I installed Cloudflare’s WordPress killer the other day. If you haven’t heard it’s called em-dash.
EmDash is an open-source, full-stack Content Management System (CMS) built by Cloudflare and powered by the Astro web framework. Billed as a modern, serverless alternative to WordPress, it features a familiar admin dashboard, AI-native tooling, and secure, sandboxed plugins that run on Cloudflare Workers.
Yes, I was naturally very impressed that EmDash can run on Cloudflare’s free tier, but with a major architectural catch regarding plugins. While you can deploy a static-first version to Cloudflare Pages for free, the full-stack CMS relies heavily on Cloudflare Workers, D1 database, and R2 storage.
To run it entirely for free, you must navigate the following limitations:
Free Tier Limitations & Requirements
- Disabled Sandboxed Plugins: EmDash requires Dynamic Workers to handle its signature secure, sandboxed V8 plugin isolation. This feature is only available on paid accounts (starting at $5/month). To run on a free account, you must comment out or delete the
worker_loadersblock inside yourwrangler.jsoncfile. This disables the sandbox, running plugins in standard in-process mode. [1, 2] - Resource Quotas: Your site will be bound to standard Cloudflare Free Tier Limits. This includes 100,000 free Worker requests per day, 5M rows of D1 database storage, and 10GB of R2 media storage. [1, 2, 3]
- The “Static-First” Pages Option: You can deploy the frontend of your Astro-based EmDash site directly to Cloudflare Pages for free. According to the EmDash Documentation Playbook, using this static-first approach avoids database and storage setup complexity at launch, but you lose the dynamic dashboard and live backend editing until you hook up the Workers infrastructure. [1, 2]
Deployment Tradeoffs
| Feature [1, 2, 3, 4] | Free Tier Deployment | Paid Tier ($5+/mo) Deployment |
|---|---|---|
| Plugin Isolation | Disabled (In-process mode) | Fully Sandboxed (V8 Isolates) |
| Compute Limits | 100k Worker requests / day | 10M+ Worker requests / month |
| Database (D1) | 5M rows / 1GB storage | 25B rows / 100GB storage |
| Media (R2) | 10GB storage | 1TB+ storage |
But let’s remember something: it’s brand new. I found once I was in the admin it was a confusing mess, but it’s like a brand new slate. What do you expect? Personally, I think Cloudflare is planning to take over the Internet. We’re a partner, so naturally I have much love and respect for the company. I think their strategy to offer their services for free to get the foot in the door is brilliant. It’s very much as the street would say, “the first hits free.”
I kinda didn’t really know what to do with EmDash once I had it installed. I can navigate the WordPress admin by memory alone, it’s in my dreams. I often find it funny when new users get their new WordPress sites and are confused where to go. Then I realize again I pretty much have the admin memorized. It’s so simple, clean and easy how do you get lost? It wasn’t like that with EmDash and that’s not a jab in any way. I just expected some things out of the box but so much needs built. It needs a community just like WordPress has. Most successful open source software projects live or die by a thriving community. After my first experience, I have no idea what EmDash will do because AI is influencing so many decisions in development, architecture and obviously business decisions. It’s obviously not WordPress but the question can it sit on the iron throne? It’s very much Daenerys Targaryen with the baby dragons.
Either way, I had to do a post on it and get something on record because I want to see how this post ages.
Let’s pause on WordPress a moment. I plan to do a bigger post about this, but on another note, I think Cloudflare is coming for AWS, GCP, and Azure, also. The reality is you can already do so much with the R2 buckets and D1 for storage. Most people don’t even realize they also have a full RAG solution (originally AutoRAG, now branded AI Search). But they also offer LLMs. I mean seriously. What a company?!
Back to WordPress (which we are also a Premier Partner). Per Wikipedia, WordPress just celebrated its 23rd birthday on May 27, 2003. I’m not sure if anyone knows for a fact, but it’s fairly well stated that 41.5% to 43.5% of the Internet is on WordPress. Then there are over 61,000 free plugins in the official WordPress.org Plugin Repository. When including premium third-party marketplaces, independent developers, and commercial tools, the total exceeds 90,000 plugins across the entire ecosystem.
That’s very David vs. Goliath, but there are so many wild cards. With AI writing so much code, the speed and deployment of code is on steroids compared to the 23 years WordPress built their empire. But let’s not be fools. Those same steroids are available to Automattic (WordPress owner) also. It’s not like they aren’t constantly improving the core code and growing all areas they deem necessary. Still, Cloudflare just has so many cooks in the kitchen, and they eat your lunch while you blink.
I can’t predict the future, but I’ll say this: Cloudflare is going to have a major role in it. Perhaps we won’t call it the Internet or World Wide Web anymore. We’ll just call it Cloudflare.
Look out for my post on AWS,GCP,Azure vs. Cloudflare.