WordPress Studio Review  🔗 **Source:** [WordPress Studio Review](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEP3H17BkVI) > [!note]+ Document Notes > --- > tags: [wordpress-studio, local-development, wordpress-playground, developer-tools, wordpress-com] > author: Brian Coords > source: Brian Coords (YouTube) > reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEP3H17BkVI > date created: {{date:YYYY-MM-DD}} {{time:HH:mm}} > --- > # 🏷️ Title: WordPress Studio Review > ## 🧭 Table of Contents > - [📝 Summary](#-summary) > - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) > - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) > - [📚 References](#-references) > - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) > - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) > - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) > - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) > - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) > - [❓ Questions](#-questions) > - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) > - [💡 Implications](#-implications) > - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) > - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) > - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) > - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) > - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) > - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) > ### 🔗 References > - [WordPress Studio (wordpress.com)](https://developer.wordpress.com/studio/) > - [WordPress Playground](https://playground.wordpress.net/) > - [Local WP (WP Engine)](https://localwp.com/) > - [wp-env (official)](https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guides/packages/packages-env/) > ## 📝 Summary > - Brian Coords reviews WordPress.com Studio, a newly released graphical local development tool, and frames the review around correcting three widespread misconceptions rather than a feature walkthrough. > - It matters because the community is mislabeling Studio as official, first-of-its-kind, and a Local WP killer — and each label hides something real about how WordPress, wordpress.org, and wordpress.com actually differ. > - Key stakeholders: wordpress.com / Automattic (vendor), the WordPress Playground and WP Now developers (shared team), WP Engine (Local WP), and WordPress developers choosing a local stack. > - Risks and tradeoffs: Studio runs on Playground (WebAssembly, SQLite), so some things that work on real hosting or Local break in Studio; it lacks WP-CLI bundling, Mail Pit, a database GUI, and any import/export or pull-down-a-live-site workflow. > - Bottom line: a genuinely cool, high-potential tool that's great for spinning up quick sites and building themes/blocks to share, but not yet a replacement for a serious client-development workflow. > ## 📖 Main Content > - Coords defines Studio as a local development tool from wordpress.com that spins up WordPress sites on your machine, wrapping the WP Now CLI in a graphical app and adding a one-click deploy-and-share to wordpress.com servers. > - Under the hood it's WordPress Playground — WordPress compiled to run inside the browser via WebAssembly, running PHP and using SQLite as the database. He calls Playground one of the most innovative places in WordPress and says he uses it every day. > - Misconception 1 — "official tool": Studio is not official. wordpress.com is a private hosting company (part of Automattic, owned by a co-founder), distinct from wordpress.org's open-source project, plugin/theme directories, and forums. The wordpress.com account integration isn't good or bad — Local WP from WP Engine works the same way. The closest thing to an official local environment is wp-env (Docker, command-line, no GUI). > - Misconception 2 — "finally a local tool": there have been a million local tools — XAMPP/MAMP, Local WP, and host-specific environments from Kinsta, WordPress VIP, and Pantheon. Most are command-line; Studio's real peer as a downloadable graphic app is Local (and the now-defunct DesktopServer). Even a wordpress.com-integrated desktop app existed before (needed Jetpack / XML-RPC). > - Misconception 3 — "Local WP killer": under the hood they're extremely different products for different use cases. Studio's Playground base differs from real production WordPress — PHP module availability, SQLite, and known Playground bugs around media files and embeds mean heavier work may hit bugs you'd blame on yourself. Local bundles WP-CLI, Mail Pit (fake inbox for testing outbound email), a database GUI (Table Plus), and drag-a-zip import; Studio requires WP-CLI pre-installed and has no real import/export or pull-live-site-down workflow yet. > - Despite the criticism, he's genuinely excited: Studio shines for building themes or blocks meant to be shared (he names the wordpress.com themes team plus the Create Block Theme tool), and for getting into WordPress fast to mess around. His open worry is the "graveyard" pattern — host-released free tools that launch with fanfare and collect dust a year later — and he can't predict which way Studio goes. > ### 🗒️ Notes > #### ⏱️ [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEP3H17BkVI?t=0) What Studio is > - WordPress.com Studio released in the last few weeks; "really cool piece of technology" with cool stuff under the hood. > - Local development tool that spins up WordPress sites on your local machine, from wordpress.com. > - Built on WordPress Playground: a website running WordPress in your browser, PHP plus SQLite as the database. > - Playground devs built WP Now (CLI spin-up); wordpress.com bundled that into a graphical UI with one-click deploy to wordpress.com servers to share. > #### ⏱️ [00:02:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEP3H17BkVI?t=150) Misconception 1 — not an official tool > - "this is not an official tool from WordPress" — it's from wordpress.com, not wordpress.org. > - wordpress.org = open-source software, plugin/theme directories, code, forums, anyone can join. > - wordpress.com = a hosting company you pay, like WP Engine or GoDaddy; differences: the name, Automattic ties, founder ownership. > - Account integration isn't positive or negative — Local WP (WP Engine) does the same for extra features. > - Closest to an official local env: wp-env — Docker-based, one command, command-line, no app/GUI. > #### ⏱️ [00:06:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEP3H17BkVI?t=360) Misconception 2 — not the first local tool > - "as if there hadn't already been a million" — XAMPP/MAMP, Local WP, host envs (Kinsta, WordPress VIP, Pantheon). > - Most are command-line; Studio's real peer as a downloadable graphic app is Local; shout-out to the defunct DesktopServer. > - Even a wordpress.com-integrated desktop app existed before (Jetpack / XML-RPC dependent, which many hosts now disable). > #### ⏱️ [00:09:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEP3H17BkVI?t=540) Misconception 3 — not a Local WP killer > - Attributes the "shot across the bow" framing to "Chris quer" (Chris Quer/Wiegman) and pushes back. > - Playground base differs from real production WordPress: PHP modules, SQLite; some things won't work in Studio/Playground. > - Git repo already lists issues with media files and embeds — heavier work hits Playground bugs you'd wrongly blame on yourself. > - Local bundles WP-CLI, Mail Pit (fake inbox for outbound email testing), a database GUI (Table Plus), drag-a-zip import. > - Studio: WP-CLI must be pre-installed; no real import/export; no pull-live-site-down/push-back workflow yet. > #### ⏱️ [00:14:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEP3H17BkVI?t=840) Where it shines, and the open worry > - wordpress.com's Git integration is "pretty cool looking and very unique"; their hosting is powerful and fast. > - Strong use case: building standalone themes/blocks to share; names the wordpress.com themes team and Create Block Theme. > - Great for getting into WordPress fast to mess around — like Playground, which he uses every day. > - Worry: the host-tool "graveyard" pattern — big launch, fanfare, then no support response a year later; can't call which way Studio goes. > ## 📚 References > - [WordPress Studio](https://developer.wordpress.com/studio/) — the wordpress.com tool under review. > - [WordPress Playground](https://playground.wordpress.net/) — the WASM/SQLite engine Studio is built on. > - [WP Now](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@wp-now/wp-now) — the CLI spin-up tool Studio wraps. > - [Local WP](https://localwp.com/) — WP Engine's competing graphic local tool. > - [wp-env](https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guides/packages/packages-env/) — the closest-to-official Docker-based local environment. > - [Create Block Theme](https okay let's talk about wordpress.com Studio which just kind of got released in the last few weeks it's been a really big deal I think it's a really cool piece of technology has some really cool stuff under the hood that hopefully we'll talk about but I've also seen a lot of kind of like broader misconceptions about it so I thought it would be a fun thing to just talk about what are some of the big misconceptions people have about wordpress.com studio and what can we learn about WordPress about the community just by kind of examining these conceptions and turning them on their heads so my top three big things that I keep seeing so first let's start with what is WordPress studio just real quick if you haven't had a chance to look at it it's basically a local development tool that lets you spin up WordPress websites on your local machine and it comes from wordpress.com it's a pretty like kind of cool way to do it because under the hood it uses this tool called WordPress playground if you've never used WordPress playground it's literally a website you go to a website and it's WordPress running inside of your browser browser running PHP mostly running SQ light as the database and so WordPress playground is like maybe one of the coolest places of where Innovation is happening in WordPress so the developers that worked on WordPress playground created this tool called WP now that was basically like command line spin up a little WordPress on your local machine and wordpress.com has sort of taken that like the it's a lot of the same people they've taken that and they've bundled it into like an actual graphical user interface where you can load up these playground versions of WordPress website using this tool and they run locally on your computer and then it has this kind of nice integration where you can click a button and it'll deploy it to wordpress.com servers and you can share it with other people so it's a really cool tool a really cool use Technologies but like I said there's been a ton of kind of weird misconceptions just from maybe people in the community and stuff so let's go through the list number one I keep seeing a lot that this is an official WordPress local development tool and that's the first misconception this is not an official tool from WordPress this is actually not even from WordPress itself this is a tool that comes from wordpress.com wordpress.com is not the same as wordpress.org and wordpress.org is an open source uh piece of software and it's you know includes things like the plug-in directory and the theme directory and the code itself and and all the collaboration that goes on and the support forms and all this different stuff that's wordpress.org that's that open source community that anybody can join wordpress.com is a hosting company that you go and you pay and you get a WordPress site just like WP engine or GoDaddy or something obviously there's some differences the fact that they can use WordPress in their name and the fact that they are part of automatic which is one of the largest contributors towards the WordPress project and also that they're owned by one of the original founders of Wordpress so they are a little bit different in stuff but this is a tool that comes from the private company wordpress.com and it's not really an official tool for wordpress.org because it does have that integration layer with your wordpress.com account it's not a bad thing that's enables you to do cool stuff in fact the other very popular WordPress development tool that we'll talk about which is local WP is the same thing it comes from a hosting company WP engine it has a deep integration with that account that gives you some extra features so that's not a positive or negative that's just the way that the tool is built if you wanted a official WordPress local development environment tool I do recommend one called WordPress Envy but this is a developer kind of tool because it uses Docker so if you have Docker running you type in one command in your computer and it spins up a WordPress environment inside of Docker for you uh it's very command line there's no app you download there's no graphic user interface so that's kind of that but that that is the if you had to say I guess official WordPress local development environment this is probably the closest you'll get that comes from the actual core product itself okay misconception number two is that this is the I keep seeing people say like finally a local development tool for WordPress as if there hadn't already been a million there's been a million local development tools for repress we have back in the day you could kind of like hobble your own with like zamp and M and all those sort of like old servers local WP has been around for a long time almost every hosting company has their own local development environment kinsta has one WordPress VIP has one Pantheon has one like all these places have local own environment so the idea that this is some sort of like first thing or or new thing is not really the case I would say the one difference is that most of those examples I gave are command line tools where you run it in your terminal and that sort of thing so if you're saying well this is WordPress but it's an a graphic app that I can download then I think local is really the other main competitor that I would say is the closest but Local's been around a long time and that actually reminded me of one of my old favorites that doesn't exist anymore but desktop server which was a great graphic user interface for WordPress as well and it's not even really the first app for WordPress you know there are WordPress mobile apps that are on wordpress.org there is I don't this isn't even link to anything but there is a desktop one that I remember downloading at one point in time some sort of desktop WordPress app that was very wordpress.com integrated though and I think you need to have jetpack I think you need to have support for xmlrpc which a lot of Hosting companies don't even let you turn on anymore more so the options are there there was a desktop app I'm not 100% sure but anyway the point being WordPress development apps have existed for a long time this is definitely not the first one and I think the third misconception that I keep seeing is that this is going to be a local WP killer that this is a I think Chris quer said like shot across the bout local and stuff like that and I think from the outside when you kind of look at the two different projects you're like okay a list of sites on one side a bunch of settings here it's a very similar but the reality is that under the hood they're extremely different products for really extremely different use cases so Studio by WordPress this one comes from that WordPress playground web assembly in the browser version of Wordpress which is not really the same WordPress that you're going to run on a real production server for clients on like your hosting company or something so it's a tiny bit different under the hood the availability of PHP modules the fact that he uses SQ light these are slight differences there are some things that aren't going to work on Studio or in playground that would actually work on a hosting company or local so there are some real technical differences under the hood and it depends on the type of work you're doing whether you could actually use Studio or not so that's the first big thing if you go to the git repo for there is like already some issues listed with things like how it handles media files and embeds and stuff like that because it is running WordPress all inside of a browser so if you're doing heavier Duty stuff you might end up dealing with bugs that you think are because of you but they're just because of the way playar works so that's definitely something to keep in mind the second thing is local WP does bundle a lot of other features in that are not as part of studio and I don't know if they will be number one with local it brings WP CLI which is like a really power user tool they kind of give you that automatically it opens up term all that stuff with Studio you have to have it installed on your machine already which is maybe a little bit of a barriered entry maybe it's a nice thing depends logo also includes tools like mail Pit Where when emails get sent out from your WordPress site it like fake sends them and actually puts them in a fake inbox so if you're testing like email routing or receipts or whatever and and you want to test all that stuff out those sort of like Advanced things it has a tool to help you deal with that it has a tool to open the database inside like table Plus or whatever database tool you use and all that sort of stuff so there's definitely like sort of power user tools that local WP has that are not in studio another big one is and we use this all the time even if you're not on WP engine if you have a zip folder with your WordPress website and database you literally drag it into local and it spins it up and runs it and stuff as far as I've seen for Studio there's no import export really anything other than what's like core in WordPress or that you could do with wpli so taking a production site from any server and getting it into your local environment there's not really a workflow that they built for that yet not saying they couldn't just saying that there's not one yet and so that's kind of another big thing with local WP you can like pull a a live website down work on it push it back up with wordpress.com Studio I think you can just like show demos to other people of a site but you can't really like pull a real site and work on it and push backup that being said wordpress.com has been doing some crazy developer things their G integration is pretty cool looking and very unique and very different from other hosting companies as far as hosting goes they have good hosting it's it's powerful and fast and all that good stuff so there's definitely potential and you can see kind of where they're going with it but as of right now at least for the kind of work I do it's not going to replace my workflow or something I'm going to use yet I think that if you're somebody who is building maybe you're just building themes like just themes not really for any particular client but you're just building a new theme for WordPress or a new block for WordPress or something that's a little bit more it's not for one specific site but it's just kind of like a general thing that you might want to share you might want to build a theme and and share it I think that's a like a really good use case for it I could see the wordpress.com themes team where these people are cranking out themes constantly of these nice designs I could see them wanting to use it would be really good for that combine it with the create block theme tool where you just build the whole design click a button and it makes a theme for you so there's a lot of cool stuff like that I just don't think developers are going to be putting it into like a high-end development workflow I think if you want to just like get into WordPress really fast and mess around and stuff this is definitely a great way to go just like WordPress playground is a really great way to go and I'm not going to lie I I use playground literally every day so those are my three big misconceptions WordPress Studio it's not the first one here it's not an official wordpress.com tool and it's really not a local WP killer at least anytime soon but those three things aside I don't want to get the impression that I am not excited about this I think that it's a really good tool I think that it's something that is probably going to have a lot of potential when hosting companies release free tools to the WordPress ecosystem it could really go one of either ways every hosting company this is not about any single company every company has things that they've done a really great job of supporting and keeping going and then they have that graveyard of Wordpress tools that they released to the community a big to-do lots of fanfare and a year later nobody's responding to any of the support requests or issues and it's collecting dust I don't know which way it's going to go with this one I think that there's so much potential right now with playground and the technology underneath it and the fact that the teams are so intertwined that I think there's going to be a lot of movement with it and I think obviously wordpress.com has been doing a lot of developer focused features so I'll be interested to see where it goes from there and in the meantime I'll keep using Wordpress EnV I'll keep using local and all the other local development tools that you have to spin up depending on who you're hosting with and maybe one day we will get that really true official WordPress local development environment but in the meantime all these other tools are looking really good did I miss anything do you disagree any other questions about WordPress Studio or local WP let me know in the comments below, WordPress Studio Review, Brian Coords, 01kw2mf8c2q4g8tmhbnyt69njp.