Picking the better boring options – EmDash is not for us

In the last couple of days there has been a lot of talk over CloudFlare’s recent creation, EmDash, with quite conveniently attaching itself to a lot of press touting it as a “spiritual successor to WordPress”. Yet, we’ve been here before, and likely will be here again in the future.

Positives about EmDash

Any new project gets to start from scratch and decide things which were just not available at the start of older projects. WordPress was initially launched in 2003, which as of 2026 is 22 years ago. The web development scene in 2003 is clearly very different, and security concerns were very different too.

EmDash takes an isolated approach to plugins, benefiting from the platform chosen for the system to run upon allowing such a thing. WordPress runs typically on “LAMP” style platforms, with PHP not really having many solutions for isolating code. However, even with such a security model, there likely will be malware and bad actors eventually beyond what we can already expect – even Chromebooks with their outstanding security have malware and bad extensions that can be installed.

Other positives such as using a modern stack, no known warts in the code that can’t be easily removed without disrupting all of the existing websites trying to keep up to date exist within EmDash.

Negatives about picking EmDash today

EmDash is new and shiny which is really tempting to pick it up and run with it. However, you are putting what your business is reliant upon on a brand new technology. Technology always has faults with it in reality, no matter how hard we try to prevent them.

WordPress is known, and with professionals steering the wheel, can be secured against known threats, can be controlled to provide a great experience. Not only that WordPress has automatic updates which “just work” on most environments with most site owners just getting a notification of “WordPress automatically updated” without having to worry too much otherwise.

EmDash being really new also tempts developers to quickly change their API and functions available to developers. Breaking changes can easily cause problems and downtime for websites, or even having to rollback to older, potentially insecure versions. While this can happen with WordPress, it’s much less likely to happen with such a mature and known codebase – and the team behind WordPress won’t risk their reputation to change core APIs without deprecation and progress! Even the new Block Editor work isn’t fully used by everyone which has been evolving over multiple years.

Another big point is WordPress has a massive library of plugins. Need to add e-commerce capabilities? WooCommerce available from the plugin directory today – with 1000s of plugins to add other functionality on top to make your e-commerce work today. Same for Contact Forms, Directory Websites, Property Listings, or anything else you can think of!

Portability of EmDash

EmDash requires server knowledge to run as it is NodeJS/v8 based. WordPress requires PHP which sounds technical, it is incredibly simple to run. Many solutions exist such as Installatron with cPanel, WordPress Manager for both cPanel and Plesk, or many solutions like Kinsta and Krystal Managed WordPress.

Many options exist for moving WordPress websites around, such as All in One WordPress Migrator, Duplicator Pro and many others. This allows you to pick up sticks and move if you need to, within an hour for smaller sites even!

So if your hosting renewal comes up to more expensive than you would expect, you can find a different supplier and move without much of a disruption at all!

What will actually happen with EmDash

If we had to place a bet, we think it will end up similar to Ghost which exists as it’s own right, along with many other platforms. Having options and competition, even in an open-source world helps everyone, as not everyone works or thinks in the same way. Some people enjoy experimental usage of platforms, and the risk associated, and can pay for in-house teams to keep things going.

Either way, we believe for our customers, and small businesses in general, we pick the boring, tried and tested tools to get the job done works better. While not flashy, we can be sure it will be supported for years to come, and evolve as needs change with time.