There is no best CMS for everyone. For a blog or a small business website, WordPress is usually enough. A store that runs on 1C (the accounting and inventory system most Moldovan companies use) and needs a ready-made sync with it is a good fit for 1C-Bitrix. A small store on a tight budget is often launched on OpenCart. Shopify lets you start selling without a developer, and a landing page or a simple business card site can be put together in an evening on Tilda or Wix. Headless platforms make sense for multilingual sites with real traffic and integrations, when you have developers on the team. You choose a platform for the job it has to do, for the budget over three years, and for the people who will keep it updated.
Below we go through each option honestly: who it suits, where it is strong, and what to check before you commit. We are a web studio in Chișinău, so we look at it the way a Moldovan business would: 1C, Paynet and MAIB for payments, and a site in both Romanian and Russian.
Start with the job, not the platform
People usually reach for a CMS ranking too early. Rankings like W3Techs and BuiltWith count how many sites run on each platform, and by that measure WordPress is the most widely used CMS in the world. That tells you it is popular and that a developer is easy to find. Whether it will work for your store with a catalog pulled from 1C, the ranking says nothing at all.
So start with what the site has to do. In practice, projects fall into five types.
Business card site or landing page. A few pages, a phone number, a contact form. Almost anything works here. The questions are price and who will edit the copy.
Content site or blog. Lots of articles, categories, search, SEO. You need an editor that is pleasant to use and decent handling of languages.
Online store with a small catalog. Up to a few hundred products entered by hand, card payments, delivery within Moldova.
Store or catalog fed from accounting. Products, prices and stock live in 1C, and the site has to show them without anyone copying data over by hand. Here the integration with accounting eats more of the budget than the storefront does.
Site as part of a larger system. Leads go to a CRM, orders go to an ERP, dealers see their own prices in a customer account. At this point you are choosing an architecture more than a CMS.
Seven questions to answer before you choose a CMS
There aren't many criteria. Ideally you have an answer to each one before your first call with a contractor.
- What the site does now and what it will do in two years. If a store is in the plans but today you only need a business card site, pick a platform that can handle the store, or budget for a move later.
- What it costs to own for three years, not just to launch. License, subscription, paid plugins, hosting, updates, custom work. We break down the math below.
- Who installs updates and patches vulnerabilities. On SaaS platforms the service does it for you. With WordPress, Bitrix and OpenCart, the platform's developers release the updates and your team or contractor installs them. That's ordinary scheduled work, and it belongs in the plan from day one.
- How the site connects to 1C. A ready-made module, a third-party plugin, or custom work built around your accounting setup. And who checks every day that the sync is actually running.
- Which payment providers you can connect. In Moldova that means Paynet and MAIB card acquiring first of all, plus QR payments through MIA, the national instant payment system. Check that Moldovan payment providers can be connected before you pick the platform.
- How Romanian and Russian will work. Separate URLs for each language, hreflang, translated SEO fields, and fonts that render ș and ț correctly (with a comma below, not a cedilla).
- Who will run the site afterwards. Your own team, a contractor on a support plan, or the studio that built it. Any of these works, as long as it's decided up front and written into the contract.
A side-by-side CMS comparison
| Platform | Best for | Pricing model | Who installs updates | 1C sync | Paynet, MAIB | Russian/Romanian | Who runs the site afterwards |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress (+WooCommerce) | Blog, company website, small store | Free, with paid themes and plugins | Your team or contractor: core, theme, plugins | Via plugins | Check before choosing | WPML or Polylang plugins | Your own team or any contractor, plenty of specialists |
| 1C-Bitrix | Store or corporate site that syncs with 1C | Paid license | Vendor releases them, your team or a partner installs | Built-in sync module | Check before choosing | Built in | Your own team or a 1C-Bitrix partner |
| OpenCart | Small store on a tight budget | Free, with paid modules | Your team or contractor | Via modules | Check before choosing | Built in | Your own team or a contractor |
| Shopify | Selling without a developer | Monthly subscription plus fees and apps | Shopify | Through apps or custom work | Check before choosing | Built in | You, with a Shopify expert if needed |
| Tilda, Wix | Landing page, business card site, promo page | Subscription | The platform | Not what site builders are for | Check before choosing | Separate pages (Tilda), built-in module (Wix) | You |
| Headless (Strapi, Directus, Sanity and similar + Next.js) | Multilingual site with traffic and integrations | Open source or subscription, plus development | Development team | Via API, built around your accounting | Via API, built around your setup | Designed into the architecture | Development team, in-house or a partner's |
The table simplifies things. Check every row as of the date you're choosing: payment modules get updated and pricing changes.
The platforms one by one
WordPress
The most popular CMS, and a great choice for a blog, a media site or a company website of 5–30 pages. Any content manager can figure out the editor, there are thousands of themes and plugins, and you can find a developer in Chișinău within a week. For a store you add WooCommerce, and for a small catalog it works fine.
WordPress's strength is its ecosystem: there is already a plugin for almost any task. Each plugin updates on its own schedule, so the site needs someone who installs updates regularly and checks that everything still works. That's the normal routine for a WordPress site, and it's best to assign it to someone right away, either an employee or a contractor on a support plan.
WordPress connects to 1C through plugins, and for a simple sync of products and prices that's enough. Wholesale prices, several warehouses, or orders going back into accounting usually mean custom code.
1C-Bitrix
A commercial CMS from a Russian developer, closely tied to 1C. Its main advantage is that syncing the catalog, prices, stock and orders with 1C works out of the box, over a standard protocol. For a store whose entire accounting lives in 1C, that saves a noticeable share of the integration budget.
The license is paid and depends on the edition. Ask a 1C-Bitrix partner about the terms for purchase and renewal. Bitrix is built for serious projects: it needs hosting with caching, and Bitrix specialists cost more than WordPress ones. If you work with partners in the EU, check in advance whether they have any requirements for the software their contractors use.
OpenCart
A free ecommerce platform that is popular in the CIS countries (the former Soviet states). It launches quickly, the admin panel is simple, and there's a module catalog for payments, delivery and 1C sync. For a store with a few hundred products managed by hand, it's an affordable option that does the job.
Modules are written by different authors, so before a major platform update their compatibility has to be checked. If the store plans to grow, it helps to agree with your contractor in advance on who handles this and when.
Shopify
A hosted platform: you pay a subscription, and Shopify takes care of hosting, security and updates. The pricing model is a monthly subscription plus transaction fees and paid apps, so check the current terms on Shopify's website. For getting sales started without your own developer it's very convenient, especially if you sell abroad.
For a Moldovan company, the first question about Shopify is payments: check that Moldovan payment providers can be connected before you choose the platform. Sync with 1C is done through apps or custom work.
Tilda and Wix
Site builders. You can put together a landing page, a business card site or a promo page on them in a day, and for a single page with a phone number and address there's no reason to pay a studio. Tilda gives you good-looking blocks and fast results, while Wix has a built-in language module and a simple store.
Site builders are made for sites you run yourself, without a developer. A 1C sync usually isn't part of that job, connecting Moldovan payment providers is something to check before you choose, and SEO settings only go as far as your plan allows. If you later need a store with a catalog from 1C, it's usually built on a different platform.
Headless CMS platforms
Here the CMS only stores content, and the site itself is built separately, usually with Next.js. Examples include Strapi, Directus, Sanity and Contentful. The result is a fast site, languages are designed into the architecture, and it connects to 1C, CRM and ERP through an API in exactly the way you need.
This is a project for a development team: integrations are written for you rather than installed as a plugin. The approach pays off when the site matters to the business and there's a team behind it, in-house or a partner's.
WordPress or 1C-Bitrix
In Moldova this question comes up more than any other, because so many companies keep their books in 1C. The short answer goes like this. If the site mostly tells people about the company, runs a blog and collects leads, go with WordPress: it's cheaper to build, easier for editors, and there are more specialists. If it's a store where the whole catalog, prices and stock live in 1C and orders have to go back into accounting, Bitrix handles the sync out of the box and will save you money on integration. Both paths work: WordPress with a custom-built sync, or Bitrix with a license and its standard sync. Run the numbers on both over three years before you decide.
How to budget for three years
The launch price is only the first line of costs. A €600 site on a site builder and a €6,000 custom site can end up costing almost the same after three years if the first one had to be rebuilt twice as the store grew.
Count five lines:
- Launch: design, development, content migration, SEO setup.
- Platform: license and renewals, subscription, paid themes, plugins and apps over 36 months.
- Hosting: server, SSL, backups, attack protection.
- Maintenance: updates, security patches, checking the 1C sync, responding to outages. That's a specialist's hours every month, even when "nothing is happening".
- Growth: new sections, integrations, rework as the business grows.
The fourth line is the one people forget most often, because for the first few months the site runs fine without it. But updates keep coming out, and someone has to install them. Your own team, a contractor on a support contract, or a partner who runs the site: that's your call, but make it before launch.
The real choice is how you want to work
If you boil this guide down to one decision, it isn't between a good system and a bad one. It's between "buy it and run it ourselves" and "work with a partner who runs the system together with us". WordPress, Bitrix, OpenCart and Shopify are platforms you pick up, set up and keep developing with your own team or any contractor. That's a perfectly normal route, especially if the company has its own developer or marketer responsible for the site. The second route is for those who don't want to keep the site in-house: one team builds it, hosts it, updates it, promotes it and develops it for years.
How we do it
We work the second way, and we don't sell a CMS on its own. WebX builds client sites and stores on our group's own platform: Garm CMS for websites, Garm Ecom for stores. The group was founded in 2017, and Garm CMS is its own platform, which we write and develop ourselves. Pages are assembled from blocks, each language has its own URLs and SEO fields, a draft can be shared by link before it goes live, and images are served in AVIF and WebP. We solve a client's problem in the platform's code rather than by hunting for a plugin, and we install updates and security patches ourselves without waiting for anyone to ask. Projects run on Garm infrastructure, on our own servers in the EU, behind Garm WAF, with 24/7 monitoring and nightly backups. The catalog, prices and stock come from 1C, payments are connected through Paynet, and Russian, Romanian and English are built into the structure from day one. A corporate website starts from €1,500, a store with a catalog from 1C from €5,000, and support from €250 a month, all excluding VAT.
To be upfront about the other side of this: a site on our platform is run by us, not by any contractor off the market. That's a deliberate choice, because we want to be responsible for the whole site. If company policy says the site has to live on your own servers, we'll hand it over, and from then on updates and security are on your side. "Here's your site, you're on your own" is not how we work. We stay with the client from the first brief and for the long haul, and the same people build, promote, support and develop the site.
If the site needs to be part of a system, with leads flowing into a CRM or orders into an ERP, that's a conversation about architecture, not about a CMS. We have that one too.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best CMS for an online store?
It depends on the catalog. For a small store managed by hand, WooCommerce or OpenCart will do, and Shopify if you want to start without a developer. If products, prices and stock live in 1C, look at 1C-Bitrix or at custom development with an API sync. There's no single best ecommerce platform, so compare the cost of ownership over three years, not the launch price.
WordPress or Bitrix: which should I choose?
WordPress if the site tells people about the company, runs a blog and collects leads: it's cheaper and there are more specialists. Bitrix if it's a store with a catalog from 1C and orders going back into accounting, because its 1C sync is built in. The Bitrix license is paid, and developers cost more.
Can I connect Paynet and MAIB to Shopify or Wix?
That depends on whether the payment provider has an app or module for that specific platform. If taking payments in lei (MDL) from cards issued by Moldovan banks is critical for you, check the Paynet and MAIB connection before you choose a platform, not after launch.
How much does CMS website support cost?
Count a specialist's hours every month: core and plugin updates, testing after updates, backups, the 1C sync. On SaaS platforms this is included in the subscription. At WebX, support with hosting behind Garm WAF starts from €250 a month, excluding VAT.
How do I build a site in Romanian and Russian the right way?
Each language needs its own URLs, hreflang tags and translated title and description. Write the copy in each language rather than running it through machine translation. And check that your font supports the Romanian ș and ț with a comma below.
Is it better to use an off-the-shelf CMS or work with a partner?
It depends on who will run the site. If you have your own team, an off-the-shelf CMS like WordPress or Shopify is a normal route: you set it up and develop it yourselves or with any contractor. If you don't want to keep the site in-house, work with a partner who builds, hosts, updates and promotes it for years.
Can I move from a site builder to a CMS later?
Yes. Usually the storefront is rebuilt on the new platform, while the copy, images and products are carried over and 301 redirects are set up from the old URLs so you don't lose your Google rankings.
What is a CMS ranking, and can I rely on it?
Rankings like W3Techs show how many sites run on each platform. That's useful for knowing whether a developer will be easy to find. Whether a CMS is right for your store, a ranking won't tell you.