WordPress Studio Review

WordPress.com released their new local development tool- and there's been a lot of misconceptions lets clear those up, talk about some of the underlying technology, and compare it to the elephant in the room: LocalWP.
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👉 Studio: developer.wordpress.com/studio/
👉 LocalWP: localwp.com/
👉 WordPress Playground: wordpress.org/playground/
👉 WordPress/Env: developer.wordpress.org/block...
00:00:00 What is WordPress Studio
00:01:54 This is not an "official" WordPress app
00:03:26 Are there official WordPress Dev tools?
00:04:00 This is not the first local development tool
00:05:42 Is WordPress.com Studio a "Local" Killer?
00:07:12 Features for Power Users or Agencies
00:09:23 Who is WordPress.com Studio for?
00:10:20 Is there potential here?

[@jkbdevel]

Thank you, Brian. I appreciate the unbiased review of this new tool. As you said, this seems to be for someone who is mostly wanting to create a personal site for maybe a blog. I'll stick with Local.

[@BrianCoords]

Agreed - if you're doing any dev work, Local or wp/env is the way to go.

[@visualmodo]

Thanks for your video!

[@PeterIngersoll]

Thanks, Brian. It's also important to note that, at the moment, Studio is Mac only.

[@BrianCoords]

Yep good point. The Windows version is already in beta, I think, so it shouldn't be too far off. Linux? Don't see it happening any time soon.

[@jamiewp]

Great summary 👍

[@cholo2605]

Hi Bryan, thanks for sharing. I have one question: I don't see the option in Studio to view the database like Local does.

[@BrianCoords]

Yeah I don't believe that Studio exposes any sort of GUI to browse the database. I'm wondering if you could determine the credentials and use a tool like Tableplus to browse it 🤔?

[@cholo2605]

@@BrianCoords Thanks😁

[@bicho44]

I know its not exactly to WordPress, but what about "Valet / Herd", for me is the local eviroment i use to anything related to web development, easy to install, (Mac / Win / Linux) almost no GUI, and you can make every site use any version of PHP / Node (or whatever) multiple kind of database / cache etc, to mirror your Production Site.
I think is the way, but i really wanna know your opinion

[@BrianCoords]

I think in my first (deleted) draft of this video I mentioned Herd which is another great example of just a super lean tool to run PHP. I use Herd (plus DBngin) for Laravel and typically use Docker for WordPress, but I think one of my coworkers has been successfully using Herd for WordPress recently.

[@bicho44]

@BrianCoords Herd/Valet has drivers for most of the big PHP "apps."
It's basically like a pseudo-docker, without using Docker (I don't really know the technical term, lol).
So, you can run different PHP and database setups in a directory with automatic domain and SSL-it's really nice. (I never really understood Docker, but that's my fault, I know.)
You can use wp-cli or download a zip to install WordPress in a directory, and you're good to go with a .test domain.
A long time ago, I had a problem with "local," and I lost a client's website (nothing fancy, but it was important). After that, I was looking for something more lightweight, with minimal memory consumption, etc. (Also, for me, opening an app just to open an environment feels a little redundant.)
So, thanks for your answer!

[@ivanbarta2821]

Laravel Herd is a great development environment not only for Laravel but also for Wordpress.

[@king-fisher1000]

Thanks for the video. Currently Studio does not appear to support WordPress multisite networks either, whereas LocalWP does. I agree, I don't think LocalWP will be going anywhere-- It is a fantastic tool. That said, Studio does provide a nice installable UI wrapper for playground, which is great for spinning up a simple site for testing or troubleshooting.

[@BrianCoords]

There's a new update coming to multisite that will allow unique ports (8888, 8889, etc). Once that's in core I believe Studio will be able to support a multisite install.
But overall I agree 100% - Local for real development work, Studio for simple sites to play around with things.