Best CMS Alternatives to WordPress

WordPress has been miles ahead of its competition when it comes to Content Management Systems (CMS). It has turned into an industry standard over the years. The architecture of templates and plugins helps users build their custom websites without the need for having in-depth knowledge on the subject. So, when looking for a WordPress alternative, we’ll be looking at all the aspects that the CMS has to offer and how it compares to WordPress. Although more than 40% of the websites are built on WordPress, there are other options to be explored as well.

What’s a CMS?

A CMS or a content management system is a platform that helps you build and manage, maintain, and modify content without having the ability to code. In other words, users can create websites without any coding backgrounds. This significantly reduces the overhead as installing a CMS to your website does not require a specialist, and most of the tutorials are available online. The websites are fairly easy to update and manage.

Content management systems skip the need to write HTML code to upload content on a website. Instead, they have an interface that works as an engine that automatically uses a pre-written piece of code to manage newly added data to the website.

Although the architecture presents unlimited possibilities for users to create and manage different websites, these Content management systems are mostly used to power:

Popular CMS software

Although WordPress owns over 65% of the market share when it comes to websites made using content management systems, there still are other alternatives which work as good, if not better. Some of these are listed below:

Drupal

Drupal is known for its customizability. However, flexibility comes best if the user has experience with HTML and CSS. There are thousands of free themes to choose from in order to make the perfect mix for your website. Due to this level of granular control, Drupal websites are harder to set up and maintain than a typical WordPress website. However, security and control set it apart.

Joomla

Much like Drupal, Joomla is also very customizable. Most of these customizations have to be installed on the backend, due to which users must have a little web development knowledge in order to get the best out of Joomla. However, the platform offers thousands of themes and plugins, which makes customizations easy. The dashboard is very handy and allows users to add anything to the website. There is an extensions directory that supports over 6,000 extensions that can be added to the website. Joomla can manage lots of users at once, which makes it suitable for social networking websites, communities, and membership websites.

Shopify

Shopify is one of the market leaders when it comes to eCommerce stores. The platform is focused on building online stores. For this, Shopify has support for various plugins and templates that help entrepreneurs build these stores with little to no prior experience. 

Wix

Through their extensive online marketing campaigns, Wix has turned to become one of the leading competitors of WordPress. This is one of the easiest CMS available in the market. The platform allows users to build small businesses and blogs through simple drag-and-drop functionalities. 

Users can make online businesses on Wix as well since they provide eCommerce payment support as well. The paid version of the plan comes with pre-designed templates for different scenarios. 

Hubspot CMS

HubSpot is a fully hosted CMS that has integrated tools for keeping your teams, content, and teams in one place. The CMS supports tools like domain manager, staging environment, design tools, etc. 

Due to the wide range of services that Hubspot provides, there’s no need to add third-party services to the mix. The dashboard helps track analytics, create marketing strategies, create rules and automation, and a lot more. 

The users are fully secure from any kind of attacks due to the security and firewalls in place. The platform’s global CDN, SSL, and security teams help make the whole experience very secure and seamless.

How to Build a Website using a CMS

A user can follow the simple steps to create a website using these content management systems.

Most of the aforementioned platforms compete to take the market share that is currently dominated by WordPress. What makes WordPress as special as it has turned out to be in the world of content management systems? Let’s find out.

Specialized platforms, however, have the edge due to the potential of digital marketing in their specific niches. We’ve seen platforms like Shopify and Wix already take their chunk of customer bases due to their specialties, and this is just the beginning, considering how the web is progressing. As a user, choosing the best CMS for your business or website depends on your requirements and how the CMS caters to them. This can be broken down into a few modules: usability, plugins, themes, security, costs, and features. Specialized use cases are catered by specialized platforms and turn out to be the best fit for content management systems. However, platforms like Wix and WordPress are also doing an outstanding job in this regard.