16 Free Open-source Content Management Systems
A content management system enables users to build websites and publish content without understanding code.
Here is a list of open-source content management systems. Many have large developer communities and thousands of themes and extensions. These systems are free, though most offer premium add-ons and paid plans for hosting services.
WordPress
WordPress
WordPress launched in 2003 as a blogging platform. Today, it is a sophisticated CMS built on PHP and MySQL. It runs roughly 25% of all websites worldwide, from hobby blogs to the biggest news portals. Over 60,000 plugins and themes help customize WordPress installations, including robust ecommerce functionality, galleries, mailing lists, forums, and analytics.
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Grav
Grav
Grav is a fast and easy CMS powered by PHP, Markdown, Twig, and Symfony. It comes with a package management system to allow for simple installation and upgrading of plugins and themes and simple updating of Grav itself. It features an installation process and a straightforward content creation method with a minimal learning curve. Create blogs, business sites, landing pages, portfolios, product sites, ecommerce sites, and more.
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Joomla
Joomla
Joomla is a user-friendly CMS for building basic websites and advanced web applications. Joomla is mobile and search-engine friendly, multilingual, flexible, and extensible. The platform has thousands of third-party extensions and templates for further customization. Joomla runs approximately 10% of the world’s business websites.
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Ghost
Ghost
Ghost is a CMS to publish, share, and grow a business around content. Access customizable themes to match your brand and style, or design from scratch. Build a website, publish content, send newsletters, and offer paid subscriptions to members. Expand your media with image galleries, gifs, video, audio, products, info boxes, accordion toggles, downloadable files, and more. Allow people to sign up for free or purchase subscriptions. Manage memberships, offer promotions, and utilize native analytics.
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Drupal
Drupal
Drupal is a free and open-source CMS that can be tailored and customized to simple websites or complex web applications, with thousands of free modules and themes to help deliver a message, grow a brand, and build a community. Users can easily create a new site, online store, social network, blog, wiki, or anything else. Highly scalable, Drupal publishes to a single site or shares content in multiple languages across devices. Drupal handles some of the largest sites in the world, such as Weather.com.
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SilverStripe
SilverStripe
SilverStripe is an easy-to-use CMS with a front-end templating engine and an extensive list of modules to extend functionality. SilverStripe lets you extend out-of-the-box capabilities with well-organized code. Create fields, page types, data structures, and logic to make the CMS fit your needs. Launch campaign pages straight from the CMS without the time-consuming development process. SilverStripe has over 2,500 modules and 50,000 live sites.
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Craft
Craft
Craft CMS lets you create an experience specific to your project. Pick the features and functionality you need, and update content with Craft’s built-in management features. Build and manage an ecommerce store, customize your checkout flow, run promotions, set shipping rules and methods, and more. Let customers sign up for your Stripe subscription plans and keep track of their status. Manage your products alongside the rest of your content. Use Twig for easy template creation and clean code.
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Bolt
Bolt
Bolt is a simple CMS and Symfony application using Twig for its templates. Bolt has a flexible system for multiple taxonomies, built-in search, and a marketplace for themes and extensions. Bolt includes easy content types, rich text editors, a translation function with field-level control, native search, and 20 field types. Bolt’s Slack community has over 2,000 members.
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Umbraco
Umbraco
Umbraco is a flexible CMS with user-friendly editing and over 300 extensions and plugins. With an intuitive interface optimized for creating and managing content, editors can fulfill daily tasks, preview and publish content, schedule campaigns, and more. Create and manage content in multiple languages for various channels, and reuse content where needed — for blog posts, data for a mobile app, or promotional campaigns on digital signage.
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Microweber
Microweber
Microweber is an easy-to-use CMS to create websites quickly using 450 predefined layouts and 75 modules. Choose from hundreds of templates, swap out photos and text, and customize.
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Textpattern
Textpattern
Textpattern is a free, open-source CMS with built-in simplicity, suitable for quickly publishing a blog or static website. It features a tag-based template language that’s easy to learn. The Textpattern core user interface has hundreds of plugins and over 50 languages.
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Contao
Contao
Contao is an open-source CMS for creating professional websites and scalable web applications. Its front end is entirely built on customizable templates and generates accessible HTML5 code according to W3C/WAI requirements. Contao features multiple backend languages and advanced editing, a permission system, multiple page types and websites in one tree, a flexible form generator, advanced search and sorting options, and numerous built-in modules.
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Concrete CMS
Concrete CMS
Concrete CMS is an open-source content management system for teams. Concrete CMS was designed as an extendable platform to make it easy for anyone to run a website. It features in-context editing, a WYSIWYG content editor, modular blocks, a form builder, integrated reporting, an integrated commenting system, and thousands of themes and add-ons to broaden the functionality.
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PyroCMS
PyroCMS
PyroCMS is an easy-to-use and modular CMS and development platform built with Laravel 5, the PHP web application framework. The modules of PyroCMS provide an easy way to manage custom dashboards, assets, pages and interfaces, posts, users, content variables, and more.
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Strapi
Strapi
Strapi is an open-source, fully customizable, and extensible JavaScript-based headless CMS. Get APIs and a user-friendly admin panel out of the box. Adjust and extend the API endpoints and the admin panel. Define models and add relations to create rich layout experiences. Allow cross-functional teams to deliver content faster. Connect your favorite databases, front-end frameworks, or static site generators. Join over 135,000 Strapi community members to share, contribute and learn.
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Fork
Fork
Fork is an easy-to-use open-source CMS using Symfony. Fork is dedicated to creating a user-friendly environment to build, monitor, and update your website. It also has plenty of themes and apps to extend your site.
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