That's it i've made the big move, like many others. After twenty years of wordpress development, I have to learn it all again. SEO, forms, page building, everything comes free and open source with statamic, unlike wordpress which requires a few hundred bucks to build serious web content management. Of course, on the long run, you might want to switch to Statamic Pro, which costs less than 300 hundred dollar the first year, and 65 for license renewal each year. For that small fee you get additional features like multi site management in one install, revisions, etc..
Starting statamic with a good page builder
If' you're looking to visual page builder, wordpress still leads the way with evolved plugins like Elementor, Divi, Oxygen Builder, or the more recent nectar builder, which really looks nice, a bit like the old semplice builder, designed specifically .. for designers and visual creative websites.
But if you're a good developer willing to spend a few hours on the initial learning curve of Statamic, provided you have laravel experience, it's worth the go. Among all field types that Statamic offers natively, you'll find the replicator field type that's really designed for content management. Remember one of the reasons we're all leaving wordpress is the fight between WordPress creator and famous Custom field plugin creators and maintainers (Advanced Custom Fields). Those like me who like to work with custom fields for content management, and I really think it's the way to go, can no longer rely on such conflictual context for business development on the long term. So between a dodgy plugin situation in WordPress and the native management of custom fields in Statamic, let's do it.
Main difference, of course, is the visual aspect of things. In statamic, you'll have to work your content within the field context, not really enjoying the inline edit experience our customers like on wordpress page builders. Statamic now offers live preview of your content within the edit experience on top of the main control panel (CP), but unless you work on developing your own content refresh module (check out auto refreshing and Alpine or Livewire hot reload implementation), the experience involves reloading the whole page almost each time you type characters, which is really not yet up to inline editing standards. So most of the time you'd stick to raw CP edit without the live preview, I suppose that's how most editors work.
Tip : check out existing page builders
fortunately, after you've understood how statamic fields work (more than 40 field types), you have the choice of reinventing the wheel, I mean a page builder, or, like I finally did, try an existing starter kit, equivalent of the worpress theme, but better organized in the sense that a big problem with wordpress was its mono table structure, everything was stored in the post table with and extra post_meta table for custom stuff, whereas in Statamic content is properly organized in specific structure (file or database, you pick your choice).
well my starter kit of choice is.. blogo. I chose this one because like most statamic creations it includes tailwind and it looks quite simple enough for starting complex websites with advanced block management based on replicator sets. That would be your page builder, which I enhanced by adding a few fields in the content field set for class management, file upload... you choose, once you know where to go it only takes minutes to add new fields and let your content editor use them. You could also try Peak, for may be more activity on the codebase, tailwind 4 compatibilty, while blogo has not had activity for more than a year, it's still good though believe me.
Extend like you want
The original page builder created by Afan Adjari is nice, and I decided to extend the content field set to integrate styles , template, and image fields. this gives me infinite possiblities, except working visually with columns, no doubt someone has a solution out there. For the moment I deal with two column layout , firs column is image and other on is the bard text. O and for styles I do have a specific field to apply custom styles to any text block, but also rely on my own extra styles within bard using bard text style plugin (free and pro versions available).
on the control panel side, I'd say you can't live without a proper toolbar that allows you to switch back and forth from CP to front and vice versa. In wordpress, this is native , in statamic there's a free plugin for that and i'ts really cool apart from the fact that it opens a new window, just almost perfect, and importantly, very discreet on the front side.
UX and UI development
being an integrator I also needed the basic toolset for image display : swiper js and fslightbox are for the moment my javscript libraries of choice for replacing wordpress image galleries with lightbox display. for basis scroll based animations, I use the very light tailwind-intersect package.