- Site builder
Framer
A design tool that publishes websites. The best-feeling visual canvas in the category, with a deliberately light CMS attached.
CMS Selector
A CMS gets chosen by developers and lived in by everyone else. The classic failure: the brief was a simple marketing website, and what shipped was an enterprise content model nobody on the marketing team can drive. Adjust the filters for who actually edits the content, your team, and your budget - and see which platforms genuinely fit. Headless and traditional, no sponsored placements.
26 platforms match your situation
- Site builder
- HubSpot CRM ecosystem
HubSpot Content Hub
CMS as a CRM accessory. Makes sense in proportion to how much of your marketing already lives in HubSpot.
- Site builder
Squarespace
Design-led site builder with the best-looking templates in the category. Built for small teams who value polish over flexibility.
- Site builder
Webflow
Visual development for marketing sites. Designers ship production sites without engineers - with a real CMS underneath.
- Site builder
Wix
The fastest path from nothing to a published marketing site. Fine for a small business; a fight for anyone with developers.
- Traditional CMS
- Agency favourite
Craft CMS
The agency thoroughbred. Hand-built content models with one of the best editor experiences money can buy - via a developer.
- Traditional CMS
- Government & complex content
Drupal
Heavy machinery for genuinely complex content. The canonical over-build for everything simpler than that.
- Traditional CMS
- Publishing & newsletters
Ghost
A publishing engine, not a website builder. Posts, newsletters, memberships, and paid subscriptions - nothing else, on purpose.
- Traditional CMS
- declining
Joomla
The middle child of the open-source CMS era. Still maintained, still capable, steadily shrinking.
- Traditional CMS
- .NET ecosystem
Umbraco
The open-source CMS of the .NET world. The natural choice when your organisation already runs on Microsoft.
- Traditional CMS
WordPress
Runs 40%+ of the web for a reason. Free like a puppy is free - the licence costs nothing, the upkeep does.
- Headless SaaS
Contentful
The enterprise default of headless. Mature, governed, reliable - and priced like it sounds.
- Headless SaaS
- MACH / composable
Contentstack
Enterprise composable headless for organisations that found Contentful too rigid or too expensive at scale. MACH Alliance co-founder.
- Headless SaaS
DatoCMS
The headless CMS agencies quietly standardise on. Pragmatic, polished, and priced per project rather than per enterprise.
- Headless SaaS
- GraphQL-first
Hygraph
GraphQL-native headless with content federation - one graph that can pull in your other systems' content alongside its own.
- Headless SaaS
Sanity
Content as structured data, with a studio you build in code. The most flexible headless platform - which makes your developer the editor-experience designer.
- Visual-first headless
Builder.io
The visual canvas as the product. Marketers compose real pages from dev-approved components - with A/B testing built in, no tickets required.
- Visual-first headless
Prismic
Guardrailed page building. Developers define slices; marketers compose on-brand pages from them - freedom inside the fence.
- Visual-first headless
Storyblok
The original visual-editing headless CMS. Editors click the live page and edit in place; developers keep an API-first component system underneath.
- Open-source headless
- Database-first
Directus
An instant app and API layer over any SQL database. Strongest when content is really data; weakest when data is really pages.
- Open-source headless
- TypeScript / Next.js
Payload
TypeScript-native CMS that installs into your Next.js app. The CMS and the website become one codebase - the least glue code in headless.
- Open-source headless
Strapi
The most-adopted open-source headless CMS. Full code and data ownership - and full operational responsibility to match.
- Enterprise DXP
- Enterprise Drupal
Acquia
Drupal with an enterprise wrapper: managed cloud, support, and DXP tooling around the open-source core.
- Enterprise DXP
Adobe Experience Manager
The heaviest machinery in content management. Justifiable at global enterprise scale; a seven-figure answer to a five-figure question everywhere else.
- Enterprise DXP
Optimizely
The DXP with experimentation in its DNA. The accessible end of enterprise - if testing-led marketing is genuinely how you operate.
- Enterprise DXP
Sitecore
Marketing-suite DXP mid-flight in its own SaaS transition. Personalisation-led, with XM Cloud as the bet on its future.