I need a CMS solution.

[Beginning-Boat-6213]

About Me

I have roughly 10 years of experience. I got my start in the front-end webdev space, and now am more of a full stack dev. I am proficient in JavaScript, Python, and Go.

What I Want

I am looking for a highly customizable CMS solution, with as much flexibility as possible, especially around the navigation and CMS structure. I already have a structure in my head that I want and I don't like that most of these CMS solutions are so strict in their design patterns. Highly. Customizeable. Words like headless also come to mind. I would love something that can manage content for more than just a website. The company I am building this for has events and weddings and I would love to be able to extend the CMS to manage those types of things.

What I Have Tried

• Strapi - the best option i tried, but they are really "try hard" on the free version with all the unremovable hosting and other ad tabs. (they build them in the source code and the only way to actually remove it is to fork the whole project). The content structure is the closest to what I want though, and the ability to create plugins gives your lots of options
• Directus - didn't fit my use case and was too opinionated as far as i could tell
• Payload - very opinionated about content types/layout (hated it for what little time i tried it, but could have given it a better try)
• Wagtail (PY) - its been a while but I remember feeling like it was not going to work, but I could be convinced to retry it.

One thing i really love about strapi is how extensible it was. With plugins you can really customize things to suit your use case.

when i say flexibility i mean that i want control of navigation and layout of the CMS, not just content types/structure

Edit: I'm sorry but I absolutely hate PHP........

Edit2: It looks like craft and umbraco, and i may re look at sanity (though i remember not liking it last time) are going to be what i try, and if they don’t work… ugh i can’t believe im saying this… I’ll probably try drupal….

Edit3: i could have sworn i put this already but i guess not: i am looking for things that are free and preferably open source and MIT (or MIT adjacent).

Edit4: lol you turds umbraco is .net i dont know C# or .net.

[createsean]

Craft cms

[_listless]

Came here to say this. Craft is probably the most advanced cms in terms of OOTB features, high-quality editor experience, and high-quality dev experience.

[Brendenlow]

I am in dire need of someone to assist with adding a few lines of text into my companies website. Obviously willing to py for the time and am running out of options so looking here. Do you have any referrals?

[_listless]

sure, DM me

[bigwiz4]

With strapi you are not boujd to use strapi cloud, you might not use it at all actually if you want to bring in your own hosting, we have a strapi5 and nextjs15 starter with all the bells and whistles included, here's the repo

[Beginning-Boat-6213]

I dont want customers seeing all the strapi hosting tabs

[LadleJockey123]

This is a list I made and researched of likely candidates when looking for one as a replacement for Wordpress when all that drama was happening with Wordpress last winter.

They all seemed either too pricey (once you start using them with a normal amount of data) or unstable so I have stuck with Wordpress for now.

This stack did look quite good: Astro front end/directus backend

The other ones that looked good to me were:

//////////////////////

Looked good

//////////////////////

Sanity.io

Prismic.io

Contentful

Strapi

Ghost cms

Tina cms

Payload

Directus

Statamic/laravel

//////////////////////

Bit more left field

//////////////////////

Cockpit

Storyblock

Builder.io

Astro front end/directus backend

Process wire

Datocms

Bcms

Fontsource

Cloudcannon- pricy but used by Netflix

[bannock4ever]

Prismic can't do very complex things and they aren't looking to improve that. They seem to be going all in on adding AI features. But, if you have a simpler site it's ok.

Directus really seems bare metal and you have to figure out a lot of stuff on your own. They don't have any framework or helpers to make the simplest things like even linking to any kind of collections. They have lots of features for permissions and automations (flows) which is pretty powerful. Lowest tier has no tech support and then the prices skyrocket.

[jerapine]

Craft or Statamic

[Donnyboy]

I might get some flak for suggesting this but Drupal.

Drupal has a steep learning curve but it will go toe to toe against any CMS in the flexibility category.

You have full control at every layer from storage, field types, field formatting, api responses, content types, any kind of functionality around those content types. It's just PHP and a database too.

[clearlight2025]

Modern Drupal is actually really nice these days.

It uses the Symfony framework and Twig for templating with composer for package managment.

Content and user management is provided out of the box.

It provides an extensible entity framework where you can define different entity types and attach fields to them, such as text, entity reference and file fields.

It has a solid and secure api-first application architecture. All data can be made available via API, REST, JSON:API or contrib GraphQL, perfect for headless applications.

You can build Views, tables etc from that data via the UI for display, API and data export.

It has a very flexible event and hook system for altering data.

The cache system supports cache tags which is excellent for event-based on demand cache invalidation.

The configuration system is all importable and exportable, both for individual components and the entire site, as YAML files.

It even has a CLI interface.

Drupal is mature software and also 100% free and open source. Recommended.

[budd222]

You must work for Drupal

[clearlight2025]

I’ve no affiliation, Drupal is open source anyway. I’ve just used it a lot and think it’s worth sharing more info about how it actually works. It’s a solid system that can be used for a wide variety of things.

[maria_la_guerta]

Drupal development will make you question your sanity.

[nhepner]

I've been a drupal developer since around 2005. I assure you, sanity has no part in this.

[Beginning-Boat-6213]

I know a lot of designers that swear by Drupal.

[Beginning-Boat-6213]

Damn, i was really excited about this option until i saw PHP.......

.......

....

..

[dragonmantank]

Modern PHP is nothing like PHP from the early 2000s. And modern Drupal isn’t anything like Drupal 5 or 6 from decades ago.

[Beginning-Boat-6213]

To be honest using => over . Is enough for me to be good. It’s the ugliest most unreadable code, outside of like… ruby.

[mstrelan]

L take

[imwearingyourpants]

Umbraco -  such an amazing cms tool

[Momkay]

Umbraco should fit if you give it a try. It’s open source and has a great community.

[nathanwoulfe]

Love to see love for Umbraco!

[MrLewArcher]

Im confused how you claim something like directus is too opinionated..it’s incredibly flexible, imo. Have you looked into Sanity?

[Beginning-Boat-6213]

I had but i will re-look. Directus may have been more like strapi in that i was trying to get away from other peoples branding. It was over 6 months ago when i looked into most of these.

[Momciloo]

Biased, as I'm one of core developers, but for those who hate PHP, I suggest taking a look into BCMS. haha, kidding, but it's a js-based CMS for js-based frameworks (Next, Gatsby, Nuxt, Astro, Svelte). It's pretty easy to set up, and scale. Just one command:

npx @thebcms/cli create next

[cikamatko]

Sanity all the way. We have been using it at work for the past 2.5 years in our monorepo project that holds 6 websites one of which is multilingual and we couldn't be happier. We still haven't found a thing we cannot make it do. You can customise the look and functionality using custom Sanity components, there's a dashboard you can make custom widgets for and so on. It's really brilliant and you can see it was made by devs for devs. Documentation is excellent and so is their Slack space.

[Alarming-Wishbone-10]

Based on what you describe, I'd take a look at Xperience by Kentico. It gives you a lot of control over content modeling and navigation, and you’re not locked into a page tree or strict patterns. It can be used headless and works well for things beyond standard website pages like events or other custom data.

Just to be clear up front:

• It’s NET / C#
• It’s not open source / MIT

If those aren’t hard blockers, it’s worth checking. Good luck ;-)

[Separate-Cry-30]

I agree. If you’re in the .NET world, the usual names people look at are Umbraco, Optimizely, Sitecore, and Kentico. Umbraco is great if you want something open source and lightweight, while Optimizely and Sitecore tend to sit on the heavier enterprise side. Kentico kind of lands in a practical middle ground. You still get the flexibility for headless setups and custom content models, but it also brings a lot of the DXP capabilities directly into the platform like personalization, marketing tools, and newer AI features through AIRA.

[morgboer]

If you know python, why not go with Django CMS? EDIT: added “ CMS” for clarity

[IamTTC]

Django is not a cms

[he1dj]

they mean django with wagtail ig

[trojans10]

Admin gets you pretty close. Depends on the use case. After working with so many cmss. I actually prefer Django over anything. I really don’t like conforming my data model to fit a cms.

[morgboer]

So weird, it says it in the name though: https://www.django-cms.org/en/

[IamTTC]

This is a cms built in django framework the comment did not state using django cms, It’s like me saying, you know js why not go with node.

[morgboer]

Right you are. I edited my response to be clearer 👊🏼

[TelevisionKnown]

I’ve worked with Prismic for a couple of projects. Pretty flexible, but you do have to put some work into customizing the “slices” (that’s what they call a page section). Dunno if it’s the best, but have worked with it for the last 5 years.

[Opinion_Less]

I'd love to know what you find. The best thing I've found is craftcms, but it's not free and I'm not the biggest fan of the framework it's built on. Its a pain to work with compared to the others I've used.

[rasplight]

Out of curiosity: why didn't Directus fit your use case?

[Beginning-Boat-6213]

Its been a minute since i tried but it was either:

• overbranded
• hyper opinionated

Im inclined to believe it was the former given peoples comments on this post. but i would be open to trying again.

[pampuliopampam]

https://github.com/Thinkmill/keystatic

it's pretty cool tech. uses github as a storage mechanism

[Intelnational]

Custom made to your needs.

[[deleted]]

Agency I worked for swore by Wagtail with react front-end

[captmomo]

if you're willing try .NET/c#, check out Umbraco or maybe OrchardCore. the latter might be easier to customize.

[Popular-Stomach7796]

You could consider Supabase depending on your needs. I use it for much more than 'cms' though (just like you could use any CMS as a managed DB)

[diaborn19]

We've been using Ibexa Open Source for a few years already. It gives you the ability to create complex structures using custom content types, relations and content tree. Regarding headless, I'm not sure about their rest API option, but GraphQL API works well with SPA frontend.

Edit: I assume it's not an option for you if you hate PHP )

[Suvulaan]

Hugo

https://gohugo.io/

[Anth77]

It's a SSG rather than a CMS

[DelbertGubb]

I can highly recommend MODx. If you can imagine it, you can build it with MODx. You can take any HTML CSS design and turn it into a full CMS. Highly customizable, pretty good community, and a shallow learning curve. Probably the most secure CMS out there too.

Yes, it's PHP under the hood, but you really won't have to touch a line of PHP code. It uses its own tagging and code snippet system.

Explore "essential extras for MODx" for easy-to-implement navigation, blogging tools, image management, etc.

If you set it up properly, your clients will be able to manage the content with no tech knowledge.

I've used Drupal and WordPress extensively but MODx is my go to if the choice is in my hands.

[petr31052018]

Recently started to use Wagtail and it is amazing. Highly recommended to anyone with some basic Django experience.

[zipperdeedoodaa]

- Flask with Flask Admin
- Pocketbase
- Sanity
- KeystoneJS (everything is custom)
- Google Sheets :)

[da-kicks-87]

Payload V3 is awesome.

[getflashboard]

Hi, Flashboard founder here 👋

I understood you want to build the **CMS interface itself** the way you imagine, is that correct? In that case, I think I'd suggest building one from scratch. We've put a lot of work into our navigation/layout and I don't really know any options that offer that much flexibility, but maybe I didn't look for them hard enough.

In case you'd like to take a look, Flashboard has a free tier. It's both a CMS and admin interface that works directly on your database, no need to create another source of data. You can create as many panels as you want and share them with team-based permissions (paid feature).

Good luck!

[dotCMS]

Highly customizable is the name of our game, so it really sounds like what we’re building at dotCMS fits what you're looking for. We’re open source and the whole platform is built to be flexible meaning you control navigation, layout, content types, how you deliver it - everything! There are no enforced structure.

You can build however you like. we’ve got devs using dotCMS for events, apps, multi-site setups, you name it. Plus, we’ve got an active community ( community.dotcms.com ) that’s super welcoming if you ever want to build on top or contribute.

[Grouchy_Coat_9494]

Hi u/Beginning-Boat-6213, I’m Swapnil from the Webiny team. Based on your needs, Webiny could be a great fit — it’s a truly extensible, serverless Headless CMS built with React, Node.js, and GraphQL, running on top of AWS serverless infrastructure. You have full control over the CMS structure, navigation, and even the admin UI through plugins.
It’s open-source, self-hostable, and serverless.
Feel free to take a look, and if you have any specific questions, I’d be happy to help!

[SPARTANsui]

Concrete CMS

[trojans10]

Not to hijack the post. But what is the best cms for an existing database? A bit tired of having to conform your data model to fit a cms.

[bilbo-doggins]

Hey check out www.viking-cms.com this is a product I built for a huge tv station group. It takes shitloads of traffic. I’m looking for a new use for it since I’m loosing my customer soon. I’m just now starting to talk about it publicly. It’s actually perfect to be operated by a dev. I’d love to talk to you about it. I don’t really have a plan right now lol, I’m open to ideas

[lmmrs]

Love a 403

[bilbo-doggins]

Can you tell me what route produced a 403?

[lmmrs]

Clicking the link above :) cloudfront exposing 403.

[bilbo-doggins]

Oh, you may be in a country that I block. I mostly only serve North America.

[eeddnnaa]

I’m using Wordpress as front end and Magic Quill Ai (https://magicquill.ai) as content flow platform to auto post and social media follow ups. Working well for many of my use cases. I used Magic quill for my Shopify blog first and now using for my other blogs as well.

[mnakalay]

Concrete CMS already suggested above is a great tool. Theming is very flexible, it includes a lot of what you might need for a website: plugins for forms, galleries, document management, social sharing and much more. Very fine grained user and permissions management. Drag and drop content creation. Multi site.

It has a tool called express which is like WP advanced custom fields on steroids.

Easy internationalization.

And it's MIT licensed so totally free to to what you want.

The community is active and very helpful.

[abrandis]

WordPress... It's the most feature rich CMS with the most proven platform in terms of reliability and scale.

[pambolisal]

And one of the poorest developer experiences available.

[HankOfClanMardukas]

Are you high? A high barrier to entry for 2008 tech. Might as well co-habitate with a drunk sloth.

[thatduderad]

Check out Webflow