Top 10 CMS in 2025

Content management systems (CMS) play a key role in creating and maintaining websites. With their help, even users without programming skills can quickly publish and edit materials. And developers get convenient tools for customizing the appearance and functionality of the site. Today, there are hundreds of different CMSs, both universal and specialized for specific tasks.

The CMS market has been actively developing in recent years. By 2025, experts expect the popularity of flexible headless systems based on a modular microservice architecture to grow. The trend will be for CMSs with wide customization options, integration with external services, and high performance out of the box.

In this review, we will consider the 10 best CMSs of 2025 that will be especially in demand and useful for various projects - from simple business card sites to large online stores and portals. The choice of systems is based on up-to-date statistics, feedback from real users, and expert forecasts.

Selection methodology

To compile the most useful and objective rating, we used a comprehensive methodology for evaluating CMS based on a number of criteria:

1. Popularity and market share. We took into account the total number of sites on this CMS, as well as the dynamics of growth over the past 2-3 years. The data was taken from reputable resources such as W3Techs, BuiltWith, and SimilarTech.
2. Functionality and flexibility. We evaluated the capabilities of the CMS out of the box, the extensibility of functions using plugins or modules. We also evaluated the simplicity and convenience of implementing specific tasks that are relevant to the Ukrainian market (multilingualism, integration with local CRM, payment systems, etc.).
3. Ease of use. We analyzed the user experience of both content managers and developers. We compared the simplicity and clarity of the interface, the availability of drag-and-drop editors, visual designers, and other tools to simplify work.
4. Security and reliability. We took into account the CMS's experience in countering hacker attacks, the availability of regular security updates, and built-in security tools. We used data on known vulnerabilities from CVE Details, Exploit Database, and Sucuri.
5. SEO optimization out of the box. We checked the availability of basic tools for search engine optimization - CNC settings, meta tags, sitemaps, redirects. We compared the ease of basic SEO setup for popular engines.
6. Russian-speaking community and support. We evaluated the activity and mutual assistance of Russian-speaking CMS users on thematic forums and platforms (Stack Overflow, GitHub, Habr, groups in social networks). The availability of educational materials in Russian was taken into account.
7. Cost of ownership. For open source CMS, we took into account the price of high-quality hosting and basic plugins. For commercial CMS, we took into account the transparency of the pricing policy, the availability of different tariffs for the needs of projects, and the cost of license renewal.

WordPress is a long-term market leader

WordPress has been the most popular CMS in the world for over 18 years. The total market share of WordPress is 36.2%, which means that more than a third of all websites on the Internet run on this platform.

What is the secret of such popularity? The main advantages of WordPress:

• Ease of use. The intuitive interface allows even beginners to quickly master the basic functions. And flexible settings give you room to implement non-standard tasks.
• A huge number of plugins and design themes. More than 59,000 free plugins and 9,000 themes are available in the official WordPress catalog. There are also thousands of premium extensions for every taste and budget.
• Strong community and support. WordPress boasts a huge community of developers and users. On specialized forums and Facebook groups, it is easy to get help and advice on any issues.
• Regular updates. In 2025, WordPress 7.0 was released with a number of improvements to the security, speed, and ease of editing Gutenberg blocks. Thanks to constant development, the system remains modern and relevant.
• Versatility. With WordPress, you can create a website of almost any topic and complexity - from a simple blog to an online store or portal. At the same time, the basic functionality is sufficient for a quick launch.

Thanks to these advantages, WordPress is ideal for both small sites with a modest budget and large projects where flexible customization is important. Among the well-known Ukrainian websites on WordPress are the online supermarket Rozetka, the website of the Verkhovna Rada, blogs of Petro Poroshenko and other politicians.

Shopify - the best choice for online stores

Shopify is the absolute leader among CMS for online stores. Shopify's market share among the top 1 million websites is 29%, which is 2.5 times higher than that of its closest competitor, Magento.

The reasons for this success of Shopify:

• The ease of launching a store. To start selling, you just need to choose a ready-made theme, configure the main parameters, and upload products. Basic store setup will take no more than 1-2 days.
• Native tools for sales and marketing. Shopify offers built-in features for creating promotions, discounts, email newsletters, loyalty programs, and more. Most marketing tasks can be completed without third-party plugins.
• Ease of scaling. As your business grows, Shopify makes it easy to increase your product catalog, expand functionality, and connect new sales channels and services. You can start with a simple landing page and grow to a full-fledged eCommerce business.
• Reliable payment system and security. Shopify has its own secure payment gateway with competitive rates. It is also easy to connect popular external payment systems and online lending services.
• Continuous development and innovation. In 2025, Shopify introduced a number of cool features, such as a visual theme builder, built-in augmented reality in stores, and improved customer segmentation based on AI analytics.
• A rich ecosystem of partners and applications. By 2025, the number of premium themes and apps in the official Shopify App Store exceeded 10,000. Among them, there are solutions for any task - from SEO optimization to marketing automation and warehouse accounting.

Among the successful Ukrainian stores on Shopify are Te-ua.com (electronics seller), Flapjack (clothing for children), Wow Matcha (Japanese matcha tea), and many others. Thanks to the simplicity and functionality of the platform, they compete with larger players.

Wix is the best website builder for beginners

Wix is one of the most popular online website builders in the world. Wix's market share among website builders is 32%, which is twice as high as that of its closest competitor, Squarespace.

The main advantages of Wix:

• Ease of use. The intuitive drag-and-drop editor allows you to quickly create a website without knowing any code. Most actions are done by dragging elements with the mouse and selecting settings from the menu.
• Large selection of responsive templates. The Wix collection includes more than 800 professionally designed templates for various themes. All of them are responsive to mobile devices and optimized for retina screens.
• Powerful visual editor. Wix allows you to easily customize every element of your website - change sizes, colors, fonts, background images, and videos. You can add animations and advanced effects without coding.
• A wide range of widgets and apps. The Wix App Market offers more than 300 widgets and apps for any task - forms, chats, maps, online recording, payments, and more. Most of them are free or have a trial period.
• Free hosting and SSL. When you connect a paid plan, Wix provides free hosting and an SSL certificate. In 2025, the company switched to the use of CDNs and the latest generation of servers, which provided an average increase in website speed by 30%.
• Built-in SEO tools. Wix offers simple and convenient tools for basic website optimization - setting up meta tags, CNC, robots.txt file, generating a sitemap. In Wix 2.0, smart tips for improving SEO based on the analysis of competitors' websites have been introduced.

Webflow is the perfect choice for designers

Webflow is one of the fastest growing website builders aimed at professional designers and developers.

Key features of Webflow:

• A visual canvas with full control over the code. Webflow allows you to build websites visually, just like in a graphic editor, but gives you access to clean code. You can export the finished project and refine it in other environments.
• Support for modern web technologies. Webflow uses HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript to create semantic, valid, and optimized layout. The generated code complies with the best practices and standards.
• A powerful CMS for working with content. Webflow has a built-in content management system with flexible field and data type settings. You can structure and display content on your website without a single line of backend code.
• Integration with external services and platforms. Webflow easily connects to popular CRMs, email services, payment gateways, and social networks. Dozens of ready-made integrations are available in the App Store, and you can also customize your own via Zapier or API.
• Premium templates and cloned components. The Webflow collection includes hundreds of professionally designed templates, UI kits, and cloned components (forms, icons, animations). All of them are available for you to analyze and use in your projects.
• Global styles and design system. In Webflow, you can define global styles for colors, fonts, and indents and apply them to all elements at once. It is also possible to create symbols and components for reuse.

In 2025, Webflow presented new websites of such well-known Ukrainian companies as Reface (a face replacement app), IBOX Bank, and Netpeak (a marketing agency). All of them are distinguished by their non-standard design and creative presentation of information.

Contentful is the best Headless CMS for developers

Contentful is one of the leaders among the so-called Headless CMS. These are systems in which data (content) is completely separated from the presentation (appearance of the site). Content is managed and delivered through APIs, and the frontend is developed separately on any framework or platform.

The main advantages of Contentful:

• Flexible content model. In Contentful, you can create your own content types from fields of different types and nest them into each other. For example, for a blog, you can define the Author, Article, and Tag models and set relationships between them.
• Powerful API for accessing content. All work with content in Contentful is done through the REST API and GraphQL. You can retrieve, filter, and sort records by any criteria using a flexible query language.
• Integration with any front-end platforms. Content from Contentful can be connected to a website or application in any language and framework - React, Vue, Angular, Swift, Java, PHP, etc. There are ready-made SDKs and plugins for integration.
• Multilingualism out of the box. Contentful allows you to create different versions of content for each language and easily switch between them in the API. There are also integrations with automatic translation services.
• Flexible roles and access rights. In Contentful, you can set up user roles with different access rights (editor, translator, publisher, etc.). You can also restrict access to certain types of content and fields.
• Extensibility and customization. Contentful is open source and has a fully documented API. You can customize the platform to your needs, create plugins, and integrate with external services and systems.

Contentful is ideal for projects with a complex content structure that plan to use it on different platforms and devices. And also for websites and applications where high speed and simplicity of front-end development is important.

Magento - the best solution for large stores and marketplaces

Magento is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms in the world, focused on medium and large businesses. Key features of Magento:

• Extensive customization options. Magento allows you to flexibly customize the store's appearance, product catalog, pricing algorithms, ordering and processing processes, etc. Most settings are available from the admin panel without programming.
• Multisite and support for different languages and currencies. On one Magento installation, you can create several stores (for example, for different countries) with a common customer base and products, but different prices, design, and content.
• Built-in marketing tools. Magento offers out-of-the-box features such as best-selling products, similar and related products, promo codes and discounts, customer segmentation, loyalty program, and more.
• Support for omnichannel sales. Magento makes it easy to integrate online and offline sales. You can upload goods to marketplaces (Amazon, eBay), process orders from different channels in one interface, and offer pickup from retail stores.
• Scalability and high performance. Magento architecture is designed for high loads and a large assortment (millions of products). The system supports horizontal scaling, distributed caching, database query optimization, and other highload practices.
• Large community and extension marketplace. Magento has a huge community of developers and an active official extension marketplace (Magento Marketplace). In 2025, more than 5000 paid and free modules and design themes are available on it.

The main disadvantages of Magento are the complexity of development and the high cost of ownership. High-quality hosting, a security certificate, and a basic set of modules will cost at least $200-300 per month. In addition, to maintain and develop a store, you need a team of certified Magento developers, whose services are not cheap.

Therefore, Magento is worth considering for large stores and marketplaces with a turnover of more than $100,000 per month. In this case, the investment in the platform will quickly pay off due to sales growth and business scaling.

Drupal is a powerful CMS for complex high-load websites

Drupal is one of the oldest and most functional open source content management systems. It has traditionally been popular among websites with high traffic, complex structure, and high security requirements.

The main advantages of Drupal:

• Flexible architecture and extensive customization options. Drupal allows you to implement almost any functionality thanks to its modular architecture and powerful API. You can change and expand the capabilities of the core, use object-oriented programming.
• Multi-level caching and high performance. Drupal uses an advanced caching system at different levels (database, code, templates, pages). This ensures high loading speed even with millions of visitors and complex database queries.
• Advanced content management capabilities. Drupal has built-in tools for organizing complex content structures, taxonomies, reusing materials, managing workflows, moderation, and much more.
• Advanced SEO tools. Drupal supports CNC, meta tags, canonical URLs, sitemap generation, Schema.org micro-markup, and other search engine optimization technologies. Many settings are available from the admin panel without additional modules.
• Built-in security mechanisms. Tools to protect against SQL injections, XSS attacks, DDoS, spam, and other threats are integrated into the Drupal core. The system is regularly updated to eliminate the found vulnerabilities.
• Support for multilingualism and localization. Drupal allows you to create multilingual websites with end-to-end localization of all elements - from the admin interface to the components of the design themes. There are integrations with machine translation services.

The disadvantages of Drupal are the complexity of development and a relatively high entry threshold. To fully work with this CMS, you need to have a good knowledge of PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and the peculiarities of Drupal architecture. The system is also demanding on hosting resources.

In 2025, Drupal 10 was released with a number of improvements in terms of security, performance, and usability. Automatic updates of the core and modules were added, compatibility with PHP 8 and MySQL 8 was improved, and support for WebP and HTTP/2 was added.

Drupal is worth considering for complex enterprise-level projects that require non-standard functionality, security, and reliability. These can be large portals and services, online stores, government websites, and educational platforms.

Ghost is the perfect choice for modern blogs and media

Ghost is a minimalist blogging platform that is rapidly gaining popularity among independent authors, journalists, and small media projects. It offers a simple and intuitive interface for publishing and distributing content.

Key features of Ghost:

• A minimalist interface focused on writing text. Ghost offers a simple editor with Markdown support and a basic set of formatting options. The emphasis is on the convenience of writing and publishing materials.
• Responsive themes and AMP support out of the box. All Ghost design themes are responsive for mobile devices. The platform also automatically generates AMP versions of pages to speed up loading in mobile search.
• Built-in SEO tools. Ghost automatically generates meta tags, valid Schema.org markup for articles, OpenGraph and Twitter Card for social networks. Settings are available right in the editor while writing.
• Native support for subscriptions and monetization. Ghost has built-in tools for collecting email subscribers and paid subscriptions to exclusive materials. Authors can receive donations and sell access to content.
• Support for multiple authors and roles. Ghost allows you to add multiple authors and blog administrators, set up different roles and access rights for them. There is a simple system of drafts, editing, and publishing.
• Integrations with popular services. Ghost supports integration with more than 1500 external services via Zapier, including analytics collection, email campaigns, social media publishing, payment acceptance, etc.

The main disadvantages of Ghost are limited customization options (no programming skills required) and a relatively small community compared to popular CMSs. Also, Ghost is not very well suited for websites with a large number of static pages - it is primarily a blogging platform.

In 2025, Ghost 7.0 was released with support for group subscriptions, a built-in email newsletter builder, an improved content search and tagging system, and new privacy settings (in accordance with GDPR and CCPA).

Ghost is a great choice for bloggers, independent journalists, and small media projects that need a simple and effective platform for publishing and monetizing content. It is especially suitable for those who write on technical and educational topics (Ghost supports code highlighting syntax).

Strapi is a promising open source Headless CMS

Strapi is a young and rapidly developing open source Headless CMS. It offers a flexible and scalable backend platform for content management that can be used with any frontend (websites, mobile apps, IoT devices).

The main advantages of Strapi:

• Customized admin panel and content models. Strapi allows you to create your own content types with an arbitrary set of fields right from the admin panel. You can customize the appearance of the control panel and use design themes.
• Powerful API and GraphQL support. Strapi generates REST and GraphQL APIs for all data models. Developers can quickly create and modify API schemas, use advanced GraphQL functions (aggregation, filtering, pagination).
• Plugins and extensions for different tasks. Strapi's functionality can be extended with more than 400 plugins from the marketplace - for user management, internationalization, data import/export, A/B testing, etc.
• Integration with any front-end frameworks. Strapi has SDKs and starters for quick integration with popular frameworks such as React, Next.js, Vue, Nuxt, Angular, Svelte, and others. You can deploy a full-stack application in just a few minutes.
• High performance and scalability. Strapi is built on Node.js and has a modern microservice architecture. It supports server-side rendering, request caching, and load balancing out of the box.
• Self-hosted and deployed. Unlike many SaaS platforms, Strapi can be deployed on your own infrastructure - on your server or in the cloud (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure). This gives you more control over data and security.

The disadvantages of Strapi are a relatively small community compared to the leading CMS, the lack of built-in tools for managing media content (images, videos), and the need for basic programming skills for customization and plugin development.

In 2025, Strapi 5.0 was released with a visual admin panel designer, an improved system of roles and permissions at the field level, support for Federation and Stitching in GraphQL, a built-in authorization service, and other innovations.

Strapi is suitable for development teams that need a flexible and modern platform for quick API creation and integration with any front-end applications. CMS will also be of interest to companies that want to maintain full control over their infrastructure and code.

October CMS is a promising project based on Laravel

October CMS is a young but rapidly gaining popularity content management system based on the Laravel framework. It offers a modern plugin architecture, a powerful API for developers, and convenient tools for building complex web applications.

Key features of October CMS:

• Modern design of the admin panel. October CMS has one of the most advanced and user-friendly interfaces among all open source CMSs. It combines a beautiful design, intuitive layout of elements, and extensive customization options.
• Simple and flexible plugin architecture. All components and functions of October CMS are implemented as plugins. Developers can easily create, connect, and combine plugins to solve any customer's tasks.
• Powerful tools for working with data. October offers convenient tools for creating data models, relationships between them, selecting, filtering, and sorting records. Different database drivers are supported - MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL.
• Built-in visual page builder. October CMS includes a visual drag-and-drop static page builder. It allows you to quickly create and edit page layouts from ready-made blocks without a single line of code.
• Advanced template and component system. October has a powerful Twig template language that allows you to flexibly manage the data output on the frontend. The CMS also has a built-in library of ready-made UI components, such as forms, buttons, sliders, tabs, etc.
• Support for multisite and multilingualism. You can create several independent websites on one October installation, each with its own domain, template, and content. You can set several language versions for each page.

The disadvantages of October CMS are a relatively small community of developers, the lack of an obvious upgrade path between major versions, and increased hosting requirements due to the architecture.

In 2025, October CMS 4.0 is expected to be released, which promises a transition to the current version of Laravel 10, a Vue.js-based admin panel interface, a new authorization system through social networks, and an expansion of the marketplace of plugins and design themes.

October CMS is best suited for experienced web developers who are familiar with the Laravel framework and prefer to work with elegant and well-documented code. The CMS will also be convenient for design studios that value the visual component and the freedom to customize the appearance of the site.