10 Best Content Management Systems Of 2025

Almost every small business owner I talk to about getting online is interested in e-commerce, so I think it’s important to include e-commerce CMS programs in our best list. BigCommerce’s interface isn’t as sleek as Shopify on the front end, but it makes up for it with flexibility, customization and the ability to manage multiple stores from one account for a discounted extra fee.

BigCommerce offers a ton of flexibility and scalability that lets e-commerce stores invest without worrying about hitting a roadblock later on as their needs increase.

With attractive entry-level pricing that includes a lot of features others charge extra for, such as POS integration, blogging and unlimited file storage and bandwidth, BigCommerce plans grow with your sales. However, that does mean that when you hit sales caps, you’ll have to upgrade plans even if you don’t need the extra features.

Learn more: Read our full BigCommerce review.

Reminiscent of WordPress.org’s page builder, BigCommerce has a minimal learning curve to set up a store.

I was impressed with how simple tasks like setting up conditional offers were with BigCommerce, and the learning curve is minimal for getting a shop set up. I especially appreciate the automatic payment testing feature that is preset to help new shop owners during shop creation.

The only quirky thing that may trip some up is that some theme features, such as carousels, are edited in a different section than the main design editor, similar to how some WordPress themes operate, instead of how you might expect a graphic-based editor to work.

WordPress.org powers around 40% of the web because it is an outstanding generalist that can work with almost all business types. However, that doesn’t mean it is right for everyone. I recommend WordPress very often (but with caveats) because small businesses can use it to DIY on a budget, and it has the potential to power the company through every growth stage.

For example, hosting is not included, and it requires more technical work than a website builder (which is a type of CMS itself), but the learning curve is quite manageable for most.

WordPress.org’s flexibility and easy integration with third-party tools through plugins is also its Achilles heel. Code bloat, dueling plugins that don’t play nice with each other, security holes and developer-abandoned tools are just some of the problems the reliance on external tools brings.

If you aren’t careful about what plugins you choose, it is very easy to slow your WordPress website to a crawl, introduce errors, give hackers a superhighway into your site, use all of your host memory and even break your site completely.

Learn more: Read our full WordPress.org review.

Some controls in WordPress can be theme-dependent on how they are customized.

I’ve used WordPress in building many websites and the biggest things that always strike me are how absolutely clunky the text editor is, how many back-and-forth menu jumps I have to make for some tasks and how almost nothing can be done without plugins.

A part of that is that much of how you work within a theme (that is, where you edit certain parts and some of the content management) is controlled by the theme developer and the tools they used in building the theme, so there isn’t any standardization.

While WordPress.org is a powerhouse, it is definitely not an open-and-run-with-it option. There is absolutely a learning curve that tends to get glossed over in many reviews—perhaps because it is so popular, people are afraid to point out the downsides.

While it uses the WordPress.org CMS for functionality, WordPress.com is not the same company. WordPress.com is a set of hosting plans run by Automattic. Unfortunately, I’ve seen folks soured on WordPress.org by their first experiences with the .com version because of a mismatch in expectations and reality for functionality.

WordPress.com includes hosting, while the full WordPress.org CMS does not, and it also includes a simplified hosting dashboard that’s great for beginners. However, the hosting plans lock away a lot of the full WordPress.org features behind paywalls.

If you go into WordPress.com knowing you’ll have to upgrade plans to unlock all features, it can be a great option for reducing the technical knowledge needed on the hosting side of the equation. Plus, if you ever outgrow the hosting plans, you can export your site and migrate it to any other WordPress.org-compatible host.

The simplified hosting dashboard can be a lifesaver for business owners who have never worked with a website before. I’ve literally seen folks in tears when confronted with cPanel, a wall of icons with names like MySQL and needing to install WordPress.org instead of being able to dive right into customizing content.

WordPress.com locks many WordPress.org features depending on your plan and still charges extra for more storage and other hosting perks later on.

Working with WordPress.com is both liberating and infuriating. Mostly, it’s WordPress.org, but with less technical skills needed. I love that users can jump straight into designing their website; however, the level of gatekeeping WordPress.org features feels extreme. For example, even color changes are mostly blocked on the free plan. Many of the locked features seem random as well. You occasionally run into an unexpectedly locked feature even when working on higher plans.

Overall, I rarely recommend it except to new website owners who want an all-in-one WordPress-based platform and hosting package because of the cost of add-ons to improve hosting resources and because of how features are locked so tightly.

HubSpot’s CMS is part of its larger ecosystem of business tools geared toward marketing and growing your audience, as such, it has some great features that other CMSs tend to lack. For example, I really love that it includes SEO recommendations, analytics and live chat built-in even on the introductory free plan.

Beyond the basics of creating and managing content, HubSpot CMS (part of the Content Hub module plan set) really shines in helping you build your audience and grow your business. That focus on business means a higher level of services in many cases, such as 99.95% uptime guarantee, being able to connect a custom domain even on the free plan and a business email inbox.

However, e-commerce is one arena where it falls a bit short, and many users wind up integrating outside e-commerce specialist platforms to make up that shortfall.

Overall, as part of a family of modules, it gives small businesses a way to add on services as they grow, rather than being stuck between choosing an affordable platform and a fully featured one. HubSpot is a great best-of-both-worlds option for many SMBs.

HubSpot includes a well-laid out content management dashboard suitable for beginners and experts.

Clarity is one of the best ways to describe working with HubSpot. I don’t spend a lot of time guessing where to go next anytime I start working with a new module. For the Content CMS, I especially like how easy it is to add HubSpot features to other channels such as live chat to social media channels or other platform websites.

Shopify focuses primarily on e-commerce, but it also includes supplemental content management for blogging. While it includes powerful e-commerce content management for just about any type of business imaginable, including creating your own print-on-demand and custom order marketplace, customizing the look of your shop can be restrictive.

The drag-and-drop visual editor is important for shop owners without technical teams, but most Shopify shop owners I know need to hire development help more and more frequently as their shops grow to handle even small customization situations.

That said, for smaller shops, the vast library of extensions provides functionality hard to find elsewhere and makes it possible to connect other e-commerce tools so small shop owners can compete against bigger stores.

Learn more: Read our full Shopify review.

While Shopify’s setup process includes a helpful guide, the controls don’t always function properly or intuitively.

Testing Shopify always feels like a mixed bag. Setting up a basic product catalog and connecting a payment processor gateway is straightforward and to the point. However, anything that doesn’t quite fit the mold can be problematic to customize.

For example, one shop owner I’ve worked with allows others to create their own profiles and upload designs the shop will sell and print for them. That feature winds up with very restrictive file size limits that the shop’s other print-on-demand (POD) offerings for individuals aren’t limited by.

One of the website builder-style CMSs on my list, Squarespace focuses on e-commerce but has plenty of features for blogging and supporting website pages as well. Like most website builder-style CMS platforms, you don’t see many back-end controls; instead, it focuses on drag-and-drop editing on a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) graphic interface.

Designed to take the technical skill requirements out of e-commerce, Squarespace is accessible for anyone regardless of website or e-commerce experience. However, because it is a mostly free-form design environment, it’s easy to miss important supporting steps. For example, new online shop owners might miss the need for filling out SEO metadata, alt text for images and not optimize image sizes for web use.

Likewise, it isn’t portable. While you gain the freedom from installing software on a web host and dealing with cPanel, you lose the option to migrate to another web host, so cost over time could be a concern. Similarly, you may have problems with development if you need customization outside the included extensions and functions.

Learn more: Read our full Squarespace review.

Squarespace controls generally simplify most tasks for beginners.

Every time I work in Squarespace, I wind up scratching my head over the lack of customization. I love how usable it is for those with no coding experience, but the limitations on adjusting layouts seem arbitrary when compared to other website builder CMS platforms such as Showit. However, I do like the ease of setup for the e-commerce features, which is Squarespace’s main focus.

Joomla is a powerful, scalable CMS, but it does require a good bit of tolerance for technical work, and the interface is not remotely as user-friendly as WordPress. If WordPress has ever made you feel overwhelmed, Joomla is not a good choice for you. However, if you are a small design agency and need something more flexible than WordPress.org, Joomla can be a great option.

I especially like the combination of better security and a robust user community, where most CMS platforms seem to fall into one or the other without being able to bring both sides together. There is a well-laid-out dashboard to handle back-end tasks, and built-in tools such as caching are robust. However, front-end design isn’t as fleshed out, so you’ll often find yourself resorting to manual coding or using extra tools to add design shortcuts until things are set up.

While I don’t recommend Joomla for a DIY solution, it is a powerful WordPress alternative for agencies working with clients that need in-depth customization and better security.

Learn more: Read our full Joomla! review.

Joomla’s dashboard is well laid out for some tasks but others require drilling down into less-organized menus.

Joomla is admittedly not my favorite CMS to work with. A big part of that is Joomla’s setup is very different from the workflow of CMS platforms I use more frequently, and swapping between logic sets can be time-consuming.

If someone is brand new to CMS, I would never recommend Joomla as the first system to try. That said, for developers and designers, Joomla documentation to help you through is top-notch, and once you get into the swing of it, the flexibility is absolutely worth the initial effort.

Ghost is more a digital publication CMS than a full website CMS. That said, it does digital publication and newsletters very well. While there are great, easy-to-use options to customize basic colors, fonts and styles, most site page customization is limited to how your header and footer look.

Where Ghost shines is blogging and newsletter publishing. The text editor is truly a work of art compared to “standard” editors from platforms such as WordPress, and formatting is quickly accessible without a cluttered interface.

Plus, built-in analytics, membership management and Stripe integration make it easy to manage paid content successfully. However, while you can technically self-host or load it on other hosting, most will probably use the paid plans, and costs can rise quickly because they’re based on your number of subscribers.

While that shouldn’t be an issue with paid content, if you are gathering subscribers with free content, costs could become an issue without that income to support the new higher rates.

Ghost offers limited customization of your main page, but blogging content controls are well done.

Sleek and modern probably best sum up the interface for Ghost. In testing, I found the interface intuitive and uncluttered, so it was easy to find what I needed fairly quickly without having to resort to help files.

The writing editor is my favorite of any blogging tool I’ve seen recently, with what first looks like a giant blank page quickly becoming customized through formatting and special content blocks accessed from the + as you type.

There’s a lot of room to grow with TYPO3, and in some ways, it is easier than Joomla, but there is still a good bit of technical skill needed to get it set up. Documentation is fairly well done (although some content is in German), so it’s certainly a viable option if you are comfortable following the illustrated steps and don’t mind the extra time.

In particular, it handles multiple languages and user access controls for content quickly and simply from within the content you are publishing, so it’s a great low-cost option for small companies needing to quickly swap between languages. However, the content editor is absolutely bare-bones, and many may find it doesn’t offer enough formatting options without using HTML.

Plus, even though TYPO3 is an open-source CMS, its ecosystem is smaller, with fewer extensions and themes available, so you are likely to need developer help at some point to customize features and integrations with external tools.

While initial setup for TYPO3 can be complex, user controls and other content-specific controls are well done.

When testing TYPO3, I was impressed with how well laid out the tutorials were, but I was less impressed with what felt like unnecessarily complicated steps to set up the shell and theme of the website.

Plus, the actual interface for entering content and designing a page felt cumbersome. While I liked the tab system to get to different tasks surrounding content, it felt disconnected from the design. Overall, I wouldn’t recommend it if you have any hesitancy around the technical side of web hosting.

Many open-source CMS platforms have a security problem. Concrete CMS takes a proactive approach to security and is ISO:27001 certified plus SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant right out of the box. So, if you are dealing with sensitive information, Concrete CMS absolutely bears serious consideration.

While the community and third-party tools available are much smaller than other popular CMS software, Concrete CMS includes many features that others rely on outside plugins for. The editor is drag-and-drop (although it is much more involved to edit than something like Wix), there are extensive analytics and error reporting built in, user permissions and security controls are easily adjusted and multilingual support is built in.

While powerful enough for large enterprises, it’s not out of reach for small businesses without tech teams. In spite of the sometimes spotty or out-of-date support docs, it’s more straightforward to get started with than many other CMS platforms, and hosting packages are available, so you can skip the often frustrating part of figuring out how to install a CMS on third-party hosts if you prefer.

That said, do bear in mind that the smaller ecosystem of extra tools may mean you need to hire development help later on for specific customizations.

Concrete CMS takes considerable time to build out your website layout, but security is top-notch.

In testing, I really liked the step-by-step guided setup for parts of Concrete CMS, but at some points, things were less clear. For example, it tends to dump you onto a blank website page instead of taking you directly to the dashboard, and the page editor gives you content placeholders that you then have to fill with specific content types.

However, once the logic behind the system clicks with you, it becomes intuitive fairly quickly, even though your initial page design will be a slow process with significant time investment.