Choose WordPress when the thing you are shipping is a website: pages, articles, landing pages, and a team who needs to change the words next month. Choose a custom build when the thing you are shipping is a workflow with accounts, states, and permissions.
WordPress is a poor place to hide a software product. It will run, and then every new rule becomes a plugin and an exception. A custom application is a poor place to run a marketing site if your team only needed to publish a service page and a blog post.
A simple test
If a non-developer on your team must safely edit ten pages a month, start with WordPress and a disciplined set of templates. If a customer must log in and finish a job that your staff then process, start with a custom application. Many companies need both, and they should be connected, not forced into one admin.
We build both. Start from web development or custom web applications, and we will tell you if you have picked the wrong one.
