Most CMS decisions are made backwards. Someone sees a site they like, finds out what it was built on, and that becomes the shortlist. Or a developer recommends the platform they know best, which is fair enough, but it is not the same as recommending the platform that suits your business.
We build on a lot of different systems, and the honest answer is that there is no best CMS. There is only the best fit for how your team works, what the site has to do, and how much ongoing effort you are prepared to put in. This guide walks through the questions we ask clients before we recommend anything.
Start with the people, not the features
The first question is who will actually use the CMS every week. A site edited by one marketing manager who publishes a blog post a fortnight has very different needs from a site edited by fifteen people across three departments, each with their own approval process.
Write down, roughly:
- How many people will edit content, and how technical they are.
- What they publish most often: blog posts, landing pages, product updates, events, job listings.
- Whether content needs review or sign-off before it goes live.
- Whether editors want full control over page layout or prefer to fill in fields and let the design take care of itself.
That last point matters more than people expect. Visual page builders give marketers freedom, but they also make it easy to drift away from the brand over time. Structured, field-based editing keeps things consistent but can feel restrictive. Neither is wrong. You just need to know which your team will be happier with.
Work out what the site has to connect to
Very few business websites stand alone. List every system the site needs to talk to: your CRM, email marketing tool, booking system, payment provider, stock control, accounting software, analytics, single sign-on, translation service.
For each one, check whether the CMS has an established, maintained integration, or whether it will need custom development. A platform that looks cheaper up front can become expensive if every connection has to be built and maintained by hand. Equally, a platform with a huge plugin ecosystem only helps if the plugins you need are well supported and kept up to date.
Understand the main types of CMS
It helps to group the options before comparing individual products.
Self-hosted, open source
WordPress, Drupal and Craft CMS fall here (Craft is not free for commercial use, but you host it yourself). You own the code and the data, you choose your hosting, and you can customise almost anything. The trade-off is responsibility: you need someone to handle updates, security, backups and hosting performance.
Hosted, all-in-one platforms
Webflow, Shopify and HubSpot CMS handle hosting, security and updates for you. You pay a monthly or annual subscription and accept the limits of what the platform allows. Less maintenance, less flexibility, and you are tied to that provider’s pricing and roadmap.
Headless CMS
Sanity, Contentful, Storyblok and Strapi store and manage content but leave the front end to a separate application. This suits organisations publishing to several channels or with complex, custom front ends. It also means more development work and a front end that needs its own maintenance.
| Type | Best suited to | Main trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted open source | Sites needing deep customisation and full ownership | You are responsible for updates, security and hosting |
| Hosted all-in-one | Teams wanting low maintenance and fast publishing | Platform limits and ongoing subscription costs |
| Headless | Multi-channel content and custom front ends | Higher build cost and two systems to maintain |
Think about total cost, not launch cost
The build is usually the smallest part of what a website costs over its life. When comparing platforms, think about what drives cost over three to five years:
- Licences and subscriptions: platform fees, paid plugins or apps, and per-seat charges for editors.
- Hosting: included on hosted platforms, a separate cost on self-hosted ones, and it varies a lot with traffic and performance needs.
- Maintenance: core and plugin updates, security monitoring, fixing things when an update breaks them.
- Developer time for changes: how often will you need a developer to add a section, a field or a new page type?
- Exit cost: how hard would it be to move away later?
That last one gets overlooked. Some platforms make it easy to export your content in a usable form. Others make it painful, especially if your layouts are stored in a proprietary page-builder format.
Before signing off on a platform, ask your developer to show you exactly how your content would be exported if you left. If the answer is vague, treat that as a cost.
Be honest about your in-house skills
A flexible, self-hosted CMS is a great choice if you have a developer on staff or a support agreement in place. Without that, it can slowly fall behind on updates until something breaks or gets compromised.
On the other hand, if you have a capable in-house developer, a hosted platform may frustrate them. They will spend time working around restrictions rather than building what you need.
Match the platform to the support you will realistically have in two years, not the support you have during the build.
Questions to ask before you commit
- Can our editors make the changes they need most often without calling a developer?
- Does it integrate properly with our CRM and other key systems?
- Who handles updates and security, and what does that cost per year?
- How does it handle SEO basics: URLs, redirects, metadata, sitemaps?
- Does it support the languages and regions we need, now and in the next few years?
- How easy is it to hire developers for this platform if our current partner is unavailable?
- What happens to our content if we leave?
If a platform scores well on these, the feature list usually takes care of itself.
A few common patterns
These are generalisations, but they hold up often enough to be useful. A content-heavy marketing site with a small team usually does well on WordPress or Webflow. A product catalogue with straightforward selling suits Shopify, while a store that needs unusual checkout logic or deep customisation may suit WooCommerce. Larger organisations with complex permissions and many content types often look at Drupal or Craft. Teams already running their sales and marketing in HubSpot may find HubSpot CMS saves a lot of integration work. And businesses publishing the same content to a website, app and other channels are the natural audience for a headless CMS.
None of these are rules. They are starting points for a conversation about your specific situation.
Next steps
If you would like a second opinion on which platform suits your team and plans, get in touch and we will talk it through with you.
