This question comes up in almost every early client conversation, and the honest answer is: it depends on what you need, not which technology is "better."
Choose WordPress when: you need to publish content regularly (blog, news, listings), your team wants to make day-to-day edits without a developer, and your site's requirements are broadly similar to thousands of other WordPress sites (informational sites, small e-commerce, brochure sites).
Choose a custom-coded build when: the site needs specific functionality that doesn't map cleanly onto existing plugins, performance and Core Web Vitals are critical to the business, or you're building something closer to a web application than a content site — booking systems, dashboards, custom logic.
A common mistake is forcing a highly custom requirement onto WordPress with a stack of plugins, which often ends up slower and harder to maintain than either a well-built WordPress theme or a proper custom build would have been.
The right move is usually to describe what the site actually needs to do, and let that decide the technology — not the other way around. That's the first conversation in both our WordPress Website Development and Online Software Development engagements.