By Shehab Waleed, Founder, Cairo Studio 3 min read
Clients often arrive with a platform already chosen, usually the one a friend used. We build custom sites on SvelteKit and Next.js with Prismic as the CMS, we build Shopify stores, and we have shipped Framer sites when they were the better fit. This is how we choose.
The question that decides it
Who will change the website after launch, how often, and how much will they need to change? A marketing team that edits pages every week needs a different tool from a company that updates a news section twice a month.
WordPress
WordPress runs a large share of the web, supports right to left Arabic in its core, and has a plugin for almost everything. That breadth is also its cost: every plugin needs updates, and a site with many of them gets slow and fragile. It suits content heavy sites with a team that already knows it.
Webflow and Framer
Both are hosted visual builders: design, CMS and hosting in one monthly plan per site. They are fast to launch and easy for marketing teams to edit. In our experience, right to left Arabic layouts need extra care on both, and complex logic or integrations hit limits quickly. They suit marketing sites in one language, or two with simple layouts.
A custom build
A custom site on SvelteKit, Next.js or Nuxt, with a headless CMS such as Prismic, gives full control over speed, layout and features, and Arabic is designed as Arabic rather than adapted. Editors work in the CMS; structural changes need a developer. Most of our bilingual corporate sites, like Buna Holding and MASAR, are built this way. More on the stack on our Next.js and SvelteKit page.
And for online stores
Stores are a separate decision. We compare Shopify with a custom store in When We Build the Shop, and When We Don’t.
