I’ve been building websites with WordPress since 2014, professionally since 2018. I’ve built hundreds of them through SyncWin Media. WordPress is still my go-to platform, and the reason is simple: the ecosystem is so vast that you can build almost any kind of website with it, a blog, an ecommerce store, a community, a magazine, a brochure site, all on the same core.
But I’d be lying if I said the ground under WordPress feels as solid as it used to.
Key Highlights:
- Instatic is a self-hosted, open source visual CMS built by the Core Framework and Motion.page team, founded by David Babinec
- It combines a class-first visual builder (like Bricks or Oxygen) with a full WordPress-style backend: auth, database, posts, etc.
- It has a built-in AI agent that works with your own AI APIs, letting you build with AI and then customize visually, which no other AI platform currently offers
- It’s still alpha, MIT licensed, free, and self-hosted, with a very early plugin ecosystem
- I have no affiliation with Instatic or the team, I just genuinely think this is worth watching
Why I Never Left WordPress, Even with AI Eating Into It
Nowadays, AI is so dominant in every single field that you can’t deny its impact on web design and development. People are using Lovable, Bolt, Cursor, and Claude Code to build websites now.
However, a lot of professionals like me still prefer WordPress, though, because we’re most familiar with the platform, the page builders, the plugin stacks, and the backend functionality it offers: users, posts, pages, settings, themes, authentication, role management. That’s hard to find anywhere else.
Platforms like Supabase and Appwrite power a lot of those AI-generated websites and apps, and honestly, they have most of the same features under the hood. But they’re not an all-in-one solution the way WordPress is. For the frontend, you need something like Astro or React, and for the backend, you use them, and there’s no advanced visual builder concept in that stack. You can’t manage your custom CSS variables the way you can inside WordPress.
It’s undeniable that WordPress is getting old. It was first built in 2003, and the tech stack isn’t as modern as these newer AI-proof solutions. WordPress has added a lot of AI-related features, and there are plugins like Novamira that can help you achieve almost anything.
But the direction WordPress is going in still feels very opinionated, and everything in the backend dashboard feels so dated. Full site editing and the Gutenberg block editor feel useless to me for building websites, although it’s great for blog posts.
It doesn’t feel like it’s targeting the right users. It’s neither satisfying the professionals nor satisfying the newbies. Even though it is an open-source project, the parent company uses it for WordPress.com, a hosted solution (which is completely fine), so the direction ends up heavily influenced by that.
I still use WordPress anyway, ignoring the parts that bother me, focusing on what’s good about it (as there are so many of them): the flexible foundation, the ecosystem, the all-in-one nature of it. Even so, I’ve been looking for a real alternative, a successor, for a long time.
I checked Astro, but it doesn’t have the same all-in-one solution. Webflow and Framer are great, but they’re expensive and not open-source. I looked at a lot of others, and nothing came close, especially for the workflow I use, which is a professional visual builder, a CSS framework, a class-first approach, all powered by WordPress backend features like auth and plugins.
The Video that Changed My Mind
I discovered Instatic on YouTube in a video with Elijah Mills from the Oxygen Builder team, presenting it. I thought it was going to be yet another attempt at forking WordPress into a CMS. Then I started watching, and my mind was genuinely blown.
Here’s the video that started it for me:
The product is built by the team behind Core Framework, one of the most popular CSS framework builders, and Motion.page, a GSAP motion editor for WordPress. The founder is David Babinec, someone well-known and well-respected in the WordPress space. Instatic is heavily inspired by WordPress, but it keeps only the best parts of it and cuts the worst parts out.
It has a class-first visual builder with all the bells and whistles like Bricks and Oxygen. A color system. An element and a structure panel. It has auth, a database, backend pages, posts, almost everything essential that WordPress as a CMS has. It has a built-in CSS variable system and also integrates with the Core Framework.
It also has a secure plugin ecosystem like WP, still very narrow right now since it’s an alpha product and not many people are involved yet. It’s open source, like WordPress, MIT licensed, self-hosted, and free.
The best part for me is that it integrates directly with popular AI platforms. You can use it like Lovable or Bolt to build websites using your own tech stack and your own CSS variables through your own AI APIs from various providers, and then visually customize the design afterward, which isn’t available on those AI platforms. It gives you very advanced builder control and CSS panels, so you can customize however you want, the same way Oxygen, Bricks, and Builderius let you.
What I Actually Think Happens Next
My prediction is that this is going to be big in the future, a true alternative to WordPress, but for professional web designers and developers. It offers only the best parts of WordPress and its most essential plugins natively. It’s not a direct competitor to WordPress since the direction is completely different, but I think a huge chunk of WordPress professionals who want to build with the same tech stack I do will jump over and start using it.
I watched the videos from Elijah Mills and from Paul C at WPTuts to understand the product and what it can actually do, and I’m genuinely excited to try it for a future project.
Here’s the second video, from Paul C, that filled in more of the picture for me:
If it blows up and a community develops around it, then we can take it seriously. It has very high potential, and if things go well, I might move on from WordPress and start using this instead. It’s very early to say that for sure, but the direction of this product is exactly what I wanted from a developer-first WordPress alternative.
If you’re one of the professional WordPress users running a stack like Bricks or Oxygen with BEM or a utility class approach and a CSS framework, and you want everything a WordPress backend offers, you should check this out and support it by spreading the word, so it grows faster, a community builds around it, and it comes out of alpha into a stable version sooner.
To be honest with you, Instatic feels like Webflow, Framer, and WordPress had a child, and it kept all the good features without the heavy price tag, and it’s open source like WordPress. I’ll definitely try it, and I’ll share my thoughts in the future if I feel like it.
Conclusion
For now, I want to congratulate and give a huge thank you to the team behind this for thinking through and creating a product with the right vision. Twelve years on WordPress made me skeptical that anything could genuinely replace it for how I build. Instatic is the first thing that made me stop and reconsider that, even in its rough, early state.
I should also say plainly, I’m not affiliated with Instatic or CoreBunch in any way. I don’t know David Babinec or anyone on the team personally. This is just me, genuinely excited about a product I stumbled onto.
Here’s the link; it’s currently available on GitHub: sync.win/instatic
