A World Beyond WordPress: Why Developers Are Turning to Payload Instead of ACF
Date Published
If you’ve spent years building custom WordPress themes and fine-tuning projects with Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), you may be wondering what’s next. The short answer: there’s life beyond WordPress — and Payload might just be what you’ve been waiting for.
The Fall of ACF and the WordPress Fatigue
I couldn’t believe it when I saw it - ACF, the plugin I’ve used for over a decade, replaced by something called Secure Custom Fields. All because of community drama. Seriously, it’s starting to feel like the Twilight Zone.
But honestly, this change didn’t come out of nowhere. The warning signs have been there for a while. Just open your WordPress dashboard: you’re greeted with ads for WordPress events. That’s not what open-source software is supposed to look like. It’s supposed to empower developers, not promote corporate branding inside your workspace.
And that brings us to an important question:
Is WordPress still the right tool for modern development? Probably not. While it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, this moment is a chance for developers to step back and reconsider what WordPress does — and what it shouldn’t do. It’s time to imagine a world where we’re not forcing WordPress to do things it was never meant to handle.
Why Payload?
Lets's all admit it: Most hands on developers are not huge fans of WordPress. Although we can respect what it accomplished - it democratized publishing - but then Payload was built so we would never have to rely on clunky CMS's again. According to the developers of Payload, Payload was born out of the frustration of dealing with WordPress’s outdated architecture, plugin chaos, and questionable ecosystem.
Unlike WordPress, Payload uses modern dependency management. It relies on npm, an open and secure package registry backed by Microsoft. That said, it’s important to acknowledge what WordPress did right. The biggest win? It’s open source. Clients love the idea of owning their code. They can host it anywhere, extend it however they want, and aren’t trapped in a proprietary system.
Compare that to most SaaS CMS platforms: the first thing clients ask is:
- “What if we want to switch vendors?”
- “What if prices go up?”
- “What if we need a feature they don’t offer?”
With WordPress, those concerns vanish — but beyond that, its advantages fade fast. What’s Next for Developers After WordPress? WordPress users generally fall into two camps:
No-code users — the ones assembling plugins and themes, hoping nothing breaks or gets hacked.
Developers — the ones writing custom code, building themes from scratch, and using ACF to model data.
If you’re in that second group, Payload might be the perfect next step. Let’s take a quick look at why.
From ACF to Payload: A Developer’s Perspective
We recently revisited WordPress and spun up a quick ACF project. Honestly? It was not a good experience. For example, I set up two post types: Directors and Movies. But in WordPress, those are just “posts.” Everything — blog entries, movies, directors — lives inside the same wp_posts table or (meta-data).
To be frankly, honest in my opinion it’s messy, inefficient, and conceptually wrong. Those should be separate tables with real relationships, not hacks pretending to be structure. Yuck. To expand on the woes, ACF itself isn’t truly open source — you need a paid license for advanced features.
Now let’s compare Apples to Apples.
Payload: A Schema That Actually Makes Sense
In Payload, I created two collections: Directors and Movies. Immediately, my database structure looked the way it should:
- Movies has a year column.
- director is a foreign key linked to the Directors table.
- poster references the Media table.
Everything works out of the box, with proper data integrity and no messy hacks. And with Payload 3.0, they have introduced bi-directional relationships. Define the relationship on one side, and it automatically appears on the other. No extra code. No headaches. Try doing that with ACF — it’s possible, but it’ll cost you time, money, and a few deep sighs.
In WordPress, everything ends up jammed into one table. With Payload, everything fits where it belongs.
Payload vs. WordPress: A Modern Editing Experience
Payload’s admin UI is designed for developers — clean, fast, and extensible. You get live preview, real-time updates, and modern editing out of the box.
Under the hood, Payload works seamlessly with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or SQLite, giving you proper indexing, relationships, and performance from day one.
It’s the difference between hacking together content types and designing a real data model.
Final Thoughts
WordPress had an incredible run, and it deserves credit for getting millions of people online. But for developers who care about performance, data structure, and maintainability, it’s time to move on.
Payload offers a future where your CMS behaves like a true application framework — one that respects your database, your architecture, and your time.
So if you’ve been building with ACF and wondering what comes next, the answer is simple:
Build it with Payload.