CMS Made Simple Alternatives for Self-Hosted

Wagtail is a free and open-source CMS built on-top of Django and Python. The CMS is built by developers and for developers and provides a configuration-less solution to content management. Wagtail plays nicely with your existing tech, especially if that stack utilze Python and the Django web framework. Wagtail can be installed as a package in existing Django application and extends the Django Admin to be more suited for content management.

WordPress powers roughly 30% of all web pages online. It's a free and open source CMS designed and developed for self-hosted publishing by Automattic, Inc. The software is written in PHP and utilize either MySQL or MariaDB as a database, and is compatible with most web hosts. Wordpress includes a plugin architecture and a templating system that can be used to extend and customize your website. These are commonly known as WordPress plugins and WordPress themes and make up a whole open source and commercial eco-system where anyone is free to create products for the platform. 

Drupal is a free and open-source CMS written in PHP. Drupal is used for creating website for businesses, political parties and governments. The CMS currently powers 2% of all websites on the internet.

Joomla is a free and open-source content management system written in PHP. The CMS is built entirely by volunteers from all over the world and has a strong community that provide educational resources, and extensions. 

Django CMS is a free and open-source content management system build on the Python web framework Django. With Django CMS, you can create your own website or blog in a matter of minutes which is easy to maintain far into the future. If you are a developer utilizing the Django framework you can integrate Django CMS into an exiting Django application and take advantage of it's publishing and editing features.

Anchor is a super-simple, lightweight blog system written in PHP. Compressed, Anchor CMS weighs in at just under 250kb making it an extremely light weight content management system. With Anchor CMS, you can manage content in HTML or Markdown, depending on which you prefer. The content management is fully free and open-source and released under the GPL-3.0 License.

Ghost is a free and open-source headless CMS and blogging platform developed by Ghost Foundation. With Ghost you can manage content in style, the user experience provided by the software is intuitive and encourages writing. Ghost is written in JavaScript for the Node.js platform and is released under the MIT license.

ButterCMS is a commercial headless content management system and content API. With ButterCMS you can quickly setup your very own headless CMS that supports In-browser editing. Where you can quickly find and filter your images and files, update and schedule content and serve you assets over a content delivery network.

Backdrop is a full-featured content management system written in PHP. The Backdrop CMS allows non-technical users to manage a wide variety of content. It can be used to create all kinds of websites including blogs, image galleries, social networks, intranets, and more.

MODX is a free, open source content management system and digital experience platform. The CMS gives you full control over your creative, editorial vision and the experience you deliver. MODX is written in the programming language PHP and supports both MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server databases. The CMS is openly developed and released under the GPL license, and allows contribution.

Tina is an open-source site editing toolkit and headless CMS for React-based sites like Gatsby & Next.js

Netlify CMS is a static site generator that is based on client-side JavaScript with a reusable APIs and prebuilt Markup. Simply pull in Netlify CMS to /admin of you site and you have an SPA (Single Page Application) admin panel that can edit content stored in a Git repository. Serving applications like this, the JAMstack way, improves performance, lowers cost of scaling and provides for a better development experience.