A CMS your team can work with

How we score

Our reference project is an agency-supported business website with connected content, an approved design system, integrations, and several years of useful life. Healthcare, manufacturing, education, and other organizations rely on these sites for sales, service, recruitment, or public information. Commerce comparisons also assess the work of running a store.

We allocate 100 priority points across seven categories. A category winner receives its points; a tie splits them. The result shows where this brief favors each platform. It is an editorial recommendation, not a quality percentage or a measured performance score.

• Publishing and brand control: 20 points. Can editors assemble, reuse, preview, and publish approved content confidently?
• Content architecture: 15 points. Can the system model and reuse the business’s actual content?
• Custom implementation: 15 points. How practical is it to build, test, integrate, and change the website?
• Security and support: 15 points. Who owns updates, dependencies, access, recovery, and application problems?
• Lifetime value: 10 points. What work and cost will the supported system require over several years?
• Ecosystem confidence: 10 points. Are developers, important extensions, and the platform’s direction dependable?
• AI enablement: 15 points. What is available for editors, developers, and governed operations today?

SEO, accessibility, and performance are requirements throughout. No platform earns search rankings from its name. Google’s AI search guidance still emphasizes established search fundamentals. We assess implementation control and operating effort rather than promise ranking gains.

The experience behind our picks

We build and maintain Craft websites, including CoxHealth and Gordon College. Our experience favors focused editing, reusable components, and maintainable custom development. We credit competitors where they are stronger, and show the evidence beside each judgment.

The research combines current product documentation, practitioner accounts, user research, and comparable adoption data where available. We searched discussions from August 6 through September 5, 2026, then used older, clearly dated evidence where recent coverage was thin. Individual posts are examples, not representative satisfaction surveys. Vendor announcements and beta features do not establish production outcomes. For AI extensions, we assess maintained tools across editorial, developer, and operational work; raw marketplace totals include unrelated and abandoned listings.

Craft’s engaged community is encouraging, but we have not verified a comparable market-share growth trend. Declining adoption elsewhere informs support risk; it does not prove a platform is abandoned. A well-supported existing site may be worth improving instead of replacing.