Best CMS Platforms and Their Features (2024)

A CMS manages to create and modify digital content. It is a software that empowers you to create and manage content on your website including its design, content, graphics and even code. With this platform you can create, edit and delete content from a site without the help of a developer. However, for extra features that fit your business needs like improving the site experience or customizing the layout then it may still require some coding. The best CMS helps you build the website without the need for you to write any code from scratch or even not knowing how to code at all. So, instead of building your own system, or creating your own pages, storing images and other functions, a CMS can handle all that architecture so you can focus more on your business side of your website.

In this post, we’ll guide you through some of the best CMS platforms by exploring their features.

The focal point of CMS is to simplify content management. Users can deliver or organize the content without code knowledge. However, maintaining good content means revising, updating, or publishing content in an engaging way. The most common features of a CMS platform are: WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor, easy publishing content, ease of use, high level of customization, security, and SEO features.

• User-friendly: A system that offers simplicity on its usage makes it ideal for the team and the users.
• Customization: A CMS that allows flexibility in the way that the content is created or managed.
• SEO features: A CMS that is SEO-Friendly will help to create URLs that work both for the search engines and your readers.
• High-level of customization: Through the help of extensions and other features CMS can provide solution to easily customize designs or functionalities based on your requirements.

Overall, CMS can be applied into any type of these sites like: blogging, e-commerce, news sites, company websites etc.

Maintaining large websites is feasible with the use of CMS. The list below shows our picks on best CMS platforms.

Livingdocs is a modern CMS for content creation and various publishing systems. It is component-based which makes it easy to edit and style content while working on a page. It offers a rich set of features such as inline editing while seeing the results on real-time, a user-friendly layout system, media drag and drop while also having the opportunity to reposition and resize the elements and also scheduling content publication. What makes it ideal for use is that the documents can be delivered to various channels and platforms. It offers an intuitive WYSIWYG editor with preview functions. Editors can also write or edit via phone or tablet while also having the opportunity to preview the content before publishing it. Once the content is written, with a click of a button it is immediately published on real-time. Another important aspect is that it offers neat SEO-friendly features where you have the opportunity to configure individual metadata on your own. In Centralsoft, Livingdocs is our preferred system by which we can offer integration based on your system.

Netlify CMS is an open-source content management system for your Git workflow and which provides editors a fast and elegant UI by also supporting rich-text editing, media uploads with drag and drop, real-time preview etc. Netlify workflow is connected to various supported Git platforms where content is stored alongside with code and can be updated or edited directly.
It offers extensions on creating UI widgets, editor plugins and custom-styled previews.
It also provides an easy setup and is preferable to use if you want a better website performance. In terms of deployment, it offers a simplified process to host websites without spending too much time which makes it easier for developers and users too. It is based on JAMstack infrastructure where the frontend pages are neatly separated from backend apps. The frontend is directly pushed into a CDN to deliver pre-built static websites to users by making the process of page-load faster.
In terms of security is it highly secured for the reason that the content is pre-rendered and static leaving no space for any active process or surface area for attack.
At Centralsoft, we use Netlify CMS alongside with Gatsby because it is a lightweight platform which simplifies our process of work and gives our team everything they need for modern development in one place.

WordPress is a free open-source CMS which was firstly used for blog purposes but now it is used for any kind of website. It has a powerful content system which it is kept updated and has plenty of plugins where you can add extra features based on your use cases. Another powerful side of the WordPress is because it has many themes, if you want to change the layout of your website you will find plenty of themes available. It has plenty of SEO plugins for you to create SEO-friendly URLs, tags or categories for your posts. The block editor is easy to use and it is a good platform for both users and developers. In regards to security, it needs to be regularly updated in order to be protected from malicious software attacks.

Drupal is another CMS platform that offers easy content management with plenty of options and modules that speeds up the page load, allows to customize website’s functionalities and features, offers lots of themes etc. It also has a built-in system where you can create roles and specify their permissions. As the website grows, the number of pages, users, formats and the content will become more complex, therefore Drupal offers scalability by extending a variety of Drupal modules to handle the heavy-traffic and content-load without having to change a thing. In terms of security, it offers strict security rules with regular patches and by locking down any directory installed, safeguarding files etc. making it a good choice for enterprise clients.

Webflow CMS enables fully-structured content by designing or updating it without using any type of code. With Webflow you can edit or add more content in the collections at any time. You can connect any design element to the collections and work with that content directly on the page without requiring database or code. For developers, it is also possible to add, edit or delete via Webflow REST API from the terminal.
You can visually design the content which can be taken from a CSV, from an API or else. You can design from scratch or could use any of the free pre-built templates and customize them on your own. You can automatically define meta titles and descriptions using fields in your CMS collections without the help of developers which makes the website run smoothly.
In terms of security, it has built-in security features to keep sites secure. Since it is hosted on Amazon Web Services it has protection from AWS against security attacks. Therefore, it consists of strong authentication procedures, backups, versioning and nonstop monitoring.

We have outlined some successful CMS systems to introduce you to this blog while also explaining their features and essential functions. It is up to you to choose on the content management system that fits best your website operation requirements. Feel free to reach out in case we can support your CMS integration efforts.