20 Best CMS Software to Build a Website in 2025

Updated Aug 6, 2023.
Best CMS Software to Build a Website (And Manage Content Effectively)

When you select the fitting CMS solution, you will be able to create a functional and great-looking website without needing to build every page and all its components using code.

But, not all CMS software will be equally capable of handling blogs, eCommerce stores, and marketing websites with all the specifics different types of websites require.

To help you, we have compiled a list of the best Content Management Software tools on the market, covering everything from the ones that specialize in creating static websites, blogs, forums, and memberships sites to comprehensive solutions for portfolios, eCommerce stores, online courses, and social networks.

Continue reading, and you will find your ideal CMS tool to help you manage all your website content in a simple way.

What is a CMS?

A Content Management System (CMS) is a web application that uses a database like MySQL or other methods to create, edit, and store HTML (or other) web content in an easy-to-manage way, helping users manage and modify content on a website without required technical expertise.

Instead of building your system for creating web pages, storing images, and other functions, CMS handles all the infrastructure so you can focus on brainstorming and implementing ideas for growing your web traffic.

On a more technical level, a Content Management System is made of two core parts, and one of them is the Content Management Application (CMA) that allows you to add and manage content on your site.

The other part is the Content Delivery Application (CDA) that allows you to delegate the behind-the-scenes processes that take the content you input in the CMA, store it appropriately, and make it visible to your visitors.

Without CMS, you would need to write a static HTML file and upload it to your server.

Instead, using a CMS, you can write your content in an interface that is simple to understand regardless if you are tech-savvy or a beginner.

Similarly, you can browse the media library to upload and manage images and other media instead of interacting with your web server directly.

A CMS software will enable you to present your content to your visitors exactly in the way you want.

What to Consider When Choosing a CMS

1. Choose a software that relieves you from focusing on managing the technology

Your development speed should not dictate your business moves, so you should pick a CMS that enables your team to focus on implementing campaigns and strategies that increase web traffic, and doesn't require you to spend excessive time and effort understanding the technology.

2. Look for omnichannel support

With content being deployed through AR/VR, mobile, kiosks, digital assistants, jumbotrons, and more alongside the desktop and mobile sites, it is important for you to consider a CMS solution capable of supporting the arising channels for your business to benefit at full capacity.

3. Allow developers to code in the preferred programming language

Hiring resources that are highly specialized in one specific CMS infrastructure can be very limiting and create bottlenecks.

Instead, it would be best practice for you to opt for a system that allows your developers to maximize their strengths and code in the preferred programming language.

4. APIs and integrations with other apps and microservices are a priority

Regardless if you want to personalize your marketing strategy or gain deeper insights into your users' web interactions and behaviors, you will require different apps and microservices to manage everyday operations.

Extending your CMS software's functionality to deliver personalized content will require you to integrate with marketing automation, business intelligence, Google Analytics, and RSS tools, just like you will need to connect with partner management platforms like NetSuite to better manage partner alliances.

A headless, API-first CMS will let you connect with third-party content management tools easier. Don't make the mistake of thinking that a CMS is equal to CRM.

5. Consider different types of websites

Whether it's building your brand, generating leads, or selling products you are aiming at, there are several different types of websites with each tool requiring different tools, content layouts, functionalities, and design principles.

  • Why do you want to build your website?
  • For what target audience and what kind of visitors are you looking to attract?
  • What benefits will your audience have from visiting your site?
  • What actions do you want your visitors to make on your website, and how do you plan to incentivize them?
  • How do you plan to monetize your content?

Following and answering questions like these will help you set clear goals, understand how to design websites, and recognize the best CMS tools for each website type.

Best CMS Software Solutions

1. WordPress

Best Free CMS Software Solution for Websites of All Types.

WordPress is the Best Free CMS Software Solution for Websites of All Types

Powering over 37% of websites on the internet, WordPress is the most popular CMS solution that allows you to build any type of website from an eCommerce store, membership site, blog, or personal website to forums, Q&A websites, portfolio sites, and more.

With a variety of plugins and integrations, you can display menus, products, pages, landing pages, graphics, and much more.

The flexibility of being able to host the site you build through WordPress anywhere allows you to own and control your data, which makes data migration easy.

Give out the right permissions to people so they can access what they need to effectively do their jobs with the administrator, author, editor, and subscriber levels of access.

You can easily store media and embed it into content, as the software allows you to quickly insert images, upload alt text, add images in batch, upload full zip files, and more.

If you're looking for better customer support, integrated website hosting platforms, or simply a tool that is easier to use, you can consider some of the best WordPress alternatives like Zyro, 10Web, or Weebly.

Access thousands of widgets, social media integration, spam blocking, scheduling calendars, SEO, landing page forms, and other types of plugins designed to work directly with WordPress.

The Theme Customizer allows you to make quick and inclusive modifications without extensive coding.

Being the preferred tool for creating SEO-friendly sites, WordPress creates HTML pages that are easy to understand by search engines and allows you to rank higher through SEO-friendly permalinks, title tags, and headings.

Since creating a website is only one part of the process, you can ensure fast load speeds and uptime with WP Engine WordPress hosting services that will attain the volume of consumers and reinforce the quality of your content.

Of course, you will come across faster and cheaper WordPress web hosting services depending on if you're hosting blogs, professional websites, online stores, or something else, which is why you should always consider other providers.

WordPress Dashboard
Source: ithemes

Pricing

WordPress is free.

Pros

  • Launch any type of website in any niche
  • Build the website in WordPress and host it anywhere
  • You own and control the data, which makes server migration easy
  • Free software that doesn't compromise the quality or beauty of the designs
  • Automatically mobile-responsive websites
  • Assign administrators, authors, editors, and subscribers permissions
  • Allow the users to manage their website in full and write content for the site, and upload
  • Quickly insert images, text, zip files

Built for all industries with varying levels of technical customization, broad ranges of familiarity, and all sizes of sites, WordPress allows you to host, assign permissions, add plugins, customize themes, and rank high in Google search.

2. Drupal

Best CMS Software for Managing Large Amounts of Data through a Built-In User Access System.

Drupal is the Best CMS Software for Managing Large Amounts of Data through a Built In User Access System

Through the Content Construction Kit (CCK), non-technical users can create content types like blog posts, products, job vacancies, events, personnel records, and more.

The Views module allows non-technical users to select nodes from the CMS using sophisticated criteria, sort them, and choose which fields to display.

Providing you with the means to grant them controlled access, Drupal enables you to register certain users as trusted team members while deploying the “anonymous” etiquette to untrusted web visitors.

Supporting multi-site management, Drupal lets you construct sophisticated multi-site architectures that can run in separate silos or be completely integrated, allowing the sites to share combinations of core code, module code, themes, users, roles, permissions, and content.

The Multisite Manager lets non-programmers easily create and delete micro-sites.

Drupal Dashboard
Source: Drupal

Pricing

Drupal is a free, open-source CMS tool.

Pros

  • Non-programmers can create simple and sophisticated systems for managing and displaying complex content on web pages
  • Create content types with image fields and multiple images attached to content items
  • Simplified form development and form coding with the Forms API providing a set of field types
  • Write codes attached to events or actions within the system through hooks
  • Filter search results to particular topics and for SEO and provide relevance through categories of content through Taxonomy & Categorization
  • Unlimited number of roles with each role assigned to a set of permissions and each user associated with multiple roles
  • Build sophisticated multi-site architectures in separate silos or completely integrated

Providing superb quality of finished sites, straightforward learning process, and extensive flexibility for non-technical users to get the grasp on everything as fast and efficiently as the programmers, Drupal can support a high number of concurrent users and manage high-traffic sites.

3. Joomla

Best CMS Software for Building and Publishing Content for SMBs, Governments, Non-Profits, and Large Organizations.

Joomla is the Best CMS Software for Building and Publishing Content for Large Organizations

With a rock-solid code base and large global community helping you get a fast start, Joomla will equip you with all the tools you need to build websites or develop applications, develop templates or extensions, or something else completely.

Joomla offers thousands of high-quality templates, a lot of which are free, and many templates come with a GUI that allows you to change colors, fonts, layouts, and features with zero coding necessary.

Powerful SEO tools are ready out-of-the-box, with metadata and keywords, menus creation with clear and consistent sitemaps, and much more.

Keep your software updated in one click, maintain your extensions up to date and install them without leaving your back end, and allow visitors to register and gain access to additional resources.

Joomla Control Panel
Source: Blog.cpanel

Pricing

Joomla is free and open-source.

Pros

  • Create a blog, business website, intranet, community website
  • Broaden the functionalities with over 8K extensions
  • Content versioning
  • Redirect the URLs, monetize with banners and ads, add tags, create RSS feeds from your content
  • Extended developer documentation and microdata library implementation
  • Create customized solutions like custom layouts, language and template overrides, custom CSS
  • Equip each menu item with separate meta description, keyword, and robot settings

Making your content editing and publishing easy, updating your extensions fast, and allowing the visitors to access additional resources, Joomla can help you create everything from eCommerce stores to social networking websites with a mild to moderate level of technical ability required.

4. Magento

Best CMS Solution for Running an eCommerce Store alongside a Blog, Business Site, Forum.

Magento is the Best CMS Solution for Running an eCommerce Store alongside a Blog, Business Site, Forum

Create content, personalize for specific customer segments, update pages, automatically display products by price, color, release date, and take manual control for special items, help store associates deliver personalized experiences for all sizes and types of businesses.

Easily integrate with existing back-end systems, assign custom catalogs and price lists, manage quotes, and use the same branding across all your sites without multiple instances.

Magento can easily handle a lot of product types, such as bundle, virtual, and downloadable products while allowing you to manage unlimited product attributes and configurations and create special attribute sets for certain products.

Acquiring solutions for a domain name, hosting, shopping cart, payment, and shipping alongside Magento's powerful eCommerce capabilities will help you accentuate the qualities of your eCommerce website and learn everything about eCommerce website design to set your online store up for success.

Magento Product Configurations
Source: Magefan

Pricing

The Magento Open Source is free to download, but you will need to pay for web development, hosting, and additional integration costs to launch and maintain your site.

Pros

  • Track viewed and compared products and set up related products to encourage customers to spend more
  • Add product images to the unlimited virtual, downloadable, grouped, bundled, configurable, and personalized products
  • Manage multiple stores and websites from one admin
  • Order splitting for customers splitting in multiple directions and among multiple invoices
  • Bulk import/export the CSV files
  • Coupon codes for offline distribution, customer groups based on location and demographics
  • Wish lists and social buttons
  • Google SiteMaps, customizable URLs and meta-information

Any store offering a large volume of detailed products with various options, variants, and customizations will be satisfied with Magento Open Source, and the feature-rich set with an expanding base of integrations makes Magento perfect for optimizing your content along with powerful marketing, SEO, and catalog-management tools.

5. HubSpot CMS

Best CMS software for Marketers and Businesses Looking to Connect with Customers.

HubSpot CMS is the Best CMS software for Marketers and Businesses Looking to Connect with Customers

In HubSpot CMS, the developers can build using flexible themes, and marketers can easily edit and create pages by themselves, along with a free integration with HubSpot CRM through which you can add leads directly to your CRM, personalize your website for individual visitors, and more.

Utilize the SEO recommendations and elevate your site, select from the pre-built website themes with optional configuration, track every visitor on your site and create personalized digital experiences.

Update and create pages without the developer's help or custom code while publishing changes on the fly, create up to five variations of a page and serve up the best-performing option, and analyze which content types, sources, and campaigns drive the most leads.

HubSpot CMS Dashboad
Source: Resonatehq

Pricing

The CMS Hub Starter pack is $23 per month.

HubSpot CMS Pricing Plan

Pros

  • Build flexible themes and edit and create pages on your own
  • Seamless digital experience with a built-in free CRM integration
  • Gain actionable insights into how you can improve your site through SEO recommendations
  • Go with a pre-built website theme or configure one without worrying about mismatched design, logos, or navigations
  • Publish changes on the fly and update pages without a developer's help
  • Select the best performing option out of five different page variations
  • Analyze the impact of your website
  • Optimize conversion rates and generate organic traffic through A/B testing and SEO capabilities

With HubSpot, you can plan, execute, review, analyze, strategize, collaborate, reach customers, and more while choosing the best-performing version of your website and analyzing the content types, sources, and campaigns generating the most leads.

6. Kentico

Enterprise-Focused CMS Software with Two Different CMS Products.

Kentico is an Enterprise Focused CMS Software with Two Different CMS Products

Kentico's two CMS products include the Experience that provides integrated content management, digital marketing, and commerce tools and the Kontent that provides omnichannel content management, and it can be managed in the cloud and delivered via API.

The headless cloud-based CMS solution Kontent lets you create content from anywhere without maintenance or downtime, enabling you to deliver content via API, maximize your team's expertise with inline suggestions, tasks, and reviews, and add content into your microservice architecture.

Xperience is a digital experience platform that allows you to deliver engaging, personalized experiences across websites, online stores, email campaigns, and on mobile while engaging with customers during their entire journey, maintaining a fast development lifecycle, and extending your solution with third-party apps or custom components.

Kontent Interface
Source: Webcoda

Pricing

The annual fee for the Experience license is $10,500 in the Business plan, while the Kontent monthly subscription package starts at $1,249 in the Business package.

Kontent Pricing Plan

Pros

  • Clean, structured content delivered by API
  • Deploying as part of the CI/CD pipeline
  • Manage all your content in one repository and update websites in context without developers
  • Integrate content into your tech stack for faster deployments and unrestricted design possibilities
  • Create engaging portals for your customers and employees with insights into purchase decisions, product issues
  • Reuse successful content across campaigns and channels
  • Personalized experiences on the web, mobile, email
  • Unique content for different types of visitors

Whether you want to personalize content for different groups of visitors and keep your customers engaged through automated actions in the Experience platform or allow the developers to choose their own tech staff, integrate with internal systems, and manage all your content in one repository through the Kontent CMS, Kentico has got you covered.

7. WooCommerce

Most Flexible Open-Source E-commerce Solution with a Powerful CMS.

WooCommerce is the Most Flexible Open Source E-commerce Solution with a Powerful CMS

Functioning as an open-source WordPress plugin instead of a standalone site builder and being one of the best free eCommerce website builders, WooCommerce allows its users to configure the software to handle the eCommerce capability of the site built through WordPress.

Allowing you to work with physical and digital goods, sell products with multiple variants and configurations, offer instant access via download to digital items, operate an affiliate marketing model, WooCommerce will improve the eCommerce experience for all customers.

Configuring your Storefront website is easy, and you can customize your stock management options, plugins' general settings, add and configure new products and items for sale.

Choose from a selection of free and paid WordPress themes that come with SEO features and are responsive across mobile devices, and access the general settings menu for the WooCommerce plugin to find extensive customization options.

For a more extensive payment gateway offer, more unique free features that meet your business goals, legal texts such as terms and conditions as standards, and website support outside of WordPress, you can always make a quick search and investigate the best WooCommerce alternatives.

Pricing

The base WooCommerce shopping cart is free, but you may have to pay additional money for extra plugins.

Pros

  • Install the Storefront child theme and refine the look and appearance of your eCommerce site
  • Specify menu orders, tag and categorize products, add taglines for product images
  • Enable and disable reviews for specific products
  • Themes are customized for faster load times and conversion increase with some offering hoisting and setup
  • Access a wide selection of free and paid WordPress themes
  • Customize everything from the checkout process to the price display in the general settings menu
  • Add upsells and cross-sells

If the free, eCommerce-tailored, performance-maximizing Storefront WordPress theme isn't enough for you, you can access hundreds of themes on the WordPress website or even thousands of themes on sites like Themify while improving the appearance and functionalities of your store with free and premium WooCommerce extensions and plugins.

8. Squarespace

#1 CMS Software for Non-Technical Users Creating Basic Websites.

Squarespace is a CMS Software for Non Technical Users Creating Basic Websites

One of the best free eCommerce platforms, and designed to provide the ability to non-technical users to create a simple website or a lightweight eCommerce store, Squarespace offers more than 100 sophisticated themes that are optimized for mobile phones and tablets.

If a blog is going to be a central element on your website, Squarespace provides commenting, multi-anchor, post-scheduling, AMP support functionalities.

The editor supports all six interface languages, and you can access the eCommerce and accounting apps in the Squarespace Extensions marketplace or the web editor add-ons like pop-ups and announcement bars, photo galleries, appointment scheduling, social media widgets, restaurant tools, and more in the Business plan.

As the two giants in the eCommerce industry, Squarespace and Shopify are undoubtedly excellent choices, but understanding which is the better choice for starting a small store with a gorgeous website/blog accompanying it and which one is better for event selling or digital products will require you to delve deeper with your Shopify vs Squarespace comparison.

If you're looking for more extensive eCommerce website builder features, higher customizability, more flexible pricing, more advanced SEO tools, you can always check out some of the best Squarespace alternatives such as Constant Contact Builder or Webflow.

Squarespace Features
Source: Kinsta

Pricing

When paid monthly, Squarespace's Personal plan is $16 per month, but this is not all the Squarespace pricing model has to offer as different features are important for different use cases, company stages, and business models, all of which plays a role in your subscription choice.

Pros

  • Extremely easy to use for the non-technical site builders
  • Over 100 artistic and modern templates
  • Integrate a shopping cart into your website or blog
  • Customize title tags, meta-descriptions, and URLs
  • Add premium, members-only content like classes, workshops, podcasts
  • Integrate the Email Campaigns newsletter service with your website and store
  • Enable other widgets and tools and edit source codes of your templates
  • No bandwidth and storage limit

Excellent for smaller websites, online stores, and blogs that need to look attractive, Squarespace's minimalistic architecture will help you build stunning portfolios and personal sites while offering add-ons like Members Areas, Squarespace Scheduling, and Email Campaigns.

9. Paperflite

Best CMS Software for Collaboration & Project Management Assistance for Sales and Marketing Teams.

Paperflite is the Best CMS Software for Collaboration & Project Management Assistance

Paperflite is a cloud-based CMS designed to assist marketing and sales teams with collaboration and prospect management, providing predefined templates, document management, indexing, text editing, repository, and other capabilities.

Create campaigns after selecting the preferred themes, adding customized content, and crafting messages for specific audiences, and gain crucial insights on metrics such as views, downloads, time spent on a page, heat maps, and integrated video analytics.

Assign role-based access to your staff with permissions for editing and publishing while easily integrating with third-party applications like Dropbox, Box, Drive, OneDrive, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more.

Paperflite Dashboard
Source: G2

Pricing

Paperflite for Sales Content Management is $50 per user per month, while the Clverstory for Interactive Landing Pages program starts at $950.

Paperflite Pricing Plan

Pros

  • Create microsite templates and collaborate with reps for simple cloning and incremental updates
  • Team members receive alerts when the customers interact with shared content
  • Switch collections to live updates and notify previous recipients of the new and updated content
  • Create custom microsites to share content and track how prospects engage
  • Multi-recipient tracking technology for custom-tailored follow-ups
  • Share visually stunning content storyboards with your customers
  • Choose from a variety of captivating imagery and add your custom messaging for your microsite

Paperflite allows you to share target-exclusive content with stunning themes, all from within your inbox, while giving your sales reps a personalized content library with structured content streams and intelligent content recommendations for interactive, personalized experiences for every prospect.

10. Wix

Best CMS Software with Visually Impressive Layouts for Small Businesses, Restaurants, Online Stores, and Artists.

Wix is the Best CMS Software with Visually Impressive Layouts for Small Businesses

With exceptional designs and pre-built layouts for a variety of different industries, Wix allows you to animate text and other elements, add newsletter tools, live chat software, online booking widgets, and more tools from the app market, deploy ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence), and automatically back up your website.

Embed videos in the background, import your own fonts, activate the Wix blog add-on with tags, categories, RSS, blog post scheduling, edit and publish articles on the go through the Wix Owner mobile app, and more.

Access comprehensive and customizable reports on traffic, sales, contacts, and blog engagement while integrating paid sites with the often considered the best of the best website analytics tools Google Analytics.

Create members areas within your store, as well as for your bookings, events, blogs, forums, and decide which members get approved access instantly and which ones are selected

manually.

The visually impressive layouts Wix excels in capture a wide range of website types they can decorate, including portfolios, demos, online resumes, student websites, artist galleries, and more, which is why it is a good idea to gain inspiration from some personal website examples and explore what you have borrowed in Wix.

For more access to your site's back-end code or being able to launch a blog more easily, you can take a peek into the best Wix alternatives such as Gator Builder, Webnode, or Jimdo.

Along with WordPress, Wix occupies the top two picks for the cheapest regular website builders without the mandatory coding skills.

Wix Dashboard
Source: Hostinger

Pricing

The Connect Domain plan is $4,50 per month, and there is a free plan, but you will have to deal with ads and no custom domain, which is why you should consider your use cases, traffic numbers, and goals in a sort of a Wix pricing guide to help you choose an ideal plan.

Pros

  • Create a small membership website for users to receive personal login credentials
  • Create members areas for your store, bookings, events, blogs, forums
  • Access the customizable traffic, sales, contacts, and blog engagement reports
  • Edit and publish articles on the go through the Wix Owner mobile app
  • Sell paid subscriptions to your blog posts
  • Edit page titles, meta-descriptions, and alt tags individually
  • Create rules for auto-generating titles and descriptions with 301 redirects and SEO patterns
  • Embed various widgets and other tools through an integrated HTML iframe tool
  • Set up custom API interactions through JavaScript with Wix Code

The perfect website builder for photographers, bands, artists, and small businesses that rely heavily on visual presentation, Wix will help you deliver stunning websites across all devices while providing access to over 300 apps and the always-improving SEO mechanism.

11. dotCMS

Best Hybrid CMS Software for Deploying Content-Enabled Applications like Websites, Single-Page Apps, & Mobile Apps.

dotCMS is the Best Hybrid CMS Software for Deploying Content Enabled Applications

Empowering marketers and developers to create and reuse content to build connected, engaging, and memorable digital products, dotCMS allows its users to easily customize and integrate with third-party systems through a plugin architecture and APIs.

Utilize the smooth editor, secure workflows, multilingual, and multi-tenant capabilities while controlling the user experience and fostering collaboration between the marketing and the development team.

The fully customizable dotCMS Cloud is capable of deploying websites, intranets, extranets, portals, apps, or any other content-driven strategy with great speed and agility.

dotCMS Global enables you to set up authoring and publishing environments across geographic regions for a globally distributed publishing network with static and dynamic publishing options allowing you to scale seamlessly.

dotCMS Dashboard
Source: Dotcms

Pricing

Apart from the free version, dotCMS offers its Cloud subscription at $1,400 per month.

dotCMS Pricing Plan

Pros

  • Build, manage, and deploy websites, single-page apps, mobile apps
  • Manage content, images, and assets in a centralized location and deliver them to any channel
  • Customize and integrate with third-party systems
  • Store all kinds of content in infinitely customizable content types, and display the content in a wide array of widgets
  • Manage multiple websites and share content between the sites
  • Open-source headless CMS with an API-first approach
  • Assign roles and permissions and control access to content
  • Interact with API without writing Java plugins

Assisting medium and large businesses in creating, maintaining, and launching content-enabled innovations like websites, independent forums, mobile applications while assisting in the development of a multi-channel mobile strategy, dotCMS will help you deliver trusted, continuous, and connected customer experiences.

12. Contentful

#1 CMS Software for Centralized Content Organization and Cross-Channel Digital Experience.

Contentful is a CMS Software for Centralized Content Organization and Cross Channel Digital Experience

Instead of focusing solely on creating web pages, Contentful helps you organize all your content in a central hub and lets you use it in any digital channel while seamlessly integrating with hundreds of other tools through open APIs and powerful integration capabilities.

Cultivate better performance, fast customization through robust REST and GraphQL APIs with fully managed back-end services ensuring complete flexibility for excellent digital experiences.

Power hundreds of digital experiences across any device, working side-by-side and cutting development times in half while maintaining branding and message consistency across your entire digital presence with edits in one place published instantly everywhere.

Integrate with your favorite martech tools, segment, personalize, and experiment while decreasing time to market with out-of-the-box integrations or by building custom apps.

Contentful Personalization Platform
Source: Ninetailed.io

Pricing

Contentful's Community subscription package is free.

Contentful Pricing Plan

Pros

  • Intuitive and not-technical drafting and publishing
  • Straightforward content formatting
  • Keep track of incrementally changing versions of the same content
  • Available plugins, widgets, and apps suit the needs of all sites and are easily incorporated
  • Easily institute an approval routing process between authors and editors
  • Schedule content to be published at a certain time and in the certain order
  • Storage and management of rich media files
  • Search your content based on keyword, meta-data, tags

With Contentful, you can easily manage, edit, tag, approve and store both published and yet-to-be-published content while navigating access management, internationalization, SEO, API / integrations, asset management, and more capabilities driving the always customizable designs.

13. Grav

Best Open-Source Flat-File CMS Software.

Grav is the Best Open Source Flat File CMS Software

Not requiring a database to operate, Grav queries content from text files which makes it very lightweight and easy to deploy anywhere as you only need to upload your site's files.

Designed to have a shallow learning curve and be easily set up, Grav focuses on speed and simplicity over an abundance of features at the expense of complexity, allowing you to use the most efficient Markdown editor to create your content online or offline.

Find, install, and easily update extensions and themes with the Package Manager, cache content intelligently and deliver great performances, create unlimited taxonomies such as tags, categories, and authors to filter and manage your content.

Define custom fields for all pages, including modular content, present sites in multiple languages, back up and restore your data without a hassle.

Grav Theams
Source: Deliciousbrains

Pricing

Grav is a free, self-hosted CMS.

Pros

  • Create and edit your content online and offline in the Markdown editor
  • Easily find, install, and update extensions and themes through the Package Manager
  • Stellar performance with intelligent content caching regardless of hosting
  • Define custom fields for all pages and apply unlimited tags, categories, authors
  • Built-in multi-language support
  • Simple backups and restores and easy host/server changes
  • Resize, crop, resample and deploy effects like automatic caching of images
  • Modify specific theme sections for easier updates with Theme Inheritance

Providing an easy interface through which you can create and configure content with enjoyment, Grav will deliver everything from one-click installs, powerful filtering, and dynamic image manipulation to multi-language support, easy backups and restores, and stellar performance.

14. Progress Sitefinity

Best CMS Software for Marketers in Need for Optimized, Personalized Content Delivery.

Progress Sitefinity is the Best CMS Software for Marketers

The flexible, API-driven Sitefinity is consistently praised for its outstanding ease of use, rich styling and templating functionalities, multichannel delivery, adaptive UX and content personalization, as well as powerful add-ons and integrations.

Along with superior digital asset management, Sitefinity delivers an improved Videos UI, bulk operations and advanced back-end media search by library, tag, category, and URL.

Sitefinity Insights will give you access to advanced analysis and optimize the customer journeys while the personalization module ensures audience intelligence, content personalization, conversion tracking, persona scoring, and many more capabilities.

Manage multisite, multilingual content from a single instance and deliver experiences across platforms and devices.

Progress Sitefinity Functionalities
Source: Progress

Pricing

To acquire the pricing information for either of its three programs, you will need to request a demo from Sitefinity's team.

Pros

  • Front-end developer-tailored templating for work with master pages, Razor templates, MVC Layouts, Bootstrap packages
  • Deliver a customized interface through auto generated fields and widget property editors
  • Identify valuable customer segments, tailor messaging to shape individual journeys
  • Capture more revenue through integrated commerce solutions
  • Link or embed media and documents
  • Different URLs in each language for each media content item and different URLs for different files in different languages
  • Evaluate marketing program performance, successful user interactions, friction areas in the buyer's journey

Sitefinity will help you engage audiences with thoughtful, relevant content through a sophisticated development framework that allows you to define custom modules without coding and deploy complex integrations with front-end and back-end third-party integrations.

15. Shopify

All-in-One Hosted CMS Software.

Shopify is All in One Hosted CMS Software

Shopify is a hosted, simple solution for creating your online store that makes it easy for you to sell your products to anyone, anywhere in person with Point of Sale and online through your website, social media channels, and online marketplaces.

You will only be able to appreciate the relief that a hosted CMS solution as Shopify brings when you look into website hosting costs for different web hosts and different hosting types (shared hosting, WordPress hosting).

Explore the range of free and paid themes to establish the right look and feel of your store, and request any look and feel you have in mind for the developers to realize through Liquid, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and JSON languages.

As a developer, you can build custom themes for specific merchants, customize them to meet the specific merchants' needs, build themes to sell in the Shopify Theme Store, as well as create apps that extend the functionality of a theme.

Add supporting assets to your themes and control the presentation of components or features and store reusable pieces of code that are usable across components.

For delving deeper into the intricacies like the supporting assets, you can weigh out the pros and cons and evaluate real user feedback if you are more interested in Shopify as a long-term online store solution through a more detailed Shopify review.

Shopify admin panel
Source: Plerdy

Pricing

The Basic Shopify plan will cost you $29 per month.

Pros

  • Add supporting assets to your theme to modify components and features and store reusable pieces of code across components
  • Translate your theme into different languages using locale files
  • Merchants can customize themes from the Shopify admin through the Shopify theme editor
  • Distribute themes through ZIP files, GitHub repository, Shopify CLI
  • Offer theme building as a service through the Shopify Experts Marketplace
  • Create themes for the Shopify Theme Store as a Partner and reach a global audience
  • Build an app that extends the functionalities of a merchant's theme
  • Build and edit themes locally, version-control your themes, test them for performance, accessibility, and code quality

Providing you with a wide range of customizable themes and allowing you to sell physical or digital products, Shopify helps you build new themes that represent each merchant's unique brand.

16. BigCommerce

Best CMS SOftware with Multi-Channel Approach to Selling.

BigCommerce is the Best CMS SOftware with Multi Channel Approach to Selling

BigCommerce is a hosted SaaS CMS solution that enables you to utilize a range of customizable templates so you can design your ideal online store, catering to users with both minimal web design skills and developers that can tweak the HTML and CSS.

With 12 free BigCommerce templates and around 160 paid themes, the software provides several different variations for each theme with free themes that are fully mobile-responsive and AMP-enabled.

Delivering flexibility with product variants and categories, BigCommerce lets you create up to 250 product options per product, present products in up to 600 variants, and utilize the bulk edit tool to speed up the categorizing process.

Finding a platform to jumpstart your online store success can be challenging without the right tool, and BigCommerce is often regarded as one of the best online store builders for launching your eCommerce website, alongside Wix and Shopify.

Pricing

The Standard plan is $29.95 per month.

Pros

  • Deliver your site content extremely quickly to mobile users through streamlined pages that strip out certain code types with AMP
  • Optimize all your images automatically through the Akamai Image Manager
  • Allow site visitors to subscribe to new blog posts via RSS readers or embed your posts on other websites
  • Enable your customers to upload files during their purchase
  • AMP format is available in all templates
  • Automatic image optimization is included in all plans
  • Edit page filters, meta-descriptions, headers, and create and change product-specific URLs
  • Official integration for Mailchimp

An excellent choice for new and ambitious eCommerce store owners, stores that sell through other platforms, and well-established eCommerce stores, BigCommerce lets you pick your perfect theme that can be easily customized with the new visual merchandising tool called Store Design, and elevate your products through advanced SEO and multi-channel integration.

17. Umbraco

#1 CMS Software for Developers Modeling Data, Creating Front End Templates, and Deploying Site Framework.

Umbraco is a CMS Software for Developersย  Modeling Data, Creating Front End Templates

With the Umbraco source code free and available for download as a ZIP file or via NuGet, Umbraco will let you build and extend your websites while allowing you to implement multiple 3rd party extensions and customized add-ons or build a site with a straightforward contact form.

Ensure that your team always stays focused on the context of the content they're creating with integrated workflows in the Backoffice, and create pages with added text, uploaded and cropped images while writing catchy SEO titles and descriptions.

Access previews through the Responsive Preview functionality and check how well will your content look on desktop and laptop screens with portrait and landscape views.

Add noindex and nofollow to your pages, eliminate duplicate content with canonical tags and index your pages with XML sitemaps.

Umbraco Dashboard
Source: Umbraco

Pricing

Outside of the free forever plan, the Umbraco Professional package is $7,100 per year.

Umbraco Pricing Plan

Pros

  • Add text, upload and crop images, and write catchy SEO titles and descriptions without leaving the page
  • Translate pages through language variants
  • Edit two pieces of content at the same time with text in both languages always visible through the side-by-side mode
  • Preview your content across multiple devices before publishing and utilize the Responsive Preview for portrait and landscape views
  • Add Social Media OG Tags and Cards and share your content with the world
  • Add noindex and nofollow to your pages, canonical tags to avoid duplicate content, and index your pages with XML sitemaps
  • Automatic 301 redirect management
  • Deploy data-driven marketing with tracking scripts

Empowering your team to create awesome content and elevate site performance, Umbraco will enable you to create and edit easy, simple, and friendly content while letting you excel with intuitive workflows, social media, SEO, integrations, previewing, and taking it a step further with Umbraco Cloud and Umbra.

18. Agility CMS

Comprehensive CMS Software for Managing and Delivering Content via RESTful APIs, GraphQL, and JAMstack.

Agility is a Comprehensive CMS Software for Managing and Delivering Content

Agility is a headless CMS solution that lets you manage content from one spot and deliver it anywhere through RESTful APIs, GraphQL, and JAMstack while enabling you to model your content and access the SEO, scheduling, content relationships, and other capabilities.

With the platform hosted on Microsoft Azure, you can host your front-end solution or web application anywhere you want with industry-leading security and page load speeds after creating, managing, and organizing pages with reusable blocks and sitemaps.

Allow anyone to see how your content is going to look before publishing it, reorder, reuse, and repurpose content effectively across all your digital channels.

Agility CMS Application
Source: Help.agilitycms

Pricing

The Developer package is $0 and free forever.

Agility CMS Pricing Plan

Pros

  • Set up content fields, entries, and relationships in whatever structure
  • Populate your content with custom workflow and approval capabilities
  • Share content previews with external users
  • Define your content structure and relationships and reorder, reuse, and repurpose content
  • Best-in-class consultation, training, and onboarding services
  • Built-in intuitive page management, navigation, and sitemaps
  • Utilize the Sync SDKs for limitless speed and Management API for populating content
  • Compatible with any DevOps pipeline

With Agility CMS, you can choose from starter templates to bootstrap development or modify your versions, ensure limitless speed and populated content with APIs for everything, and host and deploy your projects anywhere.

19. Oracle WebCenter Content

Best Enterprise CMS Software for Delivering Content to Any Application through a Housing Storage.

Oracle WebCenter Content is the Best Enterprise CMS Software for Delivering Content to Any Application

Oracle WebCenter Content is an enterprise CMS solution that gives you access to a storage space for your unstructured content, which you can then deliver to any application or website, and allows you to manage documents, images, rich media files, and records instead of giving you a text editor to upload content.

Unify content into a single repository with connectors to popular applications, file systems, and databases, manage content from within Microsoft Office or Windows Explorer, and quickly find content by searching full text or metadata.

Utilize built-in capture capabilities with surface imaging and workflow capabilities via familiar menus and hotkeys within existing applications, classify documents and extract data using optical character recognition, and access invoices, employee forms, receipts, and claims in context.

Oracle WebCenter Content Features
Source: Fourcornerstone

Pricing

Oracle WebCenter Content's pricing starts at $3,450.

Oracle WebCenter Content Pricing Plan

Pros

  • Pre-integrated with Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
  • Analyze, recognize, and categorize any document type
  • Auto learning, line-item table extraction, associate data searching
  • Version control, workflow engine, one-click web publishing
  • Automatically format image size, shape, resolution, and aspect ratio
  • Automatically create and compress thumbnails, web versions, print versions during media check-in
  • Control the creation, declaration, classification, retention, and disposition of content across the enterprise
  • Enforce file plans, centralize legal holds, perform disposition processing and discovery, provide audit trails and disposition certificates

Providing organizations with a unified repository for unstructured content and delivering it to business users in a proper format, Oracle WebCenter Content equips medium and large businesses with the tools to publish, document, record, capture content.

20. Ghost

Best Headless CMS Software in JAM Stack.

Ghost is the Best Headless CMS Software in JAM Stack

One of the best blogging platforms, Ghost is a headless Node JS CMS that comes with built-in advanced SEO options and a sleek web app dashboard powered by JavaScript, with posts in Ghost supporting structured data by default, core support for AMP, fully responsive and mobile-friendly themes, RSS feeds support, sitemaps generator included.

Native themes in Ghost are responsive and stunning in design, yet minimal and optimized for distraction-free reading, alongside an in-built theme marketplace with free and premium themes and the capability to create your designs.

Integrate with hundreds of services, including Disqus, Google Analytics, Stripe, Slack, AMP, and add custom integrations, and easily import content from WordPress through a dedicated plugin that you can install directly in WordPress.

Ghost Dashboard
Source: Ghost

Pricing

Based on the audience of up to 500 members, the Ghost Starter plan is $9 per month.

Ghost Pricing Plan

Pros

  • Exceptionally smooth user experience with the entire dashboard based on JavaScript
  • Create your themes with handlebars to insert data or choose from a gallery of free and premium themes
  • Utilize REST APIs in any application like mobile apps or use front-end technologies like React and Vue
  • Built-in membership support
  • Import content from WordPress easily
  • Built-in integrations with hundreds of services and custom integrations
  • Structured data, AMP, RSS, sitemaps

Suitable for both simple blogs that need post management and publishing and membership sites, Ghost CMS is fast and reduces build time with simplicity and a sleek dashboard.

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Anastasia Belyh

Editor at FounderJar

Anastasia has been a professional blogger and researcher since 2014. She loves to perform in-depth software reviews to help software buyers make informed decisions when choosing project management software, CRM tools, website builders, and everything around growing a startup business.

Anastasia worked in management consulting and tech startups, so she has lots of experience in helping professionals choosing the right business software.