16 Best Content Management System (CMS) Examples & How to Choose Yours

With so many options out there, I know how tough it is to choose the best CMS for your website. It's important to make the right choice because changing your CMS down the line is a pain, but there are so many large and small considerations that make it hard to pick the right system for you.

Let’s say you’re comparing Content Hub, WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, for example. After some research, you’ll find that Content Hub is better suited for enterprise-level sites, WordPress for blogs, Joomla for membership sites, and Drupal for high-traffic sites that have lots of data.

How does a content management system work?

These are just four examples of different types of websites you can create on a CMS. In this post, I‘ll walk through different criteria you can use to choose a CMS platform for your business. Then, I’ll share an in-depth look at a variety of CMS systems so that you can find one that suits your unique needs and goals for creating a website.

How does a content management system work?

A content management system gives you an easy way to manage all of your website‘s content without needing to manually edit your site’s code any time you want to make a change. Rather than needing to work directly with code, a CMS gives you a backend area where you and your team can use code-free content editors to add your website's content. For example, if you want to publish a new blog post, you can typically add that blog post using a simple text editor. This backend content management dashboard is called the content management application (CMA).

Once you‘ve added content on the backend, the CMS will then take that content and properly display it on the actual website where your visitors/customers can interact with it. Typically, the CMS will display the content according to the theme/templating rules that you’ve already set up. This is called the content delivery application (CDA). By combining the CMA and the CDA, a content management system offers a much easier way to create and manage content on your site, while ensuring that all of that content displays according to your brand's design specifications.

How to Choose a CMS Platform