Almost every site I run is on MODX. I’ve been considering moving all my sites to the Modxcloud just to make life easier, so I hope it’s not going anywhere. I finally found VA coder that can build a site from scratch and understands MODX.
Recently, I took on an SEO client who has a Squarespace site. I hate every click when I work on it. HA!
I actually moved all my MODX sites to MODX Cloud about two years ago. Was truly a fantastic move. So much easier to update, manage and backup sites.
It is quite a bit more expensive from what I had before (genetic hosting at several companies) but worth the money and support and advice for the MODX team is fast and solid.
Given that all CMSs and their plugins / extras require updates which will often break the site - I’m not sure it’s possible to completely hand any site over to untrained users.
However, I’d argue that with the depth of customisation possible with MODX - it’s far better suited to building sites where most of the updates will be carried out by unskilled users.
TVs, Form Customisation and ACLs [not to mention some extremely useful extras] can all be combined to present editors with precisely what they need to see - and nothing more.
This has the dual benefit of keeping things very simple for the editors while simultaneously limiting what they can update / access.
This flexibility comes at a cost - complexity. I’ve shed tears over some security / ACL setups!
But without that complexity - many of the useful configurations that we deploy wouldn’t be possible and
I kind of love the fact that there is always more to learn about MODX.
So I’d argue that MODX can do anything WP can, better and much more beyond.
This exact problem is what led me to MODX In 2005/6. Even with Evo I could build out a site simple enough for a small business owner to be trained on how to make changes to their site. Between the Resource tree as analog to the site menus and the field labels along with the appropriate use of TVs, I rarely had issues with clients (almost exclusively owner managed company owners and small businesses) managing their content. Where they needed assistance was customization and site upgrades. But WordPress didn’t gain automatic upgrades (formerly site exploders) until sometime in the mid-to-late 2010s.
Continuting to add things like Form Customization and Extending the usability with the appropriate use of things like Content Blocks or Fred and hiding things that various levels of users don’t need to see or should not have access to including hiding fields on the Resource Edit view, using Media Sources and more can streamline the user experience for non-developers.
Where WordPress shines is for organizations seeking to get a proof of concept in place quickly and you know, if things go well, you will need a more bespoke website and you may grow into MODX.
But WP on the security and performance side, these days is an area that requires a fair bit of experience in making sure the site’s aren’t like walking throuhgh wet sand and to run a WordPress site without a web application firewall is asking for trouble given how easily plugins are to use as a vector for attack.
To the point of others and not comparing to WordPress? It’s kind of inevitable. MODX Is more than WordPress and competes well with Drupal, Adobe and many other Enterprisey CMSs well. We’ve built (not that I’ve done much of the work) massicely trafficked enterprise-scale projects combined with high-availabiltiy and load balancing, as well as integrations with dozens of APIs and headless UIs. There really are few website projects that can’t be done and managed well in MODX and be tailored to the organization and the people who will manage it no matter what their skill level.
MODX Cloud is here to stay. We’ve been here for 11 years and we’re going to be here for many more. Do reach out to the team if you have any questions.
The problem is that it is not reliable how long Modx will be in future further developed.
If it ends next year what do you tell your customers? I will not think about it.
MODX continues to be developed. Is it as fast as people might want? No. But, it’s not going anywhere. There’s no evidence to support even the suggestion that it’s not reliable. We’re preparing to release 3.1 and we’re setting the stage for the next major version at this time.
MODX works very well for handing off sites to non-techies. If you do it diplomatically, and don’t rush things, you can actually get them to learn HTML. 
Wordpress commands such a massive market share for a reason, and those who adopt it in the masses aren’t just teen bloggers, they’re highly skilled and technical developers who work with Wordpress and continue to source it for their client sites. As much as I have a fond history with Modx, I have to say it’s been left so far behind that it can’t compete with Wordpress on virtually any level: security, performance, extensibility, robustness, usability, community, developers, I could go on. Some may argue, but this has been my experience after working on both platforms for several years, though arguably Modx may have come a long way in the last 5 or so.
@cyclissmo
I’m curious, why you are saying, you miss MODX, when you are happy with WP.
What about MODX is it exactly, that you are missing while using WP?
Interestingly enough, all those points brought (and still bring) me away from WP and make me love MODX, because I feel MODX has all that and WP does not. But that might be very well subjective and therefore it’s nice to have different options for different people 
Wordpress commands such a massive market share for a reason
And that reason is that popularity begats popularity. The masses aren’t out there doing careful research and making informed decisions; they’re being lazy, going with name recognition, and doing what is cheapest and easiest. Sure, there are plenty of highly skilled developers that work in the space but it’s not because of WP’s superiority in any area save one: market share. These developers are making a financial decision, not a technical one.
Popularity doesn’t come from merit. Just look at pop culture. The most popular things are never the most intelligent or insightful; quite the opposite.
it can’t compete with Wordpress on virtually any level: security, performance, extensibility, robustness, usability, community, developers
I think you must be joking. These are all the reasons for choosing MODX over WP. The WP community is certainly larger (better is a matter of opinion) but on every other point WP is objectively inferior to MODX. WP has 7126 CVEs in the database, where MODX has had only 59 over the same time period. And performance? This is laughable.
Tell me more about this!
The masses aren’t out there doing careful research and making informed decisions; they’re being lazy, going with name recognition, and doing what is cheapest and easiest.
What’s wrong with branding, especially when the brand is trusted by top brands, government entities, enterprises and SMB? You can argue that stakeholders and developers are making lazy, uninformed decisions adopting Wordpress. To me it sounds like good business.
it can’t compete with Wordpress on virtually any level: security, performance, extensibility, robustness, usability, community, developers
I think you must be joking. These are all the reasons for choosing MODX over WP. The WP community is certainly larger (better is a matter of opinion) but on every other point WP is objectively inferior to MODX. WP has 7126 CVEs in the database, where MODX has had only 59 over the same time period. And performance? This is laughable.
Nope. Not joking:
Security: Well of course Wordpress is going to log more CVE’s. But any reasonable person would expect that, given that Wordpress is low-hanging fruit and a far more lucrative target to hackers; MODx in contrast is diminuitive and flies under their radars.
Community: Vast.
Extensibility, Flexibility: MODx has several staple plugins and snippets to help speed development of a site, but many have not seen updates in years. If you need some obscure functionality, chances are you’ll have to roll your own; not a trivial task at all with legacy Extjs powering the admin console UI. Wordpress, in contrast, has tens of thousands of plugins including integrations provided by many major platforms like Salesforce, Constant Contact and others. Need to roll your own functionality or extending an existing plugin? Easy peasy with Wordpress’ event-driven architecture.
Performance: There’s many hosts that are tuned specifically for Wordpress that implement tiered caching, including varnish, redis, memcached, and plenty of plugins to tune caching based on preferences. Achieving top scores on lighthouse is expected for any skilled Wordpress dev worth their salt.
Ah, I see; you’re not actually talking about extensibility or flexibility of the platform but rather the number of pre-built plugins that can be cobbled together. This should really fall under the “Community” category which, we all agree, is larger. And while it is possible, with enough work, to squeeze acceptable performance out of WP this in no way means WP is more performant than MODX.
Nothing per se, however, branding is specious; it’s an image someone is trying to sell and isn’t necessarily representative of the product. It’s not a good idea to base a decision on a product’s branding. The tech space is full of companies and products that were branded well, generated a lot of hype, but lacked any real substance.
I won’t beat this exchange to death, and I respect your commitment to Modx. It is a very good cms. But there’s no point in continuing a debate on Modx vs Wordpress with someone, unlike myself, who hasn’t put in serious time on both platforms to have some measure of objectivity.