Most projects start as “we need a new website.” Some of them are actually software projects wearing a website’s clothes. The two are built by different people, on different timelines, with different budgets and different risks. Here’s how to tell which one you have before you brief anyone.
The quick test
A website mostly presents information. A web app mostly does something with it.
If the core value is “a visitor reads this and decides to contact us,” that’s a website. If the core value is “a user logs in and gets something done — books, calculates, tracks, uploads, manages” — that’s an app.
Signs it’s really a web app
- People need accounts and see different things depending on who they are.
- Data is created and changed through the interface, not just displayed.
- It has to talk to other systems in real time — payments, inventory, a scheduling backend.
- There’s a workflow with states: draft → submitted → approved → paid.
- Two users doing the same thing at the same time could conflict, and that matters.
One or two of these on an otherwise simple site is fine — a booking widget on a marketing site is normal. Four or five means you’re building software, and it should be scoped, priced and staffed as software.
The disguised-app trap
“It’s basically a website, it just also needs a little dashboard where clients can log in and…”
That sentence has ended a lot of fixed-price website budgets. The “little dashboard” is the project. Everything before “it just also needs” is the easy part. If your brief contains that phrase, stop and scope the app first — the marketing pages around it are the small half.
Why the category matters for cost
A marketing site is largely a fixed effort: design it, build it, launch it, maintain it lightly. A web app has an ongoing cost of ownership — hosting with real infrastructure, security patching, dependency updates, monitoring, and a support path for when something breaks at 9pm. Budgeting for an app as if it were a website is how projects run out of money at 70% done.
What to do with the answer
- It’s a website: brief it around your customer’s decision. Prioritise clarity, proof, speed and one obvious next step.
- It’s a web app: brief the smallest version that delivers real value, ship that, then expand. Resist the temptation to specify everything up front.
- It’s both: treat them as two projects with a shared design system. The marketing site can launch while the app is still being built.
If you’re not sure which one you’re holding, describe what a user does on the core screen. If the verbs are “read, browse, contact,” it’s a website. If they’re “submit, calculate, manage, track,” start planning for software.