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Are you questioning what CMS platform you should use for building your website? A CMS (Content Management System) platform lets you easily create a website without understanding any code. Well.. at least for most of them.

There are a lot of options out there. Which means that you might struggle to choose what is the best CMS that suits your needs. Below in this post, I will be explaining why it’s vital to choose the right CMS platform for your website at the start.

What is a CMS Platform?

Firstly, a CMS platform or (Content Management System) platform is a piece of software that enables you to efficiently manage content and create a website. Normally you will see web pages that are written in HTML, JavaScript and CSS coding languages. If you were to develop a website without using a CMS, then you would require to learn these coding languages and write code.

Well, to solve this issue you should use a CMS platform, by enabling you to make a website easily without writing or knowing any coding languages. Except of course, if you are looking for a developer-friendly CMS which means you previously know how to code.

How to Choose the Best CMS Platform for Your Website

There are loads of different CMS platforms out there, but which one should you pick? Before we can start choosing our CMS platform, here are a few tips that you should look for within a good CMS.

Ease of use

You should want a CMS that makes it easy for you to create and edit content. Oftentimes it means having a drag-and-drop interface, so you can add different components into your web pages. A CMS platform should be quick and straightforward for you to make changes to the content on your site.

Design options

Your CMS platform should offer you a lot of website design templates to choose from. Also, it should allow you to easily customise those designs to your requirements with or without code knowledge).

Data portability

Another option is where your CMS platform that you pick should have tools that easily allows you to export your data and move it elsewhere such as to another hosting company etc.

Extensions, plugins and add-ons

Like many things in the world. Websites aren’t all the same, that is why no CMS platform can come with all the features that would be required for all the websites in the world. So Extensions, plugins and add-ons should be here to fix that problem. These are separate components, lets you install on your CMS platform to extend its features and functionality.

Help and support options

Though most CMS platforms are here to make it straightforward as possible for you to build a website, you might still find yourself having questions about it. You’ll need to find a platform that has help and support is available if you ever get stuck.

The cost?

You will notice that some CMS platforms are completely free. While others may charge either a monthly or annual fee. Even though you notice with some free CMS platforms, you will often need to pay for third-party extensions, plugins, add-ons, template designs, and/or site hosting services.

So make sure to try and find out as much as you can about the pricing structure of the CMS before choosing your CMS. So you don’t have any bad surprises arising up.

With these tips in mind. Let’s now take a look at the 8 CMS platforms alternatives, that  you can choose from in 2022. How ever you won’t find the popular CMS platform like Drupal or WordPress.

1. Ghost

Ghost Cms

Ghost is a CMS platform that been designed for bloggers. You will often get it described to you as a headless CMS. Which sound quite odd. But it just means that the CMS platform does not force the content to be delivered in a specific way.

So, if your content or data can be either delivered on a website, or it could be sent to a mobile app or something else. If you are not a developer, you don’t need to worry about it, just use it as a platform for blogging.

2. Publii

Publii

Publii is one newest Static CMS apps that run on the desktop. Rather than on a server. Simply download the app, and use it to build a static site. Then upload that site onto a hosting solution of your choice.

In particular, this platform seems to have modern and feature-rich CMS, that is open source and free to use. The platform seems to be more foucsed on blogging There’s a marketplace that has both free and paid theme design options.

Additional features include website syncing that supports FTP, GitHub Pages, Gitlab, AWS, Netlify, or Google Cloud, a preview function, WordPress importer, and a focus on SEO.

3. Craft CMS

Craft Cms

Craft CMS is an open source CMS focused on the user-friendly content creation process. You can also easily work with custom content types using built-in tools to design custom field layouts for different content types.

To control the front end, build it yourself using the Twig template, or use CraftCMS in a headless setup using the CraftCMS self-generated GraphQL API.

4. Flextype

Flextype

Flextype is a simple, PHP based flat-file CMS platform that is designed to keep things flexible. Allowing you to create more or less anything you want. This CMS platform makes it dead-easy to define custom fields for any content entry and plus it has a built-in theme editor

Writing the actual content editing is easy, as it comes with a simple WYSIWYG editor, although Markdown support is available via a plugin.

But doing anything creative with the content will requires the use of shortcodes that you could find with the past WordPress style. Flextype is a solid foundation for a CMS to use.

5. Twill

Twill

You firstly notice with Twill, is it isn’t strictly a CMS, as such. But you may call it a CMS toolkit designed to help developers quickly create a custom CMS that matches any need.

But if you are a developer or a business owner who needs a custom-made CMS, the platform does look like an assuring way to get specifically the functionality you need, faster. Plus this platform has been based on the Laravel PHP framework, so if that’s something you already use and like, try it out.

6. Grav

Grav

Grav is an open source flat file CMS. The term “flat file” means that this CMS does not need a database to work. Instead, query the content from a text file. This makes it extremely lightweight and can be easily deployed anywhere by simply uploading a website file.

However, you can create dynamic content types to filter content. You can also use the Markdown Editor to create content.

7. Agility CMS

Agilitycms

Agility CMS is a headless CMS that allows you to manage your content from one place. And deliver it anywhere via RESTful API, GraphQL, and JAMstack.

There are many options for managing content. Including features such as content modeling, SEO, scheduling, and content relationships. Also, Agility CMS enables you to load content quickly by delivering it via a CDN.

8. dotCMS

Dotcms

dotCMS is an open source headless CMS that takes the API first approach. You can use the drag-and-drop interface to model different types of content. For example, blog posts and e-commerce products.

You can then use the API to deliver the content to any destination like a website or app. The backend continues to take advantage of traditional authoring capabilities, as well as the ability to create different roles and permissions to control access to content.

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8 Best Alternative CMS Platforms