25 Best CMS To Build Your Personal Or Business Website

Looking for the best CMS for your website can be a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be. Here, we bring you everything you need to know about the best CMS, the benefits of blogging for business, and a host of other things to consider when choosing the right CMS for your business. We will provide you with all the information you need to make an informed decision, and hopefully, land yourself with one of the best CMS for your business.

What Is A CMS Platform?

A CMS platform is a software application that allows users to create, edit, collaborate on, publish, and manage digital content without detailed coding knowledge. This type of platform supplies a user-friendly interface for numerous tasks, including content creation, storage, workflows, and publishing.

Typically, websites are constructed using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. When building a website without a CMS platform, you would need to master these languages and write extensive code. CMS platforms eliminate this necessity, allowing you to generate a website easily and quickly without coding or learning programming.

Benefits of Using a CMS Platform

CMS platforms offer various benefits to users, including simplified content management, ease of use, and a wide array of templates and plugins to enhance website functionality. By utilizing a CMS, you can manage content efficiently, update information quickly, and customize web pages without having to write code. A CMS typically provides intuitive features and tools that facilitate website management for users without coding experience.

Website Builders Versus CMS Platforms

Website builders and CMS platforms cater to individuals who want to construct a website without extensive coding knowledge. While both tools offer pre-designed templates, built-in features, and extensions to create a customized site, they operate differently. Website builders are simpler, with a more user-friendly interface, and are suitable for those not interested in deep customization or complex functionalities.

On the other hand, CMS platforms provide more flexibility, allowing for advanced customization and scalability, making them ideal for professionals and businesses that require more sophisticated websites.

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CMS Vs Website Builder

When deciding between a CMS and a website builder, it's crucial to understand the differences between the two options. CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are the better choice for brands that need highly customized sites.

With a CMS, users have access to more advanced features, such as content management, media integrations, user management, code editing, and more. Although setting up and launching a site with a CMS will take longer, the ability to create sophisticated, scalable websites is worth the effort.

Choosing Between CMS Platforms and Website Builders

On the other hand, website builders like Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly are the ideal choice when looking for an all-in-one solution for website-building tools and web hosting. These platforms provide users with a user-friendly interface for designing and developing websites.

Website builders offer a combination of intuitive design tools and hosting services to assist users in constructing visually appealing websites quickly. Users may have to sacrifice some flexibility and advanced features that are typically available with CMS platforms.

Considerations for Selecting Between Website Builders and CMS Platforms

If you're looking to quickly build an image-rich site, a website builder might be the right choice. For more complex and scalable websites with advanced customization options, CMS platforms offer greater flexibility. Make the best choice for your project by considering your requirements for the site's design, functionality, and ease of use.

Transforming Notion Notes into SEO-Friendly Blog Posts with Feather

Feather is an SEO-friendly blog that allows users to publish blog content directly from Notion. The platform requires no coding or design skills, making it easy for companies to write and publish blog content efficiently. With Feather, users can set up a subfolder blog, manage their CRM, and website blog through Notion, change design with custom CSS, and collect emails. Collaborate with your team seamlessly by writing on Notion and automatically publishing it on your Feather blog.

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5 Common Types Of CMS

1. All-in-One Website Builders

All-in-One Website Builders are essentially turnkey systems that come with everything you need to hit the ground running and manage your site and content.

Featuring an intuitive CMS, the best website builders are designed for anyone to use. They manage SEO, blog content, files, the look and feel of your site, and the backend functionality. These are perfect for new and small business owners who may not necessarily need a lot of customization.

2. Open-Source CMS Systems

Open-source CMS systems give users notable freedom and control over the look and feel and functionality of their sites. There is a trade-off. Open-source CMS systems are considerably more challenging to learn and use. These are better suited to web developers or large businesses that require or want a custom solution, and can also afford the higher development costs.

3. Cloud-Based CMS

Cloud-based CMS is hosted by a third-party provider, and there are two types: full cloud and partial cloud. Businesses that want to have their CMS infrastructure managed wholly or partially by another typically opt for cloud-based CMS types.

Users are unable to customize the full cloud CMS, but the partial cloud CMS situated on each user's cloud-based server allows for modifications through source codes or specific modules. Cloud-based CMS systems typically require ongoing support.

4. Enterprise CMS

Enterprise CMS is often used by larger institutions, as it boasts advanced features and capabilities, supporting significant volumes of content and users.

It gathers and manages an organization's unstructured data such as emails and reports, playing a critical role in helping the organization deliver relevant content to target audiences.

5. Headless CMS

This type of CMS allows users to create and publish content without a front-end user interface. With a headless CMS, users can effectively manage their content, delivering a wide range of categories and types of content to web platforms, mobile devices, and Internet of Things (IoT) products.

25 Best CMS To Build Your Personal Or Business Website

1. Feather

Feather is an SEO-friendly blog that allows you to publish blog content through Notion, and it requires no coding or design skills. Feather allows companies to write blog content on Notion and automatically publish it to their Feather blog. Feather allows you to setup a Subfolder blog (domain.com/blog instead of blog.domain.com, because subfolder is better for SEO).

Feather enables companies to get the HubSpot experience through Notion by allowing them to manage all of their CRM and website blog management through Notion. We also offer options to change design with custom CSS, collect Emails, and much more. Write on Notion, and automatically get that published to SEO-friendly blog – Collaborate with the entire team easily during the publishing process.

Try Feather’s notion to blog software for free today — create a new account and go from notion to blog in minutes!

2. WordPress

WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS by far – it powers over 37% of all websites on the Internet. It started as a blogging platform but has long since morphed into a full CMS that you can use to build any type of website, from ecommerce stores to membership sites, forums, and more. WordPress, through the WooCommerce extension, is also one of the most popular ways to make an ecommerce store.

Some of the reasons that explain WordPress’s popularity are:

It’s free and open source

You can find thousands of WordPress themes to control your site’s appearance.

You can access 55,000+ free plugins to extend your site’s features.

3. HubSpot CMS

HubSpot CMS is an excellent CMS for businesses and marketers looking to connect with customers. HubSpot CMS has a built-in integration with the free HubSpot CRM (check out these WordPress CRM plugins).

This lets you not only add leads directly to your CRM, but also lets you personalize your website to individual visitors, which can help you convert them into customers. Developers can dig into the code to customize the site, while non-technical users can build pages using a drag-and-drop editor.

4. Joomla

Joomla is an open-source CMS that powers over 2% of all websites. Compared to other CMS platforms, its core software offers more functionality right away, such as its multilingual features. The initial setup of Joomla can be challenging for non-technical users.

You can manage a site with hundreds of sub-pages efficiently and use 2-factor authentication to avoid break-ins. Joomla is best for professional websites managed by multiple people.

5. Drupal

Designed for professional web developers, its flexible API architecture supports different digital platforms. Compared to Joomla and WordPress, Drupal optimizes its built-in features for better performance and security.

It’s also worth noting that Drupal’s websites get higher web traffic than other CMS software. A good CMS platform for advanced users with great technical knowledge to create large-scale and complex sites.

6. Wix

Wix is a popular cloud-based CMS platform, though it has some limitations. We often get readers asking how to switch from Wix to WordPress that’s because every smart business owner knows that WordPress is definitely better than Wix. With that said, Wix is beginner-friendly and it might be worth considering. It offers a free plan, too.

7. Ghost

Ghost is a CMS platform specifically designed for bloggers. You’ll often hear it described as a “headless CMS,” which might sound quite odd. This just means that the CMS platform doesn’t force content to be delivered in a specific way.

So, the content or data you produce could be shown on a website, but it could also be sent to a mobile app or something else entirely. If you’re not a developer, though, or you just want to use Ghost for blogging, you don’t need to worry about this.

8. Shopify

Shopify is a hosted ecommerce platform designed for online retailers to set up and manage an entire store. Best for ecommerce and first-time sellers. Shopify makes running an ecommerce store as simple as running a site on WordPress.com. Though you won’t have as much control over its appearance and functionality, you’ll get a range of features, security, and support to help you manage your site.

9. Magento

Magento is an ecommerce platform owned by Adobe that offers nearly unlimited possibilities for tech-savvy store owners. Like Drupal, Magento Open Source is a highly flexible platform that you can use to build a site that does exactly what you want. It will take time to understand and explore all of the platform’s out-of-the-box features and extensions — even if you have experience in website development.

10. Magnolia

Magnolia is a headless, all-in-one system built for managing multi-site, multi-language, and multi-channel digital experiences. Buyers have two options to choose from: cloud service or client service. The cloud-based service allows companies to launch projects quickly without needing devops or IT assistance, while the client-hosted option allows companies to have custom Java development and integration on their own infrastructure.

11. Kentico

Kentico is an enterprise-focused CMS that offers two different CMS products:

Kontent

A headless cloud-based CMS that helps you manage your content and deliver it anywhere via API.

Xperience

An on-premises or cloud-based platform that wraps a CMS and digital marketing tools into one.

Kentico has a limited free tier for its Kontent platform, but it can get pricey if you need the paid options. Because Kentico Kontent is a headless CMS, you’ll also need some technical knowledge to create the front-end of your website.

12. Squarespace

Squarespace is a hosted website builder tool that makes it easy for non-technical users to create a website. You can also use it to create a lightweight ecommerce store. Squarespace is not as flexible as all of these other tools but that’s actually its selling point.

By simplifying things, Squarespace makes it easy for non-technical users to create basic websites. If you’re building something beyond a basic blog, portfolio, or brochure website, you’ll probably want to choose more flexible CMS software. For more info, check out this Squarespace vs WordPress in-depth comparison.

13. dotCMS

dotCMS is an open-source headless CMS with an API-first approach. You can use a drag-and-drop UI to model different types of content. For example, a blog post or an ecommerce product. Then, you can use the API to deliver your content to any destination, such as a website or app. On the backend, you’ll still get traditional authorship features, as well as the ability to create different roles and permissions to control access to your content.

14. Concrete5

Concrete5 is open-source software designed for users with minimal technical knowledge. It offers drag-and-drop content blocks that simplify content management and customization. Its secure user management also makes it a great CMS for websites with multiple developers. This CMS platform is best for creating a complex website for medium to large businesses.

15. Contentful

Contentful is a headless CMS, meaning that the content is not attached to a web page. Instead, it uses an Application Programming Interface (API) to present content as data. Because of that, the platform has a steep learning curve for non-technical users. Contentful is excellent for companies or individuals creating a custom website that incorporates other digital platforms.

16. Appy Pie Website Builder

Appy Pie Website Builder is a user-friendly web development tool that helps you create your own website without any technical skills. The platform provides a simple drag-and-drop interface, allowing you to easily customize the design, add content, and integrate features like contact, social network, photos, videos, etc.

With Appy Pie, anyone can build a professional-looking website in no time, making their online presence a breeze. Appy Pie Website Builder is best for beginners and small businesses looking for a simple and user-friendly website development platform.

17. Zephyr

Zephyr is a cloud-hosted CMS that exclusively markets itself to agencies building client websites. Zephyr only licenses itself to agencies, so individuals can’t use Zephyr unless they’re willing to work with an agency partner. Because it’s cloud-hosted, Zephyr’s main pitch to agencies is that it’s able to offer a maintenance-free alternative to other agency solutions such as WordPress or Drupal.

18. Grav

Grav is an open-source flat-file CMS. The “flat-file” designation means that Grav doesn’t require a database to operate. Instead, it queries content from text files. This makes Grav very lightweight and easy to deploy anywhere as all you need to do is upload your site’s files. You can still create dynamic content types and filter content, and you’ll also be able to use a Markdown editor to create content.

19. Craft CMS

Craft CMS is an open-source CMS that puts its focus on a user-friendly content creation process. It also makes it easy to work with custom content types, with a built-in tool to design a custom field layout for different types of content. To control the front end, you can build it yourself using Twig templates or use Craft CMS in a headless setup with Craft CMS’s self-generating GraphQL API.

20. BigCommerce

BigCommerce is another well-known hosted CMS platform for ecommerce stores. One of BigCommerce’s standout features is its multi-channel approach to selling. You can sell via your own hosted store, Amazon, eBay, and more. You can even harness some of the other CMS options on this list. For example, you can pair BigCommerce with WordPress to get the best of both worlds.

21. Agility CMS

Agility CMS is another headless CMS that lets you manage content from one spot and deliver it anywhere via RESTful APIs, GraphQL, and JAMstack. You still get plenty of options for managing your content, including features for content modeling, SEO, scheduling, content relationships, and more. Then, Agility CMS can make sure your content loads quickly by deploying content via CDNs.

22. Optimizely

Best known for its A/B testing features, Optimizely has been steadily expanding their tools for marketers. After being acquired by Episerver last year, the two have combined their strengths to create the Optimizely content cloud. This tool allows editors to create and share visually appealing content with ease and also provides developers with a means to quickly create and launch new pages and sites.

23. TYPO3

TYPO3 is an open-source CMS that’s designed for building enterprise-level sites. TYPO3 includes more than 9,000 features directly out of the box. Such robust functionality will enable you to create a complex multi-site installation — but it won’t be easy to install or set up. Even developers and advanced users will have to invest a lot of time and effort into studying the platform.

24. Adobe Experience Manager

Adobe Experience Manager is an enterprise-focused tool that melds a CMS with a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution. You can use Adobe Experience Manager Sites to create personalized web experiences for visitors across different channels, while also using Adobe Experience Manager Assets to manage all of your brand’s digital assets from one central spot

25. Sitecore

Sitecore is one of the leading enterprise CMSs in the market and is built on ASP.NET. Similar to Contentful, this platform features content creation for multiple digital platforms. The difference is this flexible CMS integrates more marketing tools than other popular CMS platforms. This CMS platform is a good option for large-scale organizations that aren’t tight on a budget.

Complete Step-by-Step Guide On How To Create A Blog for Your Website on Notion with Feather

Criteria For Choosing A CMS: 6 Key Features To Consider The Best CMS For You

Ease of Use

A great CMS will offer you a user-friendly experience like never before. Without any coding knowledge, a drag-and-drop interface allows you to place various elements wherever you want on a web page. After publishing, you can modify the content quickly and seamlessly. This particular aspect is crucial since you will regularly need to update and adjust content on your site.

Design Options

Your website should be a place where you showcase your unique style and character. For this reason, the CMS software you pick should offer numerous design templates to choose from. It should enable you to effortlessly customize these designs to match your exact requirements. It'd be ideal if you could do this without having to rely on anyone else or learn to code.

Data Portability

As a website owner, you might at some point decide to migrate to a different platform or hosting service. In such cases, you'll need a CMS that offers robust data portability tools. These resources allow you to export your data effortlessly and move it elsewhere without any complications. This feature should ensure that you can relocate with complete freedom and without any data loss.

Extensions and Addons

Every website is unique, and so are the requirements for them. A CMS can't possibly come with all the features to cater to every website's needs. This is where extensions and add-ons come into play. These are additional pieces of software that you can install on your CMS to boost its functionalities and incorporate new ones as the need arises.

Help and Support Options

Despite a CMS's goal to make website building a breeze, you may still have queries or run into difficulties. It's crucial to know what customer support or help options are available in case you run into trouble. Some CMS providers might offer FAQs only or provide sluggish customer service. On the flip side, others might boast a large and supportive community that can come to your aid at any time of the day or night.

Cost

CMS platforms can be free or come with a price tag. Even if you opt for a free CMS platform, you may end up shelling out money for third-party extensions, themes, and web hosting services. It's essential to assess the pricing details before making a selection to avoid unwelcome surprises later on.

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Use Notion As Your Blog CMS With Feather

Feather is an innovative platform that seamlessly integrates with Notion to provide an SEO-friendly blogging experience without the need for coding or design skills. With Feather, users can write blog content in Notion and effortlessly publish it to their Feather blog. This process not only saves time but also ensures a seamless transition from idea to published content.

Enhancing SEO with Subfolder Blogs

Feather allows companies to set up a Subfolder blog, which is a better option for SEO compared to a subdomain. By hosting their blog on a subfolder (e.g., domain.com/blog), companies can improve their website's overall SEO performance and enhance their online visibility.

Streamlining CRM and Blog Management

Another remarkable feature of Feather is its ability to deliver the HubSpot experience through Notion. This means that companies can conveniently manage their CRM and website blog management within the familiar interface of Notion. This integration streamlines tasks, enhances productivity, and enables seamless collaboration among team members.

Customizing Your Blog Experience

Feather offers customization options such as the ability to change design using custom CSS, collect emails, and more. This level of flexibility empowers users to create a unique blog that reflects their brand identity and meets their specific needs.

Collaborative Content Publishing

In addition to its advanced features, Feather is designed to facilitate easy collaboration within teams during the content publishing process. This feature ensures that everyone involved in the content creation process is on the same page, leading to more efficient workflows and better results.

Getting Started with Feather

To experience the power of Feather firsthand, users can sign up for a free account and start converting their Notion content into a professional blog in minutes. With Feather, the journey from notion to blog is smooth, seamless, and highly rewarding.