Fóir as an alternative to WordPress
WordPress runs a very large share of the web and it is a page engine with an application bolted on. Fóir is the other way round: structured content and an API, with the editing surface built on top.
Side by side
| Capability | Fóir | WordPress |
|---|---|---|
| Price | £0.99, £29 or £99 a month | Free to license, then hosting, plugins and maintenance |
| Content management | Standard | Standard |
| Content shape | Models and fields you define | Posts, meta, and a plugin for the rest |
| API | Typed GraphQL, generated | REST, or GraphQL via a plugin |
| Keeping it running | Managed, nothing to patch | Core, plugins and PHP, on you |
| Personalisation | Built in, resolved per request | Plugins, resolved in the page |
| Agent access | Content and control plane | Whatever a plugin exposes |
| Many sites | A project each, one workspace | Multisite, or many installs |
| Front end | Any framework, or none | Themes, or headless with effort |
Price
- Fóir
- £0.99, £29 or £99 a month
- WordPress
- Free to license, then hosting, plugins and maintenance
Content management
- Fóir
- Standard
- WordPress
- Standard
Content shape
- Fóir
- Models and fields you define
- WordPress
- Posts, meta, and a plugin for the rest
API
- Fóir
- Typed GraphQL, generated
- WordPress
- REST, or GraphQL via a plugin
Keeping it running
- Fóir
- Managed, nothing to patch
- WordPress
- Core, plugins and PHP, on you
Personalisation
- Fóir
- Built in, resolved per request
- WordPress
- Plugins, resolved in the page
Agent access
- Fóir
- Content and control plane
- WordPress
- Whatever a plugin exposes
Many sites
- Fóir
- A project each, one workspace
- WordPress
- Multisite, or many installs
Front end
- Fóir
- Any framework, or none
- WordPress
- Themes, or headless with effort
WordPress's behaviour is taken from its published documentation, current at August 2026. Where we say a thing is absent we mean absent from the product and its official plugins, not impossible to build. Corrections are welcome and we will make them.
Structure instead of a soup of meta fields
A WordPress post is a title, a body and a pile of meta rows that custom-field plugins give shape to. Querying it means knowing which plugin wrote what.
In Fóir the model is the contract. Fields have types, references are real, and the API is generated from them, so the shape you author is the shape you read.
Nothing to patch on a Tuesday
Most WordPress incidents are not the CMS. They are a plugin, a theme or a PHP version, and keeping that surface current is a standing job.
Fóir is managed. There is no plugin tree to audit and no server of yours in the path.
One schema across every client site
Running twenty WordPress sites means twenty installs to update, or a multisite that couples them together.
In Fóir, client sites that share a schema are organisations inside one project: the model is defined once and each organisation inherits it, with its own content kept apart. A client who shares nothing gets a project of their own in the same workspace.
The editors keep an interface
Going headless with WordPress usually means keeping wp-admin around for the editors while the front end moves on.
Fóir's admin is the editing surface, built for the same models your application reads.
What you would otherwise assemble
A content API is the smallest part of what an application needs. These come with it.
Publishing
Drafts, full version history, revert, publish at a future time, and bulk rollouts when a batch has to go live together.
Model behaviour
Per model: versioning, publishing, variants, or none of them. Records can be plain data, owned by a customer, or public.
Permissions
Roles for your team and roles for your customers, plus per-record visibility and grants to a named person.
Hosted sign-in
Password, one-time code, and social or OIDC providers, on your own domain, with tokens and refresh handled for you.
Media and assets
An asset library with upload, transformations and responsive renditions, and the same access rules over files as records.
API keys
Each key reaches exactly the models and operations you allow, against a schema generated for that project.
Automation
Cron schedules, lifecycle hooks on publish and change, outbound operations, and a vault for the keys they need.
Notifications
Transactional email and push to web, iOS and Android, from the same events your content already emits.
Notes and tasks
Comments anchored to the record they concern rather than to a page, assignable to whoever has to act on them.
Ask Fóir
An assistant that works your content through the same tools and permissions your team has, staging its edits for review.
Work that carries on without you
Assign a task to Fóir and it works while you are away, coming back on the note when it needs an answer or is done.
Extensions
Install apps that add your own tools to the admin, beside the content they operate on.
Search and vectors
Full-text search, and embeddings generated for your records so you can retrieve by meaning rather than by keyword.
Geo
Store coordinates on any model and query by proximity: what is near this point, ordered by distance.
See it against your own models
Create a project, define a model, and read it back over the API.