StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Self Hosted Blogging Cms
  5. ExpressionEngine vs Layers

ExpressionEngine vs Layers

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Layers
Layers
Stacks5
Followers23
Votes0
ExpressionEngine
ExpressionEngine
Stacks445
Followers17
Votes0
GitHub Stars487
Forks129

Layers vs ExpressionEngine: What are the differences?

What is Layers? A simple WordPress site builder. Layers is a WordPress Theme framework focused on extending the WordPress core functionality to include layout building through the WordPress Visual Customizer. A lightweight set of base options, widgets and theme templates provide a user-friendly, extensible tool for creating beautiful, WordPress-faithful websites.

What is ExpressionEngine? Open-Source and feature-rich content management system. It is a flexible, feature-rich, free open-source content management platform that empowers hundreds of thousands of individuals and organizations around the world to easily manage their web site.

Layers and ExpressionEngine can be categorized as "Self-Hosted Blogging / CMS" tools.

Some of the features offered by Layers are:

  • Preset layouts allow you to get a head start without the intimidation of a big blank canvas
  • Create robust, responsive designs that look incredible on mobile phones and tablets
  • Integration with WooCommerce means you can start selling right out of the box

On the other hand, ExpressionEngine provides the following key features:

  • Your site content is stored in channels—flexible data containers with fields for any type of information
  • A Template may contain ANYTHING that a webpage might contain: HTML, JavaScript, PHP, whatever
  • Live Preview

Layers and ExpressionEngine are both open source tools. It seems that ExpressionEngine with 183 GitHub stars and 46 forks on GitHub has more adoption than Layers with 11 GitHub stars and 6 GitHub forks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

Layers
Layers
ExpressionEngine
ExpressionEngine

Layers is a WordPress Theme framework focused on extending the WordPress core functionality to include layout building through the WordPress Visual Customizer. A lightweight set of base options, widgets and theme templates provide a user-friendly, extensible tool for creating beautiful, WordPress-faithful websites.

It is a flexible, feature-rich, free open-source content management platform that empowers hundreds of thousands of individuals and organizations around the world to easily manage their web site.

Preset layouts allow you to get a head start without the intimidation of a big blank canvas;Create robust, responsive designs that look incredible on mobile phones and tablets;Integration with WooCommerce means you can start selling right out of the box
Your site content is stored in channels—flexible data containers with fields for any type of information;A Template may contain ANYTHING that a webpage might contain: HTML, JavaScript, PHP, whatever;Live Preview
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
487
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
129
Stacks
5
Stacks
445
Followers
23
Followers
17
Votes
0
Votes
0
Integrations
WordPress
WordPress
HTML5
HTML5
JavaScript
JavaScript
MySQL
MySQL
PHP
PHP
Rocket
Rocket

What are some alternatives to Layers, ExpressionEngine?

WordPress

WordPress

The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.

Drupal

Drupal

Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.

Strapi

Strapi

Strapi is100% JavaScript, extensible, and fully customizable. It enables developers to build projects faster by providing a customizable API out of the box and giving them the freedom to use the their favorite tools.

Ghost

Ghost

Ghost is a platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing. It's beautifully designed, completely customisable and completely Open Source. Ghost allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do.

Wagtail

Wagtail

Wagtail is a Django content management system built originally for the Royal College of Art and focused on flexibility and user experience.

OctoberCMS

OctoberCMS

It is a Laravel-based CMS engineered for simplicity. It has a simple and intuitive interface. It provides a consistent structure with an emphasis on reusability so you can focus on building something unique while we handle the boring bits.

Twill

Twill

Twill is an open source CMS toolkit for Laravel that helps developers rapidly create a custom admin console that is intuitive, powerful and flexible.

ProcessWire

ProcessWire

ProcessWire is an open source content management system (CMS) and web application framework aimed at the needs of designers, developers and their clients. ProcessWire gives you more control over your fields, templates and markup than other platforms, and provides a powerful template system that works the way you do

Typo3

Typo3

It is a free and open-source Web content management system written in PHP. It can run on several web servers, such as Apache or IIS, on top of many operating systems, among them Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, macOS and OS/2.

Directus

Directus

Let's say you're planning on managing content for a website, native app, and widget. Instead of using a CMS that's baked into the website client, it makes more sense to decouple your content entirely and access it through an API or SDK. That's a headless CMS. That's Directus.

Related Comparisons

HipChat
Slack

HipChat vs Mattermost vs Slack

Litmus
Email on Acid

Email on Acid vs Litmus

InVision
Proto.io

InVision vs Marvel vs Proto.io

Webex
Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams vs Webex

Slack
RocketChat

Mattermost vs RocketChat vs Slack