10 Best Content Management Systems (CMS) and How to Choose Yours

With so many options available, I understand how difficult it can be to pick the best CMS for your website. It’s crucial to make the right choice because switching your CMS later can be a hassle. However, the multitude of factors—big and small—make selecting the right platform challenging.
For instance, let’s say you’re comparing WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. After some research, you’ll find that WordPress is better suited for blogs, Joomla for membership sites, and Drupal for high-traffic, data-heavy websites.
These are just three examples of the types of sites you can create using a CMS. In this guide, I’ll walk you through the criteria to use when choosing the right CMS platform for your business. Then, I’ll take an in-depth look at some of the most popular CMS systems to help you find one that aligns with your specific needs and goals.


Table of Contents:

  1. What is a Content Management System (CMS)?
  2. How to Choose a CMS Platform
  3. Best CMS Systems
  4. How I Choose the Best Content Management System Examples
  5. How to Build a Website With a CMS

What is a Content Management System (CMS)?

A Content Management System (CMS) allows you to manage all the content on your website without needing to manually edit your site’s code each time you want to make a change. It provides a backend area where you and your team can easily add, edit, or delete content.


For instance, if you want to publish a new blog post, you can do so using a simple content editor. This backend content management interface is called the Content Management Application (CMA).


The CMS then takes the content you’ve added and displays it on the actual website where users and visitors can interact with it. The system ensures that the content is presented according to the templates and themes you’ve set up. This part is known as the Content Delivery Application (CDA).


By combining the CMA and CDA, a CMS gives you an easy way to create and manage content on your website while ensuring that the design and branding remain consistent.


How to Choose a CMS Platform

Next, I’ll explore 16 of the best CMS platforms for businesses of all sizes. But before diving into the list, here’s a simple six-step process to help you choose the best CMS software for your business:

1.Make a List of Must-Have Features for Your Website

Before you start looking at CMS options, it’s important to understand the specific needs of your site.
I recommend creating a list of “must-haves” and “nice-to-haves” before looking at any tools. This will prevent you from trying to fit your needs into the features of the tool you’re considering. Here are some essential features to think about:

  • E-commerce functionality: Will you be selling products or services on your site, or will it be purely informational?
  • User registration: Do you need to allow public user accounts, or will only your team need access?
  • Content personalization: Will different users see personalized content, or will all visitors see the same content?
  • Content management capabilities: Do you need a simple text editor, or do you require a no-code tool for creating more complex designs?
  • Theme and template system: How will your frontend content be displayed? Do you need flexibility in design templates?
  • Third-party integrations: Does the CMS need to integrate with specific third-party tools or services, like CRMs or email platforms?
  • SEO tools: If you plan to market your site on Google, you’ll need to consider how well the CMS handles SEO.

Be Honest About Your Team’s Skill Level

There are generally two types of modern CMS platforms: traditional CMS and website builders.
Here’s the difference:

  • CMS: You typically install this software on your own web hosting server.
  • Website builders: These services offer an all-in-one solution, where you sign up for an account and start building right away.

Website builders like Wix or Squarespace are great for smaller businesses or users who need a fast setup without deep technical knowledge. But for greater customization and control, a traditional CMS like WordPress or Joomla may be the better choice.

3.Plan for Scalability

It’s crucial to plan for how much traffic your website will handle.
If you’re expecting millions of visitors each month, you’ll need a CMS that can handle that volume. On the other hand, if you only expect light traffic, most CMS platforms can handle the job just fine.

4.Budget Considerations

There’s a lot of price variation among different CMS platforms.
Some are free and open-source (you’ll only pay for hosting and domain names), while others can cost thousands of dollars per month for premium services.
Be sure to run the numbers on what you’re willing to spend, so you can narrow down your options to those that fit your budget.

5.Build a Shortlist of CMS Candidates

Once you’ve considered all the factors above, you can start building a shortlist of CMS candidates.
I’ll cover the most popular CMS platforms below to help you start your search. Each one has its own strengths, so you can choose based on key factors like features, security, customization options, and price.

6.Get Buy-In from Your Team

Before finalizing your choice, circulate your CMS shortlist with all stakeholders for feedback.
Tech teams and marketing teams alike need to be comfortable with the CMS choice. For example, if the CMS doesn’t offer the right tools for your marketing team, this could cause major issues even if it’s technically sound.


How I Picked the Best Content Management System Examples

Your ideal CMS should align with your business’s unique needs. Here are the key factors I considered when selecting the best CMS platforms:

  • Ease of use: How user-friendly is the CMS for both technical and non-technical team members?
  • Flexibility: Can the CMS scale with your business and be customized to suit your needs?
  • Security: Does the CMS offer strong security features to protect your site, or will you need to manage security manually?
  • Pricing: How much does the CMS cost? Does it fit within your budget?
  • Market popularity: Are major brands using this CMS, or is it common in your industry?

Best CMS Platforms

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the top CMS platforms available today:

  1. WordPress
  2. Joomla
  3. Shopify
  4. Drupal
  5. Magento
  6. Magnolia
  7. Optimizely
  8. PrestaShop
  9. TYPO3
  10. webflow

1.WordPress

WordPress, initially sent off as writing for a blog programming, has developed into the most famous CMS stage of all time. Because of the open-source stage’s tendency, which underscores publication highlights like article and blog distributing, it’s routinely utilized in distributing and blog-accommodating businesses. Since its connection point and site subjects are very easy to utilize, I think it additionally may be helpful for more modest organizations that are simply working out their web procedure or have less involvement in plan.

In the event that you’re an educated web proofreader or engineer who needs to add customizations to your website, WordPress permits various modules and other personalization open doors.
Best for: Little to huge organizations that have article groups, individual sites, and general publishing content to a blog needs

Key Action items

  • Novice amicable
  • Biggest assortment of modules and topics
  • Module and site support can time-consume
  • Costs differ by space enrollment, facilitating, and premium modules and topics

Convenience

WordPress is intended to be simple enough for novices without coding information. Its dashboard is natural with the goal that each client can change the presence of their webpage, introduce a module, change its permalink settings, add blog entries, from there, the sky is the limit.

Its new block-based editing interface adds drag-and-drop functionality to the platform, making it easier for non-technical people to create custom designs by allowing them to create media-rich pages without relying on custom code or plugins.

Be that as it may, broadening the usefulness of your WordPress site in alternate ways — say, to show a rundown of irregular posts in the sidebar of your site — will expect you to either introduce and design a scope of WordPress modules or add code to your records.

My experience has instructed me that this won’t be an issue for most engineers, however it will restrict fledglings’ capacity to construct complex locales with cutting edge usefulness.

Adaptability

WordPress has one of the biggest assortments of modules and subjects that anyone could hope to find for download to tweak the plan and usefulness of a website. The official directory contains over 59,000 plugins, and the official repository and third-party marketplaces offer approximately 31,000 WordPress themes for download or purchase.

Utilizing these modules and pre-planned subject layouts, clients with next to zero specialized information can undoubtedly make completely useful sites. For instance, you could catch, put together, and draw in your guests with free structures, live visit, email promoting, examination, and a CRM .However, you must ensure that these add-ons are up to date and compatible with your website. On the off chance that they aren’t, then they can represent a serious security risk.

Security

Each cm is defenseless against programmers and noxious clients. Open-source CMS frameworks with obsolete or unmaintained parts of their code are especially defenseless against assaults. Truth be told, 49.8% of contaminated WordPress destinations in 2022 were running an obsolete rendition of WordPress.

Obsolete or contradictory modules can likewise make locales based on open-source CMS frameworks more defenseless against assaults. As a matter of fact, module weaknesses address over portion of the realized passage focuses for programmers.

To that end site proprietors should routinely refresh their product and modules. Fortunately, WordPress has an underlying update framework that allows you to make these updates with a tick of a button.
Be that as it may, a few updates may not be viable with every one of the expansions on your site. For that reason programming and module updates can require significant managerial exertion, particularly on bigger web projects.

In the event that your security is your first concern, you might need to look at some WordPress choices, as Drupal.

Evaluating

As open-source programming, WordPress is allowed to download. You really do need to pay for a space name, facilitating, and any premium modules or subjects you need to introduce, nonetheless.
This means that building and maintaining WordPress sites can cost a lot, but the average cost is relatively low. As indicated by Web designer Master, fabricating a WordPress website will cost you a one-time expense of $200, and overseeing it will cost somewhere in the range of $11 and $40 each month.
Normal expense: $11 to $40 each month + once expense of $200
Brands Utilizing WordPress

TechCrunch

Given the huge ubiquity of WordPress, you’ll find that many online journals you regular utilize the CMS. For instance, TechCrunch routinely distributes tech-related news, articles, and recordings on a WordPress-fueled site.

One story with a large image occupies the center of the page on its home page, while other stories are highlighted solely with text-based headlines. This design likewise incorporates an itemized route bar and space for promotion space.

In an article that declared TechCrunch’s 2018 site update, the distribution noted why they’ve been faithful to the WordPress CMS.

“[WordPress] handles content writing, conveying, and storing well overall. There’s an explanation it’s the CMS controlling around a fourth of the web, and we should be genuine — our little group could reevaluate that haggle it worse than WordPress’ enormous local area as of now has.”
I believe it’s significant that TechCrunch really utilizes what’s known as a “headless WordPress” execution, what isolates the backend WordPress dashboard from the frontend content presentation.

IKEA

Universally known furnishings and home merchandise retailer IKEA uses the WordPress CMS (related to some other substance the board frameworks) for its site. As an exceptionally visual brand, Ikea’s pages utilize a network framework with practically all page space committed to pictures with text overlays.

2.Joomla

Intended to be the center ground in the open-source CMS commercial center, Joomla joins the adaptability of Drupal with the ease of use of WordPress.
Best for: individuals and larger businesses with technical expertise.

Key Important points

  • This is a center ground among WordPress and Drupal regarding usability and cost
  • 5,500+ augmentations accessible however challenging to introduce and make due
  • Absence of inherent usefulness for booking programmed refreshes leaves locales helpless

Convenience

Joomla has more out-of-the-case highlights than most open-source CMS frameworks. With its implicit usefulness, you can oversee many clients, fabricate pages in numerous dialects, and make custom post types that utilization various layouts or topics.

You can likewise arrange large numbers of your site’s settings to adjust your articles, flags, menus, media, diverts, and Search engine optimization settings.

In any case, you’ll need to do this on the backend of your site. That is the reason Joomla has a precarious expectation to learn and adapt for novices as I would like to think. Clients with some involvement with web improvement, then again, can utilize Joomla’s underlying adaptability to make more mind boggling locales from the get-go.

Adaptability

Regardless of Joomla’s hearty underlying usefulness, you’re not restricted to the highlights that the stage gives. You can download any of the 5,500+ augmentations accessible in the authority registry for extra usefulness and command over your website.

Security

As per CVE information looking at WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, Joomla has had the biggest measure of tracked down weaknesses since its send off in 2005. Most of these weaknesses are blemishes in its code, which permit assailants to infuse shellcode that maneuvers the framework toward allowing them manager honors.

While Joomla’s 13-part security group in all actuality does consistently deliver security fixes, the stage’s absence of implicit usefulness for planning programmed refreshes offers assailants more chances to target known weaknesses. 50.3% of infected Joomla sites in 2022 were running an out-of-date version of the software, according to a Sucuri report.

Estimating

Similarly as with the other open-source stages referenced above, you’ll need to pay for space enrollment, facilitating, subjects, and support to make and run a Joomla site. Joomla sites typically have higher hosting and design costs than WordPress sites, but they have lower costs than Drupal sites. For instance, information gathered by Kinsta shows that Joomla designers cost more than WordPress however not exactly Drupal, which will influence the completed expense of your site.

As a general rule, having a straightforward Joomla site created for you will cost somewhere near $700 to $6,500, contingent upon who you work with. You could do it less expensive in the event that you do everything yourself.

Average Price: $700 to $6,500 to make and keep up with
Brands Utilizing Joomla
Ariel Speculations

Chicago-based speculation organization Ariel Ventures utilizes the Joomla CMS for its primary site. The actual site is clear and planned true to form for a web-based property in the money space. Additionally, it gives customers access to the company’s website for logging in and communicating with it.

Nintendo Nordic

While it’s hazy which CMS Nintendo utilizes for American regions, Joomla takes note of that the gaming organization has utilized its CMS to oversee content on its Nordic sites. Both the website in the United States and the one in the Nordics that is used as an illustration by Joomla are comparable to and consistent with Nintendo. Notwithstanding, the Nordic variant appears to be somewhat more visual.

3.Shopify

Shopify is a facilitated web based business stage intended for online retailers to set up and deal with a whole store.

I don’t suggest it for non-web based business stores, however it very well may be an extraordinary choice to send off your own web-based store.
Ideal for: Internet business and first-time merchants

Key Important points

  • Ideal for first-time retailers
  • Restricted determination of subjects and applications
  • Handles reinforcements and programming refreshes for you
  • Offers three premium plans, going from $29 to $299 each month

Convenience

Shopify makes running an internet business store as straightforward as running a website on WordPress.com. However you will not have as much command over its appearance and usefulness, you’ll get a scope of elements, security, and backing to assist you with dealing with your site.


In the event that you’re a first-time retailer or simply don’t have the opportunity or assets to plan each part of your site, this might be great. You can utilize Shopify’s implicit writing for a blog devices, client surveys, all set installment choices for clients, deserted truck recuperation, and investigation on web traffic and items, among different highlights, to make your store ready rapidly. Software updates and other aspects of your site’s day-to-day management are also handled by Shopify.

Adaptability

In return for this effortlessness, you’ll swear off some customization choices. Most notably, you can’t change Shopify’s code because it’s a proprietary platform.

You can anyway change the appearance and usefulness of your site by choosing from north of 70 topics and around 5,700 free and paid applications in Shopify’s true store. A considerable lot of the applications empower reconciliations among Shopify and different stages like HubSpot to fill in any holes you really want to maintain your business.

This choice is restricted, especially when contrasted with the CMS stages talked about above which offer a large number of formats and additional items.

Security

To sell on the web and acknowledge installments from Visa, Mastercard, American Express, or Find, your store should be PCI consistent. With Shopify, you don’t need to put away your time and cash to get a Level 1 PCI confirmation. PCI compliance is built into all Shopify stores by default.
Shopify will likewise oversee security issues, physically back up your site, and guarantee the product is modern for you.

Evaluating

Shopify is an exclusive stage that offers three paid plans. Beginning at $29 each month, Shopify plans incorporate web facilitating, a SSL declaration, and a Shopify subdomain (yourname.shopify.com). Assuming that you need a custom space, that will be an extra expense.

For extra seats and other high level elements like gift vouchers and more reports, you can move up to “Shopify” for $79 each month. As you keep on developing, you can move up to “Cutting edge Shopify” for $299 each month for significantly more seats, investigation, and limits on installment handling charges.

There are likewise undertaking centered Shopify In addition to plans that expense in the large numbers each month, however I don’t think most stores need those plans.

Normal Expense: Plans starting at $29, $79, and $299 per month are offered by brands like Shopify Briogeo. Because Shopify is used by a lot of e-commerce websites, it is simple to find popular websites built on the platform. One that stands apart is Briogeo, a hair care organization that involves just regular fixings in its items.

Briogeo’s site itself is a fine grandstand of what’s conceivable on Shopify, complete with item shows, super menus, client accounts, checkout, picture montages, a blog, and, surprisingly, a prizes framework.

Pipcorn

The Pipcorn site is one more fabulous illustration of a site fueled by Shopify — the landing page is enhanced with idiosyncratic, cordial movements that feature the brand’s legacy nibble items. Furthermore, you can peruse for items with the store finder, pursue its pamphlet, or add items to your card directly from the landing page.

Instructions to Fabricate a Site With a Substance The executives Framework


Final Thoughts: Choosing the Best CMS for Your Business

While there’s no one-size-fits-all CMS, you can find the best CMS for your business by considering your unique requirements. The right platform will offer the features you need, empower your team to manage content effectively, and help you create a positive user experience for your visitors.

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