Ghost Alternatives for Self-Hosted

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.

The Mura CMS platform makes it easier & faster to build and update websites. The content management system was created to free content managers from distraction of multiple tools, the worry of steep learning curves, and a clear need to tell the right story, to the right audience, at the right time. Mura is loved by content managers, content contributors, marketers and developers alike.

Craft CMS is a flexible, user-friendly CMS for creating custom digital experiences on the web and beyond. Craft is designed from the ground up to empoer the entire creative process. From the user-friendly interface to the completely customizable back end, everything you interact with is designed to just make sense. With Craft your content comes first. No more trying to make your content work within the confines of the CMS.

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.

Silverstripe CMS is designed to be simple to learn and easy to use. Whether updating a page or publishing multiple pages on a large scale site. Give access to edit only specific areas of your site. Architected to safeguard your data from malicious activity or data-loss, even while scaling up complex sites.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.