Open-source content management systems in 2026
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 are listed separately.
All open-source content management systems, ranked
Complete systems you can adopt 11
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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
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
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 -
4
Joomla CMS joomla
Home of the Joomla! Content Management System
Complete system Production-ready You need a multilingual site with fine-grained access control and are comfortable with PHP hosting.
★ 5.2k GPL-2.0 PHP Active, pushed today -
5
Microfeed microfeed
an agentic cms self-hosted on cloudflare, for podcasts, blogs, photos, videos, documents, and curated urls.
Complete system Usable A podcaster or blogger wants to host episodes and posts on Cloudflare's free tier without running a server.
★ 4.1k AGPL-3.0 TypeScript Active, pushed 26 days ago -
6
Siteserver CMS siteserver
SSCMS 基于 .NET Core，能够以最低的成本、最少的人力投入在最短的时间内架设一个功能齐全、性能优异、规模庞大并易于维护的网站平台。链接是SSCMS推出的全新AI视频开源社区：献丑AI
Complete system Production-ready A Chinese-speaking organisation on .NET wants a mature traditional CMS.
★ 3.9k AGPL-3.0 JavaScript Active, pushed 4 days ago -
7
Shopware shopware
Shopware 6 is an open commerce platform based on Symfony Framework and Vue and supported by a worldwide community and more than 3.100 community extensions
Complete system Production-ready A European mid-size merchant wants a self-hostable shop with a large agency and plugin ecosystem.
★ 3.5k MIT PHP Active, pushed 4 days ago -
8
Squidex Squidex
Headless CMS and Content Managment Hub
Complete system Production-ready A .NET shop wants a headless CMS it can host on MongoDB, SQL Server, MySQL or PostgreSQL.
★ 2.5k MIT C# Active, pushed today -
9
Vvveb givanz
Powerful and easy to use cms to build websites, blogs or ecommerce stores.
Complete system Usable A small business wants one self-hosted tool for a site, blog and simple store with visual page editing.
★ 1.2k AGPL-3.0 HTML Active, pushed 5 days ago -
10
Textpattern textpattern
A flexible, elegant, fast and easy-to-use content management system written in PHP.
Complete system Production-ready You want a lightweight, stable PHP CMS for a personal or small organisation site and like hand-crafted templates.
★ 883 GPL-2.0 PHP Active, pushed today -
11
Concretecms concretecms
Official repository for Concrete CMS development
Complete system Production-ready An organisation wants non-technical staff editing pages in place, with granular permissions, on a self-hosted PHP stack.
★ 854 MIT PHP Active, pushed 2 days ago
Frameworks and platforms to build on 10
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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
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
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
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 -
5
Twill area17
Twill is an open source CMS toolkit for Laravel that helps developers rapidly create a custom admin console that is intuitive, powerful and flexible. Chat with us on Discord at https://discord.gg/cnWk7EFv8R.
Framework or platform Production-ready An agency builds content-heavy sites on Laravel and wants a tailored editing back office rather than a generic CMS.
★ 4k Apache-2.0 PHP Active, pushed 2 months ago -
6
Daptin daptin
Self-hosted application server for schema-driven APIs, identity, files, automation, integrations, realtime, metering, and protocols.
Framework or platform Usable You want a self-hosted backend-as-a-service in one binary and prefer config over writing CRUD code.
★ 1.9k LGPL-3.0 Go Active, pushed today -
7
SonicJS SonicJs-Org
SonicJS - The edge-native headless CMS for Cloudflare Workers. Sub-100ms response times, zero cold starts, TypeScript-first. Built on D1, R2, and Hono.
Framework or platform Usable You want a headless CMS hosted on Cloudflare's edge without managing servers.
★ 1.8k MIT TypeScript Active, pushed today -
8
Revolution modxcms
MODX Revolution - Content Management Framework
Framework or platform Production-ready A web agency wants full control over HTML output and a flexible PHP CMS rather than theme-driven WordPress.
★ 1.4k GPL-2.0 PHP Active, pushed 5 days ago -
9
AlchemyCMS AlchemyCMS
Alchemy is the Open Source Rails CMS framework for the component based web that can be used as classic server side rendered or headless CMS.
Framework or platform Production-ready Your site or product is built on Rails and editors need structured, component-based page editing inside it.
★ 905 BSD-3-Clause Ruby Active, pushed today -
10
Fae wearefine
CMS for Rails. For Reals.
Framework or platform Usable A Rails team wants generated admin models and views that they will customise heavily.
★ 852 MIT Ruby Active, pushed 2 days ago
Building blocks for your own system 6
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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
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 -
3
TerminusDB terminusdb
TerminusDB is a Knowledge Graph Database with Version Control. Time-travel, reason, collaborate, branch, merge, diff, and query your data with Datalog.
Building block Usable You need a system of record where data changes must be versioned and reviewed like code, for example reference or regulatory data.
★ 3.5k Apache-2.0 Prolog Active, pushed today -
4
Sveltia CMS sveltia
Leading Git-based headless CMS. Successor to Netlify/Decap CMS. Modern UX, first-class i18n support, mobile support + numerous improvements. Framework-agnostic, open source & free.
Building block Usable You run a static site with Decap or Netlify CMS, or want one, and prefer an actively developed drop-in replacement.
★ 3k MIT JavaScript Active, pushed today -
5
Keystatic Thinkmill
First class CMS experience, TypeScript API, Markdown & YAML/JSON based, no DB
Building block Usable You want a database-free CMS for a developer-built content site with editors working through GitHub.
★ 2.5k MIT TypeScript Active, pushed 32 days ago -
6
Alinea alineacms
Content management, streamlined
Building block Usable You build Next.js sites and want typed content in Git with an editor UI, without a separate CMS server.
★ 854 MIT TypeScript Active, pushed 3 days ago
Integrations 1
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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
Developer tools 1
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1
Vscode-front-matter estruyf
Front Matter is a CMS running straight in Visual Studio Code. Can be used with static site generators like Hugo, Jekyll, Hexo, NextJs, Gatsby, and many more...
Developer tool Production-ready You write content for a Hugo, Astro, Jekyll or Next.js site yourself and want CMS conveniences without leaving the editor.
★ 2.5k MIT TypeScript Active, pushed 21 days ago
Templates and starters 1
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1
Next WP 9d8dev
Headless WordPress built with the Next.js App Router and React Server Components
Template or starter Usable Editors are happy in WordPress but you want a faster React front end.
★ 1.3k MIT TypeScript Active, pushed 3 months ago
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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