If you’re trying to decide between Easy Digital Downloads and Envato, you’re really deciding between two completely different ways of building a business, you can trust me, I’ve used both.

Like many WordPress developers, I started on CodeCanyon. Back then it felt like the obvious choice. You build a plugin, upload it, wait for approval and suddenly your product is sitting in front of thousands of potential customers. That’s a pretty powerful feeling when you’re starting out.

The problem is that what works when you’re trying to get your first sale isn’t always what works when you’re trying to build a real business and that’s where EDD enters the conversation.

Why So Many Developers Start With Envato

I am sure that most developers don’t join Envato because they love marketplaces, but they join because customers are already there.

I know that building a plugin is difficult and building an audience is most of the time even harder (by far).

You can spend months creating a great product and then discover that nobody knows it exists and Envato solves that problem.

When you upload a product to CodeCanyon, you’re effectively opening a small shop inside a giant shopping mall. The foot traffic already exists. People are browsing. People are searching. People are buying. You don’t have to convince them to visit your website because they’re already on the marketplace.

For a new developer, that’s incredibly valuable… In fact, without Envato, I probably wouldn’t have sold nearly as many plugins early on. It gave me exposure that would have taken years to build on my own.

But exposure comes at a price and I’m not just talking about commissions…

The Question That Changed Everything For Me

After a few years, I started asking myself a simple question: what exactly am I building?

At first, the answer seemed obvious, I was building WordPress plugins. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I was also helping build Envato’s business. Customers visited Envato -> customers searched on Envato -> customers trusted Envato.

Many customers remembered buying from CodeCanyon before they remembered who actually built the plugin. That bothered me more as time went on and not because Envato was doing anything wrong. That’s simply how marketplaces work: the marketplace owns the relationship. You’re actually just renting space in someone else’s ecosystem. But this comes with the up side of TONS of free traffic! So, don’t get me wrong on this one…

And for most developers, that’s perfectly fine.

EDD Is The Opposite Philosophy

Easy Digital Downloads couldn’t be more different. Nobody is sending you customers, nobody is promoting your products. No one is handling marketing for you.

You get a WordPress plugin and a blank canvas. Trust me on this, that’s both exciting and terrifying. When you launch an EDD store, everything belongs to you, including the website, database, email list, branding + every article you write. Every backlink you earn with your hard work. Every customer you acquire. That’s the dream that attracts many developers to EDD.

The Part Nobody Talks About

A lot of articles make EDD sound like some magical path to freedom. What they usually leave out is the amount of work involved, as when you’re running your own store, you’re not just a developer anymore.

You’re suddenly responsible for hosting, backups, security, performance, payments, analytics, renewals, email delivery, licensing, customer support and whatever else decides to break on a Friday evening. There were times when I spent more time maintaining systems around my products than actually improving the products themselves.

That’s not a criticism of EDD, but it’s simply reality. Owning everything means being responsible for everything: some people love that and some people discover very quickly that they don’t.

Traffic Changes The Entire Equation

This is where things get interesting: the biggest advantage Envato has today is exactly the same advantage it had ten years ago.

Traffic.

You can build the most beautiful EDD store in the world. You can have the fastest server, the perfect checkout and incredible products. Without visitors, none of it matters, as traffic is the oxygen of every online business. The challenge is that most developers think like developers: they tend to focus on features and unfortunately for us devs, customers don’t find features, customers find websites.

That’s why so many talented developers struggle when they leave marketplaces. They assume the hard part was building the product. In reality, marketing often becomes the hard part… and Envato removes the most part of that burden. Not all of it, but enough that you can focus more heavily on development.

So Why Do Successful Developers Leave Marketplaces?

Because eventually the math changes and when you’re making your first few sales, marketplace commissions don’t feel significant. Also, when you’re making thousands of dollars every month, they start feeling very significant. When you’re trying to build a recognizable company, marketplaces start feeling restrictive.

When you’re trying to launch additional products, build an email list, create recurring revenue, and establish direct customer relationships, ownership becomes more important.

I see this pattern repeatedly: many developers start on marketplaces, then they build an audience, then they build a website and start pushing customers toward channels they control. I think of this as a natural evolution of a developer in this industry, as their businesses mature over time.

If I Was Starting Today

This is probably the question most people actually care about! If I were launching my very first WordPress plugin today with no audience, no traffic and no existing customer base, I’d seriously consider marketplaces. Getting discovered is incredibly difficult. Marketplaces can help solve that problem.

But if my goal was building a long-term WordPress business that I wanted to fully own five or ten years from now, I’d choose EDD every time. Not because it’s easier… It isn’t. And you risk of failing in building your store, because the simple fact that there are many more breaking points you can miss in your journey…

However, every hour I spend building the business increases the value of something I actually own. That’s a very different feeling from building inside someone else’s platform.

Final Thoughts

There’s no universal winner in the EDD vs Envato debate. They’re designed for different stages of the journey. Envato helps developers get visibility. EDD helps developers build independence.

One helps you borrow an audience while the other forces you to build your own and I see this as neither path being wrong. The most important thing is understanding the tradeoff, because once your products start gaining traction, you’ll eventually realize you’re not just choosing where to sell your plugins.

You’re choosing what kind of business you want to build, do it well!