What are the best web content management systems?

Question

WebCMSContent Management System

What are the best web content management systems?

30

Options
Considered

165

User
Recs.

Jan 23, 2024

Last
Updated

26 Options Considered

Best web content management systems	Price	Language	License
-- ProcessWire	-	PHP	MPL 2.0 and MIT licenses
56 Drupal	-	-	GPLv2+
56 WordPress	-	PHP	GPLv2
-- Ghost	-	JavaScript	MIT
-- Joomla!	0	PHP	GPLv2

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score 15 · Answer 1

ProcessWire

Top Pro

Nice and helpful growing community

You will always find one to respond politely in the forums. Sometimes even the creator Ryan Cramer himself. See More

noelboss's Experience

I have fallen in love with this CMS. I did not find anything comparable out there, and I tried many! See More

Specs

Language:PHP

License:MPL 2.0 and MIT licenses

Price:Free

Multi Language Support:Yes

See All Specs

Top Pro

Custom Fields on steroids

ProcessWire is heavily based on custom fields. All objects (Pages) inside ProcessWire are based on extensible templates comprised of fields that can be easily defined. Many useful fields come prebuilt and they can be extended with modules. See More

HonorableSenuna's Experience

One of the best CMS I have ever programmed with. Really intuitive structure and easy learning curve. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Processwire is extremely easy to learn. Consider this: echo $pages->get('title=Hello World')->title; // "Hello World" echo $pages->get('title=Hello World')->parent->title; // "Home" echo $pages->find('Template=Category')->count; // 126 echo $pages->find('Template=Category')->each('title'); // ['Audio', 'Video' …] Selectors are so powerful but yet so easy. Check out the cheatsheet. See More

Top Pro

Powerful and easy API

The API is jQuery like; // find some pages: $pages->find('template=skyscraper, architect=john, sort=title')->limit(4); // mutate $pages->get('title=Hello You')->set('title', 'HelloWorld')->save(); $pages->get('title=Old')->trash(); // trash page // check user… $user->isLogedin(); echo $user->name; // guest $session->login($name, $pass); $session->logout(); // redirect $session->redirect($url); See More

Top Pro

Powerful selector engine

The way you fetch, access and manipulate objects (Pages) in ProcessWire is extremely powerful and easy. You can receive any page and its custom fields, filter, travers, add… See More

Top Pro

Template Engine Agnostic

By default, ProcessWire comes with 0 assumption on how you handle the output. You have 100% freedom on how you want to develop the frontend. Want to plain output stuff, go ahead. Want to use any number of Templating Engine, do it. Just use as Headless-CMS, okay! See More

Top Pro

Extensible

Either using the modules already available or writing your own module, using the jQuery-like API. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Source available on GitHub. See More

See All

score 29 · Answer 2

Drupal

Top Pro

Highly customizable

Drupal can be customized to do almost anything. It was built ground up with the intent of using a wide variety of small modules to get the exact result wanted instead of just the most common solutions. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

Drupal is not easy to get into and out of the box doesn't offer much. To get Drupal doing what you want it to, modules are required. To get modules, an understanding of how Drupal works is required. And that takes time. See More

Specs

License:GPLv2+

Default Template Engine:twig

Extensible:yes

Field Builder:yes

See All Specs

Top Pro

Open source

Drupal is free to use and open source. See More

Top Con

Lacks good themes

Top Pro

Great for enterprise use

Drupal is stable, with powerful version control and access control methods and can handle large amounts of traffic. See More

Top Con

Lacks good free modules and themes

Most good third-party modules and themes are costly. See More

Top Pro

Excellent SEO

Drupal was designed from the beginning to follow best practices in regards to SEO. See More

Top Con

Unbalanced community

Some (mostly sponsored) modules are well thought-out and have decent to good documentation, but the majority of modules are either poorly designed, work for one specific use case (a lot of bugs are shaken off as "works as designed") or are abandoned. In a lot of cases you need to use some exotic beta version which is used by 160k sites and has like 1200 open issues. See More

Top Pro

Multi-lingual support

Starting with Drupal 8, there's built-in multi-lingual support. See More

Top Con

High resource consumption

A more complex Dupal installation can easily exhaust 256 MB of RAM with only one or two visitors. See More

Top Pro

Active community

Drupal have one of biggest and more active communities across FOSS, maintaining a large and vibrant ecosystem of extensions and installation profiles. See More

Top Pro

Extremely Flexible

Allows to add new modules upon request, also it’s easy to deliver custom functionality on top of modules already existing on the market. See More

Top Pro

RESTful

Drupal 8 has REST services built in. See More

Top Pro

It's easy to transfer config changes from dev to production

Top Pro

Good accessibility

Top Pro

Free and open source

Drupal is free to use and open source. See More

Top Pro

Responsive front-end and back-end

Drupal 8 follows responsive design philosophy out of the box, both front-end and back-end. See More

Top Pro

Drupal has full SEO capabilities

(vs Joomla, which lacks SEO capabilities), there is an essential issue for promotion. See More

Top Pro

Good community

Top Pro

Great templating engine

Top Pro

Easy and convenient to use

Drupal has support, is updated and has decent themes that are easy to work with. See More

Top Pro

Semantic HTML5

See All

score 39 · Answer 3

WordPress

Top Con

Can be hard to optimize speed

If you have a low end server or lots of traffic it can be hard to get good speed. There are numerous plugin options for caching but most will only work with simple blog like pages and can be tricky to get working. See More

Top Pro

Widely used

According to some statistics, WP powers a fifth of the Internet. It means that there are resources for everything. There's excellent community support and a plethora of plugins and customization options. See More

Yanis's Experience

What else... seriously :) See More

Specs

Language:PHP

License:GPLv2

Default Template Engine:PHP

Store Support:Yes (Plugin)

Top Con

Too many amateurish, insecure, outdated, unmaintained, incomplete or useless plugins

True, there may be some plugin for every functionality you require. However if you take a more detailed look at those plugins they are either outdated, made by some hobby programmer (i.e. no in-depth testing, no security audits, no code reviews, hacky, unmaintainable) in their spare time (and don't get me wrong: I adore everyone giving something to the community; but many of these plugins are just unusable for serious business), incomplete (regarding multi-language capability, an author of a famous Wordpress form builder plugin responded something like: "Well, maybe sometime"; seriously, man?), insecure (e.g. recently there was a serious flaw as a buggy plugin is used by many themes) or often need much hacking to finally get the correct functionality that YOU need currently. See More

Top Pro

Open-source

It means that you have complete control over every single aspect of WordPress. You can change anything to fit your needs. See More

Top Con

Restrictive templating makes it hard to do original layouts

The templating system is highly restrictive. All your body content for a page (technically a post) comes out from one variable, and is spat directly onto the page. If you want to pull that content out into chunks? Tough shit. You have to use plugins to make it work correctly. See More

Top Pro

SEO friendly

The default WordPress SEO setup will work great for most people starting out, but you can further tweak different aspects of WordPress to achieve better search ranking results by installing plugins, following tutorials or experimenting yourself. See More

Top Con

Data based content requires plugin

If you want to force your users to enter information in a field based way you need an extension such as Advanced Custom Fields. See More

Top Pro

Beginner-friendly

WordPress is easy to understand and use. Basic tasks are easy. See More

Top Con

Clunky, and trying to do too much

Top Pro

Lots of plugins that extend functionality are available

There are plenty of plugins available to extend the functionalities of WordPress. See More

Top Con

Saves data serialized

Wordpress itself and many of the available plugins save most of their data using the serialize-function from PHP. This means that you will need some coding using the API to extract the data that you want, instead of just running some easy SQL-query. Also depending on your PHP version / database environment the serialization of the data can be different, i.e. no easy deployment of data as e.g. string length for multi-byte characters will be different, breaking the data structure. See More

Top Pro

Easy and inexpensive to customize

Simple open source code base makes adding custom functionality easier than many other CMSs. See More

Top Con

Dated

The code is a mess, uses dated conventions, and relies on dated technology. See More

Top Pro

Optional free hosting

WordPress offers free hosting under a wordpress.com subdomain. This option eliminates the need for setting up the CMS yourself and is reasonably secure, as WP uses multiple servers to back your site up. Additionally, for a fee, you can even set up your own custom domain name. See More

Top Con

Default custom content uses single table key value pair

This will slow down your site with multiple custom attributes See More

Top Pro

User management

It doesn't require you to have the same access for all. Developers work with plugins, editors works with content and admins can run the site. See More

Top Con

Editing a template requires coding

If you don't like a part of a template, such as its position or if it's shown or not, the only way to change it is to change the template file by hand. Creating and editing templates can be quite complex and requires a good amount of knowledge of php as well as the system itsself See More

Top Pro

RSS feeds for everything

Including tags and categories. See More

Top Con

Spam

Wordpress by default allows commenting on pages, any page. Even if you turn commenting off for a page bots can still access the commenting endpoint; even if you use a 3rd party commenting system such as Disqus. Wordpress comes with an anti-spam filter called Askimet which does a pretty good job but not perfect. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

Top Con

A bit of bloat and complexity

WP has grown past being just a blogging platform and as such it's not as lightweight as it used to be. It also considerably more complex due to many more customization options compared to other solutions. See More

See All

score 6 · Answer 4

Ghost

Top Pro

Either self hosted, or hosted for you

Users can choose to get it hosted somewhere, or host it themselves. The barrier of entry is very low. See More

Top Con

Not a cms

Specs

Language:JavaScript

License:MIT

Template Engine:Handlebars

Top Pro

Markdown support

Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax designed so that it can be human-readable and easily converted to HTML. Markdown allows HTML code for complete flexibility. See More

Top Con

Commenting must be added

One needs to edit their post.hbs file and add some code from Disqus in order for commenting to be available. See More

Top Pro

Open Source

Top Con

Finding Ghost host sites can be difficult

If wanting to host elsewhere, some of the other ghost hosting sites are hard to find, and once found they vary in features and functions. There isn't a single standard of service across the board. See More

Top Pro

Official Docker image

Very easy setup with an official image from Docker. Just needs a custom config.json and you are pretty much good to go. See More

Top Con

Inappropriate terminology in the UI

Despite some community support of having it removed, Ghost still prominently uses the following phrase in the UI: "Display a sexy logo for your publication." This terminology can be considered exclusionary and even inappropriate in a professional environment. See More

Top Pro

Very easy to use

Ghost is as straightforward as it gets. It's built for one purpose: Blogging. You won't find anything easier than this. See More

Top Con

Very immature and buggy

Top Pro

Lots of templating options

Top Con

Self-hosted might be hard to setup

Requires NodeJS and NPM which both come with a lot of dependencies. Also requires editting configuration files manually. See More

Top Pro

Real-time preview

You can see markdown on one side of the pane and the result on the other, while writing. See More

Top Con

Limited hosting options

If a client already has hosting (eg, universities, government, or big corps) it's sometimes impossible to setup Node. Yes, the real solution is to get better hosting but the reality is that that's not the reality. See More

See All

score 12 · Answer 5

Joomla!

Top Pro

Highly customizable templates

Joomla allows for heavily customizable templates to be changed from the admin interface without needing to hack. See More

Top Con

Insecure

It's common-place for a Joomla-based website to be defaced, often very quickly. This is most often due to the low quality of extensions. See More

JoomBoost - Joomla! Extensions Developer's Experience

CMS very very secure and ensure extensions security quality. See More

Specs

Language:PHP

License:GPLv2

Price:Free

Multi Language Support:Yes

See All Specs

Top Pro

Powerful and user-friendly admin interface

Admin interface is constantly being iterated on to remove unnecessary legacy features and to streamline the interface. Resulting in a very clean and easy to understand interface that also offers a wide range of options. See More

Top Con

Extensions are scarce, badly maintained & rarely good

If it's not part of the default Joomla installation, quality extensions are rare. Joomla has a extensions library, but it is full of abandoned, dated or bloated components, modules and plugins. See More

Top Pro

More than 8000 extensions

Which can be found here. See More

Top Pro

Easy to pick up

Top Pro

Great for social networking and commerce sites

Joomla has both a good native support and a great list of extensions that make creating either a social networking or a commerce site easy. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 6

KeystoneJS

Top Pro

Keystone comes with Express already configured

Express comes out of the box already configured from Keystone or it can be treated like any other Express Middleware. See More

Top Con

Some working knowledge of JavaScript, NPM and Databases is needed

MongoDB is required to be up and running and a Yeoman generator is used to generate the application. Although the prompt based start-up in the command line helps you a lot, it still can be hard for someone inexperienced with NPM and Yeoman. See More

eyrewiut's Experience

KeystoneJS is a very nice CMS to work with, despite the fact that it does require technical knowledge to use, the system does work well. At one point the project did appear to be stale but now that work on Keystone 5 is under heavy development and the team has got it'self organised the future looks very good. As a developer I enjoy working with Keystone because it is pretty easy to add features. See More

Specs

Language:NodeJS

Price:0

Database:Mongo and Postgres

Top Pro

Open source

KeystoneJS is open source so you can remove the bits you dont need See More

Top Con

It's hard for front-end developers with no MVC experience setting up views

Keystone follows MVC practices in managing routes, views and templates. Back-end developers with experience in working with MVC frameworks will find themselves at ease since the beginning, but developers who work on the front-end only will have a hard time finding what they are supposed to do to set up templates and such. See More

Top Pro

Effective session management

Keystone has advanced and effective session management and authentication features. Logging in and signing up is easy and it even has password encryption out of the box. See More

Top Con

No default option to add pages in admin panel

Top Pro

Keystone uses MongoDB through Mongoose

Keystone allows the usage of MongoDB since it comes with Mongoose, the most popular ODM for node and Mongo, this means that anything that is built using Mongo can be built with Keystone. See More

Top Con

stale project

Not a lot of movement in quite some time. See More

Top Pro

Numerous amounts of templating engines are supported

Keystone supports almost all templating engines out there. Although it uses Jade directly after a fresh install and it points to using it further, other template engines can be installed and used instead. See More

Top Pro

Keystone has easy form processing

Using the data models defined by the developer, Keystone can validate forms automatically without any more setup. Form validation doesn't get easier than this. See More

Top Pro

Easy email management features

With Keystone it is easy to set up an email management system for an application. It has template-based emails and it's also integrated with Mandrill (Mailchimp's transaction email sending service) See More

Top Pro

Easy to install and use

KeystoneJS is very easy to install and use. See More

Top Pro

Many cool features

Great CMS with auto-generated admin, schemas... See More

Top Pro

Out-of-the-box Admin UI

Keystone comes with an auto-generated Admin UI, which makes things very easy for any task that can be completed using Keystone. In any way Keystone is used, the Admin interfaces saves a lot of time and makes any job easier. See More

See All

score 4 · Answer 7

MODX

Top Pro

It just makes sense

score 5 · Answer 8

Redaxo

Top Pro

Free

DaringSalacia's Experience

very flexible fast and lightweight a lot modules that are based on Bootstrap See More

Top Pro

Good community

See All

score 1 · Answer 9

concrete5

score 3 · Answer 10

TextPattern

Top Pro

Great documentation

Top Con

Relatively few high-quality templates

Top Pro

Easy to use interface

Top Con

Fewer plugins than the more popular CMSs

Top Pro

Well suited for sites of all sizes

Top Con

Small community

See All

score 4 · Answer 11

TYPO3

Top Con

Writing or debugging extension in Typoscript is a nightmare

Top Pro

Flexible multi-lingual site management

You can use both one-tree and multi-tree structure. See More

Top Pro

Multiple websites/domains from one installation

You can use a single TYPO3 installation for multiple websites and domains. See More

Top Pro

TYPO3 is enterprise

TYPO3 can be used from small to very big installations where it is possible to give rights to users on a very fine grained basis. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 12

Wix

Top Pro

Wix Code lets you add custom code and backends to your WYSIWYG site when needed

This means you can add custom interactions and API's to your site when needed, but do most of the editing in a GUI. This helps you avoid the need to redo an entire site if you need custom interactions. Also dead easy to connect a database and have dynamic components based on CMS updates. See More

Specs

Store Support:Yes

Top Pro

Straightforward drag & drop interface

There's a selection of elements you can choose from in the sidebar that you can drag and drop into the page and edit. There are common elements such as text, images and buttons as well as less common elements such as blog or online store. All elements can be adjusted to some extent to fit your needs. For example, you can change things like the font, weight and style of text and even crop, adjust colors and apply filters to images. See More

Top Pro

Functionality can be extended with community plug-ins

Wix has an add-on store, called the App Market, that includes community developed bits of functionality (such as comments, calendars and integrations with third-party services) that you can add to your site. The store includes both free and paid add-ons. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 13

Blocs

Top Con

Only on Mac OS X

Top Pro

Fast development time

Blocs really is insanely fast, you can build full webpage layouts in minutes. See More

Top Pro

Easily add animations

Blocs lets you easily add stunning animations to your site with just a click. See More

Top Pro

Unlimited websites

Blocs is a desktop app meaning you can build as many websites as you like, no restrictions. See More

Top Pro

Pre-made layouts

Blocs comes with many pre-made layouts, so building and prototyping is fast. See More

Top Pro

Works offline

Top Pro

No coding required

Top Pro

Easy to use

See All

score 1 · Answer 14

ExpressionEngine

Top Pro

No restrictions on how a site can be designed

Top Con

Simple pages can hurt performance

A simple page can rack up on database queries. Many sites usually suffer from this. Create an empty page and there's a few queries that run and it's unneccessary. See More

Top Pro

Focus on security

Top Con

Can be overkill for simple or smaller sites

Top Pro

Commercial support

Top Con

Cost is high

Especially for commercial sites See More

Top Con

Built on top of codeigniter: an outdated framework

Codeigniter was cool.... back when PHP was at 5.2 See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 15

SilverStripe

Top Pro

Open source

Top Pro

Generates backend forms

score 1 · Answer 16

GoNevis

Top Pro

Custom Google Analytics code

Using user's own Google Analytics code. See More

Specs

Top Pro

File manager

With file manager Dolphin, keep all your photos, music, videos, documents, and other files under control. See More

Top Pro

Themes

Different templates and themes. See More

Top Pro

Author Global Profile

Each user on GoNevis.com have a global profile, this will help each publisher to get more coverage. See More

Top Pro

Built-in SEO

When someone shares content from your website, related information such as images, title, description and other data that will be recognized by social media. See More

Top Pro

Free subdomain

Get a free subdomain registered under gonevis.com See More

Top Pro

Granular permissions engine

You can bring your whole team to each website and give them permissions such as Author, Admin, Owner, etc. and manage your entire website with your team. See More

Top Pro

Disabling Google Analytics code

Users can disable Google Analytics from their website. In that, GoNevis will not put any analytics code on their website. See More

Top Pro

Full SSL Support

Using secure connection on all the website's traffic. See More

Top Pro

Built-in commenting

You don't need to use external commenting widgets on your site, all the comments and discussions happening on the website are stored under your account and can be easily managed and moderated. See More

Top Pro

Custom domain

Users can connect their own domain to their website. For example, jungle.gonevis.com => jungle.com or even blog.jungle.com. There's no limit on how many custom domains users can set on their website. See More

Top Pro

Follow/Subscription support

People can subscribe and receive notifications on new posts. See More

Top Pro

Static pages

Websites and blogs can have static pages alongside their index page. Such as About, Contact or even dedicated pages and links to display a page with selected tags or categories. See More

Top Pro

Built-in search

Top Pro

Advanced open-source dashboard

GoNevis Dash is an open source project/product that you can participate directly to improve, either by submitting code, reporting bugs, reviewing patches, etc... See More

Top Pro

Free

Absolutely free for a lifetime. No cost at all. See More

Top Pro

Content tagging

To keep content management simple, #tags are available instead of categories. See More

Top Pro

Author profile

Each writer will have a profile on their blog or website. This will make it easy for visitors to read all the content published by the author. See More

See All

Answer 17

Pinegrow

Top Pro

Edit any existing web page

To see how a page works, you can load it directly inside the app to edit and play with its code. See More

Top Con

Not free

But very reasonably priced. See More

Top Pro

Decent code editor

The code editor is quite capable and powerful. See More

Top Pro

Drag and drop elements to build pages

Easy for beginners, requires no coding. See More

See All

Answer 18

Webhook

Top Pro

A ground-breaking CMS

Mobile friendly and real-time, the Webhook CMS comes bundled with 30 widgets to build the content site of your dreams. See More

Specs

Multi Language Support:JavaScript

Top Pro

Easy, one-step deployment

No infrastructure to build or manage. Deployment is built in. We host the site, you point over your custom domain. See More

Top Pro

Local dev that just works

No database to run and no backend to write. Locally edit your design with Django-style templates in your text editor of choice. See More

Top Pro

Uploads and image resizing

Images, mp3s, pdfs... add them all into the CMS. Later resize images on the fly in your templates to suit your design. See More

Top Pro

Static site generation

Reliable and faaaaast. Your site is built to scale from day one. Fast sites translate to happy users and better SEO. See More

Top Pro

Works well with teams

Webhook works great with versioning systems like Github and can be worked on by a team of developers. Editors can edit the CMS at the same time and enjoy real-time updates. See More

Top Pro

Clean scaffolding

Webhook will scaffold naked starter templates and urls based upon your CMS forms. There's no theme to remove, it's just HTML. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 19

26 Options Considered

My Recommendation for ProcessWire

My Recommendation for ProcessWire

Nice and helpful growing community

Custom Fields on steroids

Easy to learn

Powerful and easy API

Powerful selector engine

Template Engine Agnostic

Extensible

Open source

My Recommendation for Drupal

My Recommendation for Drupal

Highly customizable

Steep learning curve

Open source

Lacks good themes

Great for enterprise use

Lacks good free modules and themes

Excellent SEO

Unbalanced community

Multi-lingual support

High resource consumption

Active community

Extremely Flexible

RESTful

It's easy to transfer config changes from dev to production

Good accessibility

Free and open source

Responsive front-end and back-end

Drupal has full SEO capabilities

Good community

Great templating engine

Easy and convenient to use

Semantic HTML5

My Recommendation for WordPress

My Recommendation for WordPress

Can be hard to optimize speed

Widely used

Too many amateurish, insecure, outdated, unmaintained, incomplete or useless plugins

Open-source

Restrictive templating makes it hard to do original layouts

SEO friendly

Data based content requires plugin

Beginner-friendly

Clunky, and trying to do too much

Lots of plugins that extend functionality are available

Saves data serialized

Easy and inexpensive to customize

Dated

Optional free hosting

Default custom content uses single table key value pair

User management

Editing a template requires coding

RSS feeds for everything

Spam

Steep learning curve

A bit of bloat and complexity

My Recommendation for Ghost

My Recommendation for Ghost

Either self hosted, or hosted for you

Not a cms

Markdown support

Commenting must be added

Open Source

Finding Ghost host sites can be difficult

Official Docker image

Inappropriate terminology in the UI

Very easy to use

Very immature and buggy

Lots of templating options

Self-hosted might be hard to setup

Real-time preview

Limited hosting options

My Recommendation for Joomla!

My Recommendation for Joomla!

Highly customizable templates

Insecure

Powerful and user-friendly admin interface

Extensions are scarce, badly maintained & rarely good