The 13 Best CMS Systems Today & How to Choose

 Like Sisyphus’s incessant attempts to roll a rock to the top of a mountain, any search for "the best CMS" is doomed.

The truth is there are thousands of content management systems on the market and each has its own strengths depending on your business purpose and use case.

Let’s say you’re comparing CMS Hub, WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, for example. After some research, you’ll find that CMS 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.

These are just four examples of different types of websites you can create on a CMS. In this post, we’ll walk through different criteria you can use to choose a CMS platform for your business. Then we'll explore a variety of CMS systems so that you can find one that suits your unique needs and goals for creating a website.

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How to Choose a CMS Platform

Many freelancers and businesses don't know or have the time to learn enough HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to code a website from scratch — and that's okay. With the right tools, you can easily and quickly create a custom website that provides seamless experiences for your visitors on the front end and users on the back end.

These tools fall into two major categories: CMS platforms and website builders.

While both offer built-in features, pre-designed templates, and extensions for creating a custom site without coding or even knowing how to code, they present two very different approaches to creating and managing a website.

Let's take a closer look at these two approaches below so you can decide which tool is right for your site.

CMS vs. Website Builder

If you're looking for website building tools and web hosting in one place, go with a website builder. You can purchase a custom domain, customize the appearance of your site, and create rich multimedia pages with advanced elements like animations and scroll effects. While you focus on design and content, your hosting platform will take care of your site's maintenance, security, backups, and more.

In exchange for this ease of use, you have to give up some flexibility. Website builders lack the content management features, advanced functionality, and customization options that you'll find in CMS platforms. For that reason, website builders are ideal for agencies, artists, restaurants, and other user types looking to build image-rich sites fast.

For more advanced features and customization options, go with a CMS. With a CMS, you can completely control the design of your site, add multimedia in your posts, organize your content by tags and categories, manage multiple users, edit your site's underlying code, and much more. The process of setting up and launching your site will be longer but, in the end, you'll be able to create and manage a larger and more complex site that can grow over time.

If you've decided you want to build a site with a CMS, then you can further narrow down your selection with the following criteria.