Compared to…

There are a lot of ways to create, host, and maintain a website. In a lot of cases, Clear Label might be the best option, but definitely not in every case. Here are some comparisons.

Wordpress

Wordpress is a great choice for just about any kind of website. It's flexible, it's stable, lots of people already know how it works. But Clear Label can do a lot of the same stuff Wordpress does.

With Advanced Custom Fields, editors can manage really complex systems of structured data. Clear Label has this functionality out of the box; it's a central concept of the system. It can sometimes feel like you're fighting with the preconceived notions of what a Post or Page is in Wordpress when layering on ACF configuration. Clear Label has no preconceived notions about your data at all.

Wordpress injects a lot of metadata into your HTML and forces you to support some specific URLs (like /wp-admin/). Clear Label never publishes HTML or URLs you haven't written yourself.

Wordpress has an unimpeachable ecosystem of plugins. Clear Label has no plugins. Just about anything a Wordpress plugin grants you can be implemented directly in Clear Label, but if you're someone who enjoys hunting for the perfect plugin to solve a problem, Clear Label might not be for you. (If you're curious about whether the features of a particular plugin can be emulated here, email me and I'd be happy to talk to you about it.)

Squarespace, Wix, Webflow

There are a lot of visually-driven website services. They vary somewhat in their flexibility and features, but one thing's for sure: if you are not comfortable with HTML and CSS and prefer designing a website with a graphical interface, Clear Label is probably not for you (yet).

However, once your site is set up, it's entirely possible you'll never have to look at its code. Clear Label's CMS is designed around creating custom admin forms that provide flexible controls for the content and appearance of a website using a graphical interface. If you happen to already be working with someone who can code—if you've hired a developer to set up your site, say—you might consider sending them here. When it comes to structured content like events, a platform like Squarespace has a solution but it may not be the solution you want. With Clear Label, you can end up with exactly the fields of content you want, presented exactly how you want them.

Next.js/React, Ruby on Rails, Django

Clear Label is a website platform, not a web application platform. If you're gathering user-generated content, generating custom pages on the fly, or selling things, Clear Label is probably not for you yet. However, you might be surprised how much of a "dynamic" website can actually be totally static with a good CMS. If you're running a custom ecommerce platform, you might consider migrating your catalog to Clear Label and sending your users to a separate app when it's time to check out. You could effectively delete a huge portion of your app in favor of a faster and more stable static site. You could even render JSON files with Clear Label to provide an API that your dynamic app consumes. (If this interesting to you, you should absolutely email me to talk about it. I love this stuff. Obviously.)

Eleventy, Hugo, Jekyll

The oldest design documents for Clear Label date back to the late 2000s, and this project evolved alongside the explosion of filesystem-based static website generators that have appeared since then.

Like those projects, Clear Label generates static sites. The content here is not flat files, and you can't open them in your text editor. If that's a dealbreaker for you, I get it. The benefit of Clear Label's hosted CMS is…that it's a CMS, and not flat files. If you want to get other people involved in maintaining your website and you don't want them to have to learn what YAML is, Clear Label might be for you.

Prismic, Contentful, Strapi

If you're using a hosted headless CMS for your project, you should be migrate to Clear Label instead. I really believe that! Clear Label is designed primarily to serve HTML but you can just as easily render JSON if you wanted to. A lot of the design of Clear Label is based on my own frustration with headless CMSes. You really ought to give it a try.

Ready to see it for yourself?

I really hope you are. Email me and I'll get you started!