Open Source Craft CMS Alternatives

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

A hybrid content management system that includes classic CMS and Headless CMS features. With dotCMS content managers can create content that fuels the brand experience. The API-first approach provided by the headless part of dotCMS allows developers to build extremely fast front-ends with popular third-party front-end framework and deliver content optimally. The content management system allows content creators to build engaging and memorable content that can be reused across sites.

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.

Grav is a modern free and open source flat-file content management system. With Grav, you can publish content and build sites in a fast, flexible and simple manner with the file-based web platform. Grav requires zero installation and is just an zip archive that can be extracted to start using the CMS. Grave also comes with a powerful package management system that allow you to extend the feature set of Grav CMS. With the package management system you can install and upgrade themes and plugins written specifically for Grav. The software is written in PHP and released fully free and open-source under the MIT License.

Kotti is a high-level, Pythonic web application framework. It includes an extensible Content Management System called the Kotti CMS, offering all the features you would expect from a modern CMS. Kotti is built on top of a number of best-of-breed software components, notably Pyramid, SQLAlchemy, and Twitter Bootstrap.

Plone CMS is a free and open source content management system written in Python. The CMS is built on top of the Zope application server, a free and open source web application server written in the object-oriented programming language Python. The significant strength of Plone is its flexibility, allowing users to manage the lifecycle of their workflow, from creation to publication and storage, with version control, content locking, and digital asset and document management. Plone has an active, thriving open source community that holds annual conferences, regional symposia, and many sprints all over the world. Which means that anyone if free to join and improve the codebase

PyroCMS is a free and open-source Content Management System written in PHP on top the web development framework Laravel.

CMS Made Simple is a free and open-source content management system that offers an easy to use interface for end users, while maintaining a powerful backend for developers. CMS Made Simple is written in PHP and got an extensive API and custom modules. The CMS also utilize the Smarty templating engine that can be used to customize sites with HTML, CSS and PHP.