Every CMS conversation we have starts the same way: "which one is best?" And the honest answer is always the same — best for what? The right choice depends on who edits your content, how often it changes, what it needs to connect to, and how much you want to spend keeping it all running.
Start with the editors, not the tech
The people who will live in your CMS every day are rarely the people choosing it. Before comparing platforms, watch how your team actually works. Do they publish three times a day or three times a quarter? Do they need to preview changes across a dozen page types, or just swap a hero image? A CMS your editors avoid is an expensive way to keep content stale.
The three broad camps
Classic platforms like WordPress remain the fastest path to a content-heavy site with a huge plugin ecosystem. The trade-off is that the same flexibility becomes a maintenance burden at scale — plugins age, security patches pile up, and performance tuning becomes its own project.
Headless CMSs separate content from presentation. Your content lives behind an API, and your site — or app, or kiosk, or anything else — pulls from it. This is our default recommendation when a business has more than one front end, a design system worth protecting, or developers who want a modern stack. The cost is that "just install a plugin" becomes "build a feature."
Hybrid and file-based setups — like the Git-backed approach powering the site you're reading — suit teams where developers and content sit close together. Content changes ship through the same review process as code, which is either a superpower or a bottleneck depending on your team.
Questions that actually decide it
- Who fixes it when something breaks — an agency, an internal dev, or nobody?
- How many front ends will consume this content over the next three years?
- Does your content model fit pages, or is it really structured data wearing a page costume?
- What does the total cost look like once you include hosting, plugins, and the hours spent fighting it?
Our take
There is no best CMS — but there is a wrong one, and it's usually the one chosen because it was familiar rather than fit. If you're weighing options for a rebuild, we're happy to talk through what we'd pick for your situation and why.