Craft CMS Alternatives

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. 

October is a free, open-source and self-hosted content management system written in PHP on top of the framework Laravel. The CMS features a universal extendable dashboard, inspector, reusable CMS components and a plugin system that can be used to extend functinality of your website. The plugin store contains thousands of community-made plugins that can either be purchased or installed for free. As a data store, October CMS supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite.

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.

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.

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.

Strapi is a free and open source headless CMS developed with JavaScript for Node.js. The software makes it really simple to generate REST and GraphQL APIs. Simply create your database schema and relationships in the Strapi admin panel UI, and Strapi will auto-generate API endpoints to represent the data structures provided. Strapi comes packed with features you come to expect from normal CMS's such as authentication, authorization, content management and a media library. The software can be used for free and can be self-hosted on any server and platform. Extra enterpise functionallity is currently being developed, and will be sold at cost.

With Contentstack, content and marketing teams are able to publish content with a much higher frequency than ever before. Contentstack brings business and technology teams closer together by providing a personalized, omnichannel experience with a visual editor alongside content scheduling and publishing management tools.

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. 

Ponzu is a powerful, free and open-source HTTP server framework and CMS. It provides automatic, free, and secure HTTP/2 over TLS with Let's Encrypt, a useful CMS and scaffolding to generate content editors, and a fast HTTP API on which to build modern applications.

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.

Subrion is a PHP/MySQL based CMS & framework that allows you to build websites for any purpose. Yes, from blog to corporate mega portal.

An open-source tool for managing content across all your omni-channel digital experiences. Directus is free and open-source headless CMS written in PHP, that takes a data first approach. Developers and content creators use Directus to manage content and generate a powerful API that can be used by any frontend technology. Directus can be self-hosted and is absolutely free.