TOTAL Noob here…building first site with WordPress….It's your standard, Review/News/Info type website
I've read from numerous sources that you can't bring in other plugins with the Premium Plan…that allowance comes with a Business Plan. This doesn't make sense to me but I've now seen that this is how the payment tiers are setup?
Someone told us that if you host the site elsewhere (we're hosting on WordPress, currently), you can use additional plugins with the Premium Plan. I know nothing of anything but that doesn't seem to make sense to me either…..but I hope it's true?
We're both somewhat bright people but ran into issues immediately building our site; trying to insert an image and it was populating all image locations….so the same image was plastered across the page. We googled and looked at reddit posts and could not resolve the issue. We thought we'd use an additional site building plugin…..and ran into our Premium Plan can't use additional plugin issue
So:
1) Is there a way to use additional plugins with a the Premium Plan, somehow? Hosting somewhere besides WP?
2) Is there another CMS/Builder we should try instead? I have looked on reddit for more info on this and have seen, Joomla, Drupal, Brightspot, Glide, etc…..suggested to others asking for similar advice. But with all that advice, people still say WP is a strong option to all of those. Doesn't seem like anyone really has a super solid option to refer to

If you self host wordpress.org instead of wordpress.com, you can add whatever you want
Support for wordpress .com can be found here: [https://wordpress.com/support/](https://wordpress.com/support/)
In my opinion as a newbie you should stick with wordpress .com. Other options (including self hosting after downloading from wordpress .org) do involve a greater level of knowledge.