What is the best CMS available in 2024?

The primary purpose of a CMS (Content Management System) is to make creating and updating content for a website as effective as possible. What effective means though, varies wildly across the target demographics of bloggers, designers, developers, marketers or businesses, and keeps on changing as the web ecosystem evolves.

Here is my very personal tier list of best CMS for various use cases, from the perspective of a technology integration partner that values ease of use and maintainability of a website most:

The Best CMS to get started:

If you are setting up the first iteration of your website, and don't have a clearly defined strategy laid out yet, the easiest way to get started is setting up a fresh WordPress installation.

There is a reason after all, why on over 43% of the top 10 million websites WordPress is used to allow anyone on your team to easily manage content on a Website, without having to involve a developer for every single change.

In fact, over 34% of WordPress sites (so roughly 15% of all sites) are using a visual page builder like Elementor to fully design, build and fill a website, without the need for any custom code at all. If you are like me, and spent some time optimizing Performance, Accessiblity and design consistency, you will also have your very personal issues with WordPress sites built with such tools. There's no denying the utility of the huge assortement of free and paid WordPress plugins out there, though.

For me as a developer, WordPress still brings great value through all of the functionality already included in it's core for when the budget's tight, as well as the ubiquitousness of the admin panel. Ask anyone, the chance that they are already familiar with how WordPress works is high.

The Best CMS for Pure Performance

While the inner workings of WordPress allow for a simple setup and ultimate flexibility in how you build your website, there is also no denying that you will quickly find other solutions outperforming it on performance benchmarks.

What "performance" am I talking about here exactly? Performance as in loading speed both on the frontend as well inside the backend of the CMS. This is not to say that any CMS can be used to build a well-performing website.

Now, most work should really only happen once, after saving a new piece of content, and not repeatedly when visitors are accessing the content in the frontend anyways (the magic word is caching). But even then, you might get to see it's limits when i.e. batch importing 50.000 posts from an external data source or keeping thousands of products in sync with an existing ERP.

For such high-content-volume use cases, CraftCMS will be your answer. It is a decent UI on top of relational databases, built up the way god intended. This is the key to making queries for content in your templates or searching through the entire content within your seite super fast, (almost) no matter how large your collection of content grows.

Note: I know this to be true from personal experience as well, but there seem to be surprisingly few comparison benchmarks for the performance difference — in my humble opinion, the primary reason to go with CraftCMS — out there. Great idea for a future blog post!

The Best CMS for Ecommerce

Every self-respecting CMS these days is quick to advertise their "effortless" Ecommerce capabilities. And while these are often quickly installed in the form of just one more plugin:
WordPress has WooCommerce, CraftCMS has Craft Commerce and Statamic has Simple Commerce.

So you install the respective extension to your CMS and can get started adding your products, variations thereof, pricing tables etc. and figure out payment providers right away.

But the real fun begins, when you're about to figure out calculating local taxes for you customers, integrating with a shipping provider to dynamically calculate shipping costs and tariffs or integrate with a fullfillment center.

With Shopify these problems all have well thought out solutions readily available and you just have to fill in the gaps. The shopify ecosystem is also one of the most well-integrated ones with third party ecommerce tools there is (head to head with WooCommerce of course), with the caveat that shopify extensions do tend to be on the pricier site and accumulate once you add features to your store.

You can also manage non-ecommerce content via Shopify CMS which works decently well both with available themes and custom themes. To get the absolute best of both worlds, you could run both, Shopify and a traditional CMS headless, and combine data from both sources seamless into on headless frontend that still displays your entire site uniformly.

The Best CMS for a Headless Frontend

Building headless websites is the hottest new stuff in web development and in 2024 it has reached mass adoption (click "All internet" to see what I mean).

Strictly speaking it is the frontend (the piece of code that is assembling and delivering the site to your browser) that is being detached from it's head, the CMS (the piece of code allowing you to manage your content).

Nevertheless there is a new crop of CMS solutions advertising themselves as „Headless CMS“. Noteable examples include Sanity, Contentful or Hygraph, all of which are closed-source software-as-a-service solutions, where your content is stored with the company behind the CMS.

Any of the traditional CMS solutions mentioned above, can also be used headless, I just found that the core feature set and inner workings are usually optimized towards the traditional way of using them, that can lead to more overhead in getting up and running. There is absolutely no denying though that a mature CMS solution (like WordPress or CraftCMS) also lend themselves as very capable backends of complex enterprise headless websites.

Some relatively young players in this space, with a more flexible approach, would be strapi or Payload CMS. Both of these are open-source and allow you to self-host (meaning choose your hosting provider and plan freely) them, plus they are built in JavaScript/TypeScript which makes them attractive to development teams not as versed in PHP (which is what pretty much all other suggestions above this section are based on).

The Beta preview of Payload CMS 3.0 was just recently announced, with the killer feature to put the head back onto the headless frontend by installing the CMS directly into a Next.js + React frontend. However, the admin interface and editing experience are not as end-user friendly and refined yet as we've come to expect it from more mature CMS solutions. That definitively doesn't mean it isn't worth keeping an eye on the work being done on these projects, thoguh!

Since setting up a headless website, already requires (very) roughly twice the initial setup to get it running and actively doesn't make use of many of the built-in features and advantages of pre-existing "full" CMS solutions, we usually want to keep the rest of the setup as straightforward as possible.

For me, the ideal headless CMS is super easy to setup and run, puts the content editing experience in the backend first, and still supports a great set of features out-of-the-box. While this might sound to good to be true, we found exactly that in Statamic, another relatively young CMS.

While clearly targeted at teams with access to developers (can also be used non-headless!), the CMS setup is super fast, does not even need a seperate database and offers a huge featureset like very flexible content types, a form builder, multilanguage/multisite support and a complex, multiplayer publishing workflow in it's affordeable Pro version, while still self-hostable.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the answer is yet again — "it depends". But varying on the specific requirements these are the best CMS solutions:

• to get started: WordPress

• for pure performance: CraftCMS

• for ecommerce: Shopify

• to run headless: Statamic

Each CMS excels in different areas, I hope I got you closer to finding the ideal CMS to suport your next web project. If this has left you with more questions than you started out with, feel free to shoot me a message or, book a meeting directly to clear them up all at once.