15 Best CMS Systems and How to Choose: A Complete Guide

There are countless content management systems which are available, and each has advantages depending on the use case and company objective.  After some investigation, it would be discovered that Drupal is better suited for high-traffic sites with masses of data, while WordPress is better for blogs, Joomla for membership sites, and CMS Hub for enterprise-level sites.

These are only four examples of the various website types that may be built using a CMS. Let's go through various. After that, we will consider the various CMS platforms to help you find one that meets the specific requirements and website-building objectives.

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Some organizations and freelancers don't have the time or knowledge to acquire enough HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to completely code a website and want to quickly and effectively build a personalized website with the correct tools that offer smooth interactions for both users and visitors on the front end. Website builders and CMS platforms are the main categories these products fall into. They both have built-in features, and pre-designed templates, including extensions for building a custom website without coding or even having a basic understanding of coding, but different methods are required to build and run websites.

Table of Content:
Guidelines for Selecting a CMS
Best CMS Systems

Guidelines for Selecting a CMS
The requirements and objectives of a site will be met by the appropriate CMS platform for the company. The simplicity of use, customization options, security, cost, and market dominance are some of the most crucial variables that must be taken into consideration when employed by the companies. It's not the best option if a platform has all the features that are needed but are too expensive. On the other hand, a cheap platform that will need a lot of upkeep and modifications to fit particular needs is also not the best option.

Effortless Use
Ease of use is a crucial consideration when choosing a CMS as it significantly impacts employee adoption and processes. All team members who have access to the platform should find it simple to utilize. Considering the situation where everyone is working in the CMS's backend, from content marketers to developers. In that circumstance, CMS features are required to make it simple for each team member to complete their regular tasks.

Customizability
A person ideally needs a system that delivers both, even though you could prioritize usability higher priority on usability than customization. As the company expands, a flexible and customizable CMS like CMS Hub will be able to keep up. When assessing a CMS, customization possibilities are considered that are already integrated into the dashboard, the number of accessible extensions, and whether it provides the option to edit the source code. Most CMS platforms enable in selecting of a pre-designed theme and modifying it to reflect a particular brand while having limited development resources available to create a website.

Pricing
Almost every decision that is made for the organization involves a budget and You want a CMS solution is required to satisfy company needs, the expectations of the visitors, and the budget. Fortunately, many platforms, like HubSpot's free CMS, offer many tiers of services with resources that increase production at each price point.

Popularity in the Market
Examining the CMS system's current customers including well-known businesses or rivals is another excellent technique to narrow down the available options. A CMS's features may be important and able to develop a growing business if reputable brands in the industry and others comparable to them use it. 

Best CMS Systems

CMS Hub
CMS Hub by HubSpot which is the only CMS and CRM combination is made in a way to makes it simple for businesses to create and maintain websites that are responsive to every device and visitor. It is very helpful for users having little to no technical experience in creating a unique website. It also allows continuing to utilize the same platform that is used to produce the content while managing, optimizing, and monitoring its performance. It also allows for capturing leads, doing A/B testing, making email campaigns, and tracking contact-level analytics directly in the dashboard as CMS Hub incorporates HubSpot's marketing, sales, and service capabilities. CMS Hub Professional costs $300 a month and is intended for businesses with rapid expansion. 

WordPress
The most widely used CMS platform ever has evolved from WordPress, initially introduced as blogging software, and is frequently utilized in publishing and other companies that value blogs due to the open-source platform's emphasis on editorial services like articles and blog posting. It majorly helps the smaller companies who are just developing their online strategy or have less experience with design due to its user-friendly interface and website themes. It offers a lot of plugins and other customization options for web editors and developers who are tech-savvy and willing to improve their sites.

Drupal
The target market for Drupal includes a sizable community of developers, marketers, and agencies where it enables web designers to create sites that can handle large volumes of data and heavy traffic, or it enables less experienced marketers to build a site from a template. As Drupal was developed by developers for developers, it is crucial to have a working grasp of PHP, HTML, and CSS to effectively leverage its features. It is free to download and open-source software but the cost of building and maintaining a Drupal site are much higher than those of a WordPress site, particularly for non-technical users.

Joomla
With the user-friendliness of WordPress and the diversity of Drupal, Joomla was created to serve as the middle ground in the open-source CMS industry. It allows the development of pages in numerous languages, manages hundreds of users, and creates unique post kinds that make use of various templates or themes due to its built-in features. The settings for the site's content, banners, menus, media, redirects, & SEO can all be customized. To establish and maintain a Joomla site, just like with the other open-source platforms, it is essential to pay for domain registration, hosting, themes, and maintenance and it can cost more to host and design than WordPress sites but less than Drupal sites. Three paying plans are available on this platform which is starting at $29 per month and come with web hosting, an SSL certificate, and a Shopify subdomain.  A custom domain is an extra expense that you will incur.

Magento
For tech-savvy store owners, Magento, an eCommerce platform owned by Adobe, provides virtually limitless options wo variations namely Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce. It allows the creation of a  website that accomplishes exactly what the user wants using the very adaptable framework known as Magento Open Source. It takes some time to comprehend and explore all of the platform's default capabilities and extensions.

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Magnolia
Magnolia is considered a headless, all-in-one solution for managing multi-site, multi-language, & multi-channel digital experiences and the option is provided to choose between client service and cloud service. The cloud-based solution enables organizations to complete projects quickly without the need for developers or IT support, and the client-hosted alternative enables to have custom Java creation and integration on their infrastructure. To assist newcomers in getting up to speed, this platform provides several tutorials.

Optimizely 
The majority of Optimize ly's marketing products are known for their A/B testing capabilities, and they tend to expand very quickly over time. After being acquired by Episerver last year, it was created by integrating the two firms' strengths. Editors tend to produce and distribute visually appealing content and provide developers with a way to quickly design and launch new pages and websites. It offers a variety of package options. Despite the interdependence of all package features, a single package cannot provide all the functionality a user requires.

PrestaShop
PrestaShop is similar to Joomla in way that it combines the strength of Magento with the ease of Shopify and is intended to represent the center ground in the market for e-commerce CMSs. It requires more effort to get up and running than Shopify does due to two reasons. It is an open-source platform, to start which is beneficial ia n way that it allows to means to change the code of the main software and use it for free. But it also meant that before building the store, it is required to select a hosting company. Before utilizing an FTP client to upload the software to the server, the database is required to be constructed. Secondly, it also provides additional built-in features for creating a sizable e-commerce store. The dashboard, allows you to arrange coupons, make e-shop accessible in 65 languages, and customize messaging for out-of-stock items.

TYPO3
It is an open-source CMS that is made for creating enterprise-level websites and around  9,000 features are available with TYPO3 right out of the box. Although it won't be simple to install or set up, such strong capabilities will allow for developing a complicated multi-site installation. Even skilled users and developers are required to pay a significant amount of time and energy to learn the platform. The typical annual cost of a TYPO3 site is between $100 to $30,000.

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CMS Crownpeak Headless
The CMS from Crownpeak is considered the finest option for non-techies. Even though the user interface is error-proof, the CMS can perform any task that is performed by a more complex competitor. Businesses can choose the way they integrate the hybrid headless CMS with their existing systems, and with a few clicks, they can quickly create and start publishing articles, pages, and workflows. It is quite easy to use, thus using the content editor doesn't require worrying about making a mistake. The admin settings can be set up so that authors can only update or change certain components of the page, preventing them from accidentally changing or deleting material.

Contentful
It is a cloud-based headless CMS for enterprise businesses that enenablerganizations to develop and manage their digital content in one location and distribute it to any digital channel tools for creation, editing, and management of material as well as an API for distributing it. The major goal is to provide both the flexibility that developers require and the content management functionality that marketers demand. While the content management tools, Dropbox connectors, and rich text editor are all fairly user-friendly, the most challenging is the development side of it.

Storyblok
Around 40,000 developers and marketers use Storyblok, a headless content management system to create screen displays, mobile apps, e-commerce websites, corporate websites, and more. Although other methods may be more adaptable for developers, content managers cannot use them effectively. It offers marketers a distinctive combination of visual editing tools and highly customizable content blocks and offers a contemporary headless architecture that gives developers the freedom to produce strong content experiences on any device.

ConcreteCMS
It is an open-source CMS created to address a market need and it is neither an extremely simplistic "do-it-yourself" CMS nor a complex or frightening CMS created by developers for developers. The major goal is to provide the best of both worlds. An open-source CMS called Concrete was created to be as user-friendly as a word processor. It allows the quick add text, video, picture sliders, and interactive forms, including surveys to the site using Concrete's block editor. No coding is required and involves simply dragging and dropping the module anywhere on the website.

Contentstack
It is a headless web content management system where enterprises manage and deliver content across all digital channels, from desktop browsers to smartphones to automobiles or wearables due to the platform's design, which involves combining the best of content management and digital experience technologies.  Rich text editors, scheduling tools, and publishing management tools are available for content managers to produce, publish, and update material without the help of developers. Three price tiers are offered by Contentstack. The monthly cost for the Start package is $995. The monthly cost for the Grow plan is $4,500.

Webflow
For online designers willing to concentrate on building and modifying websites without bothering about hosting, security, or website performance, Webflow is a "visual" content management system. It resembles Photoshop when viewed in a browser and to build a unique website, it is required to drag & drop pieces into a canvas and style them.  Without knowing any code, a CMS (Content Management System) platform facilitates the creation of websites (at least for most of them). There are many CMS solutions available, making it difficult for some people to select the ideal CMS for their requirements.