Any competitor has a nasty chicken/egg problem to overcome. Wordpress is still hard to avoid because there's a plugin—usually with paid support available—that can do damn near anything. The codebase isn't great, developing against it sucks, and the way it's designed and the official store curated does nothing to prevent some real messes & risks on the database side—but, two days of set-up and $80/m in plugins/themes is just a much easier sell than "OK, first we'll need at least two months of development time..."

There's also the scale-benefit that you can hardly throw a ball without hitting someone who's done Wordpress development, if you do need development work, and Wordpress-focused agencies are abundant, if you'd rather not hire to get the work done. Not true for any up-and-coming competitor.

Designing a system—even an extensible one with plugin and theming architecture—that is a lot better than Wordpress isn't a small task, but is also far from impossible and wouldn't take some super-genius team to accomplish; however, that's the easiest step on the path to actually displacing Wordpress in the market.

There is a plugin that replaces wordpress itself

See also Salesforce and Shopify, whose app store/plugin ecosystems give them a network effect in their spaces in much the same way - but equally tie them to antiquated API surfaces due to their commitment to backwards compatibility.

Damn right. Forget nocode platforms, you can build sophisticated apps by choosing the right plugin combo. And edit some PHP files if needed (or add your own plugin for bespoke stuff).

There are many functionally perfect substitutes, unfortunately the WordPress value proposition is actually it's ecosystem of plugins, developers and advocacy of it's users.

We've all met the client who wants WP and nothing else. And there are countless times we've rolled a clean new solution out, but the client goes back to WP.

I have seen value in hybrid approaches, a custom app written in some other framework for complex requirements, and a WP instance and connector for content, so the client is comfortable.

What are some of the best alternatives you know of? I know Statamic and Ghost both have their strong points.

Ghost can't be used on random shared hosting. Maybe Statamic can but it is probably not straightforward.

VPS is I think better solution anyway. However for many people it is overkill to have VPS just to run some simple website.

Primo is another

There are CMSes developers want to work with, and CMSes companies want to use. To get into the latter bucket, you have to make a lot of pragmatic choices that causes you to fall out of the former. Also, companies like things that have been around a long time, and such things tend to be old-fashioned by definition.

Ok. Here it is:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

Oh no. Still the mouse movement animation on the website? It made me not read further down the page.

I am very sure the Github page I linked to doesn’t have any mouse animations. It has a README right on the page, with all the info. It also lets you clone the code and try it out, watch videos and much more.

Did you purposely seek out a different page, see a mouse animation, and then announce to everyone that you did not read further down THAT page because you were distracted by an animation? It seems like a petty thing to announce, but OK.

Sorry, not my intention. I did give feedback on that animation on main project website before (where I always look in addition to a README). Project is nice, animation is awful. My feedback stands: better to remove it.

Wordpress is the success it is today because over the years, while other CMS kept breaking API, Wordpress remained mostly stable, allowing the development of a large ecosystem of plugins.

Another thing is that Wordpress PHP API uses very little OOP. It's mostly functions + arrays. So people who know very basic programming could write their own plugins, themes and co.