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Content management systems in 2026

6 commercial products, ranked by how many people read about each, or about its maker, on Wikipedia's mobile site. Of those with an article of their own, Webflow has the most readers, about 460 a month. 30 open-source projects, ranked by GitHub stars and how recently each was worked on. Ghost leads with 56k stars, ahead of Payload. 30 had code pushed in the last three months. Most common licenses: MIT (17), Apache-2.0 (3) and GPL-2.0 (3).

Commercial content management systems

  1. 1
    Webflow Webflow

    Design, build, optimize, and rank in AI search — all in Webflow. Enterprise-grade security, CMS, hosting, and AEO built in. Trusted by over 300k teams.

    Complete system Production-ready A marketing team or designer wants pixel-level control of a site without developers, and the site fits Webflow's CMS limits.

    460 readers a month Since 2013 Commercial
  2. 2
    WordPress VIP Automattic

    WordPress VIP is the enterprise content platform trusted by over 700+ enterprises including NASA, Salesforce, and Meta. Up to 99.99% uptime SLA. FedRAMP authorized and SOC 2 Type 2 certified.

    Complete system Production-ready A large publisher or enterprise wants to run WordPress at high traffic with strict security and support guarantees.

    Commercial
  3. 3
    Contentful Contentful

    Headless CMS

    Complete system Production-ready A company with developers needs one content source feeding several websites and apps.

    181 readers a month Commercial
  4. 4
    Adobe Experience Manager Adobe Inc.

    Complete system Production-ready A large enterprise runs many brands and sites, already uses Adobe Experience Cloud, and has a budget for implementation partners.

    Commercial
  5. 5
    Sanity Sanity

    Sanity is the back-end built for AI content operations. Power web, mobile, and agentic applications at scale.

    Complete system Production-ready Developers want full control over the editing interface and content model, and real-time collaborative editing.

    Commercial
  6. 6
    Storyblok Storyblok

    Storyblok is an intuitive content management system that helps your developer and marketing teams get value from your content faster and create innovative digital experiences.

    Complete system Production-ready You want headless flexibility for developers but marketers still need to edit pages visually.

    Commercial

Open-source content management systems

Complete systems you can adopt 3

  1. 1
    Ghost TryGhost

    Independent technology for modern publishing, memberships, subscriptions and newsletters.

    Complete system Production-ready You publish content and want to run paid memberships or newsletters without taking a platform cut.

    ★ 56k MIT TypeScript Active, pushed today
  2. 2
    Halo halo-dev

    Halo 是一款强大易用的开源建站工具,从个人博客、知识库,到企业官网、在线商城,Halo 都能助您轻松实现,一站式满足您的多样化建站需求。

    Complete system Production-ready You want a WordPress-style site builder with a strong Chinese community and plugin market.

    ★ 40k GPL-3.0 Java Active, pushed today
  3. 3
    Grav getgrav

    Modern, Crazy Fast, Ridiculously Easy and Amazingly Powerful Flat-File CMS powered by PHP, Markdown, Twig, and Symfony

    Complete system Production-ready You need a small to medium website without a database and like content in files.

    ★ 16k MIT PHP Active, pushed today

Frameworks and platforms to build on 4

  1. 1
    Payload payloadcms

    Payload is the open-source, fullstack Next.js framework, giving you instant backend superpowers. Get a full TypeScript backend and admin panel instantly. Use Payload as a headless CMS or for building powerful applications.

    Framework or platform Production-ready Your team builds in Next.js and wants the CMS and backend in the same codebase, on Postgres, SQLite or MongoDB.

    ★ 46k MIT TypeScript Active, pushed today
  2. 2
    Wagtail wagtail

    A Django content management system focused on flexibility and user experience

    Framework or platform Production-ready You build content sites with Django developers and want editors to have a pleasant interface.

    ★ 21k BSD-3-Clause Python Active, pushed today
  3. 3
    Keystone keystonejs

    The superpowered headless CMS for Node.js — built with GraphQL and React

    Framework or platform Production-ready You want a code-first CMS with GraphQL and Prisma for a custom app.

    ★ 10k MIT TypeScript Active, pushed today
  4. 4
    Plasmic plasmicapp

    Visual builder for React. Build apps, websites, and content. Integrate with your codebase.

    Framework or platform Production-ready Designers or marketers need to build pages and app screens visually inside a React codebase that developers still own.

    ★ 7.1k MIT TypeScript Active, pushed today

Building blocks for your own system 2

  1. 1
    Decap CMS decaporg

    A Git-based CMS for Static Site Generators

    Building block Production-ready You have a Hugo, Jekyll, Eleventy or similar site and want a free editing UI with content kept in Git.

    ★ 19k MIT JavaScript Active, pushed 2 days ago
  2. 2
    TinaCMS tinacms

    TinaCMS is the leading open-source headless CMS that supports Markdown and Visual Editing. Your content is stored in your own GitHub repo 🦙 ❤️

    Building block Production-ready A Next.js or Astro site keeps content in Git and non-technical editors need visual editing.

    ★ 14k Apache-2.0 TypeScript Active, pushed yesterday

Integrations 1

  1. 1
    Builder BuilderIO

    Visual Development for React, Vue, Svelte, Qwik, and more

    Integration Production-ready A marketing team needs to build landing pages from developer components without code changes, and you accept a paid hosted editor.

    ★ 8.9k MIT TypeScript Active, pushed 3 days ago

All 30 open-source CMS projects

Compared head to head

Looking for an alternative to

Open-source licenses

  • Permissive: 22. Use it anywhere, including in closed products. You keep the copyright notice; Apache-2.0 also grants patent rights.
  • Strong copyleft: 4. If you distribute the program or anything built on it, you must release the whole source under the same license.
  • Network copyleft: 3. Like GPL, and running a changed version as a web service counts as distributing it, so its users get the source too.
  • Weak copyleft: 1. Changes to the licensed files must be shared, but you can link them into a closed program.

Languages

TypeScript 12, PHP 7, JavaScript 3, Ruby 2, Java 1, Python 1, Prolog 1, C# 1, Go 1 and HTML 1.

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