A content management system is the software that stands between you and the raw files a website is made of. Instead of editing HTML and uploading it, you log in, type into a form, press publish, and the system assembles the page. That is the whole idea: the content is stored separately from the design, so either can change without breaking the other. MDN's definition of a CMS is worth thirty seconds if the concept is new to you.
Everything downstream of that decision — how fast you can publish, how much a redesign costs, whether you can move somewhere else in three years — is shaped by which system you pick. This hub introduces the platforms covered across the archive; the master comparison lives in top content management systems.
How to choose one
Most people choose a CMS by reading a list of features, which is the wrong end of the problem. Start with the site instead. Ask five questions:
- What is the site for? A shop, a publication and a course have genuinely different needs, and a platform built for one will fight you on the others.
- Who updates it, and how confident are they? The best CMS is the one the person doing the daily work will actually log into.
- Hosted or self-hosted? A hosted platform trades control for not having to think about servers, backups or updates. A self-hosted one trades convenience for control.
- How much will it grow? Some systems are comfortable with a handful of pages and miserable with tens of thousands. Some are the reverse.
- Can you get your content out? Ask this before you put anything in. An export you have actually tested is the difference between changing your mind and being stuck.
The platforms covered here
WordPress
The most widely used CMS by a wide margin, and the default answer for a general-purpose site. It is open source, endlessly extensible through themes and plugins, and forgiving of people who are learning as they go. The cost of that flexibility is that the site is yours to maintain — updates, backups and security are your responsibility. See WordPress content management system and, for the money question, is WordPress a free CMS?
Shopify
A hosted platform built specifically for selling. Orders, inventory, variants, checkout and payment handling are part of the product rather than something you assemble, which makes it a fast way to open a store and a constrained way to run a publication. See Shopify content management system and the head-to-head in WordPress vs Shopify.
Joomla
An open-source system with strong multilingual support and a granular user-permission model, which is why it turns up in corporate intranets, membership portals and public-sector sites more often than in personal blogs. It asks a little more of the person setting it up than WordPress does. The project's own about page is a fair summary from the source; ours is Joomla content management system.
Drupal
Open source, and the one to reach for when the content itself is complicated — many content types, many editors, many relationships between them, strict workflow and permissions. It rewards planning and punishes improvisation, which makes it a poor first CMS and an excellent large one. See Drupal content management system.
Squarespace
A hosted, design-led builder aimed at people who want a good-looking site without assembling one. Templates are polished and responsive out of the box and hosting is included; in exchange you work inside the boundaries the platform sets. See Squarespace content management system.
Wix
Another hosted builder, with a drag-and-drop editor that puts elements exactly where you place them. That freedom is the appeal and also the catch — layouts made by hand need attention to stay tidy on small screens. It suits small brochure sites where speed of setup matters more than long-term flexibility; the comparison in the master CMS list places it against the alternatives.
Moodle
Not a general website platform at all, but a learning management system: courses, enrolments, assignments, quizzes and grades. If your project is teaching rather than publishing, a general CMS with a course plugin bolted on is usually the harder road. It appears in the master list for that reason.
Where to go next
Once a platform is chosen, the work moves to structure and search. The SEO hub covers how to build a site search engines can read, and the API integration hub covers connecting it to whatever else your business runs on. The full list of guides is on the blog index.