentsShopify pricing, 2026

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Platform

Custom Web App vs No-Code

No-code tools are great for testing ideas. But there's a ceiling, and hitting it mid-growth means building the whole thing a second time. Here's how to decide before you start.

Rebuild is what leaving costs you: your data exports, but your workflows and logic don'tUpforge, from migrations we've run

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Team

In-House Development vs Agency

The mean U.S. software developer salary is $148,100, and that's before benefits, recruiting, equipment, and management overhead. An agency ships your first product in the time it takes to fill the role. Here's the math.

$148,100 mean U.S. software developer salary, before benefits, recruiting, and managementBLS OES, May 2025

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CMS

Headless CMS vs Traditional CMS

WordPress powers 41.2% of all websites, but it was designed in 2003 for blogs, and businesses ask a lot more of a website now. Here's what it means to separate your content from the code that displays it, and what that does for your rankings and revenue.

Before / after performance measured on the pages we migrateProject-specific testing

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Shape / Your requirements

Choose around the work.

Before picking a platform, write down the customer journey, the systems it needs to connect, and who will look after it. Those requirements make the tradeoffs in each guide useful.

What should a customer be able to finish?
Which tools and data need to work together?
What can your team maintain after launch?

Compare Your Options

Custom Development vs WordPress

Custom E-Commerce vs Shopify

Custom Web App vs No-Code

In-House Development vs Agency

Headless CMS vs Traditional CMS

Choose around the work.

Have a project in mind?

Have a project in mind?