What's the best content management system?
When it comes to choosing the best content management system (CMS), it's important to consider your organization's specific goals for content. The right CMS will depend on your unique objectives. For example, if you have a large team creating and publishing content, you'll want a CMS that can accommodate multiple users. Similarly, if you're active on social media, look for a CMS with seamless social media integration.It's important to note that most organizations don't need a CMS that does everything. Instead, focus on finding a CMS that meets all of the requirements that matter most to you. Make a list of the features and tasks you deem important, and use it to compare potential CMS options.
The best CMS will help you manage your brand identity, tell your business's story, and unify your publishing voice. It should also simplify the process of creating, gathering, storing, and accessing content as needed.
Ultimately, the best content management system for your organization is the one that meets your specific needs. By considering your priorities and using them as a measuring stick, you can find the CMS that will help you achieve your goals and streamline your content management processes.
What do you want from your CMS?
Various content systems can provide a wide variety of services. But the only services that matter are the ones you’ll actually use. Start by determining your productivity must-haves, and if you find a CMS that also includes extras, even better. To get started, consider this list of common CMS features and consider making your own list of specific needs.
Is your CMS easy to use?
Many businesses seek a CMS to simplify the process of creating content and posting it to the web and want one that’s as easy to use as Word or Google Docs, without a need for users to understand coding or software development.
Does your CMS support a growing number of users?
Do you need a CMS that will accommodate a certain number of users to manage and collaborate on content? Is it easy to manage permissions, workflows and other project needs?
Is it easy to find content and other assets in your CMS?
You may be looking for a CMS that allows you to search past posts or videos in an instant. That searchability makes it easy to update, repurpose or republish older items just like new. You can also easily audit the site for the use of certain keywords.
Will your CMS scale as your business grows?
Do you want a CMS that will scale with your organization as it grows? Look for a system that offers versions for organizations of different sizes or can accommodate various numbers of users.
Can you customize your CMS to suit your business needs?
If you have specific ideas about how you want your CMS to work and how you want your content to look, you may not be happy with simple templates and one-size-fits-all solutions. Instead, you may want a CMS that is fully customizable to your specifications.
Is your CMS secure?
Data security is important for most organizations, and that includes the data that will be housed in your content management system. How important is security to your CMS search, and what specific safeguards are you seeking out?
Are you getting real value from your CMS investment?
What is your CMS budget? Make sure you understand all the costs involved with the CMS you choose. Some options will require add-on expenses, while others provide all-in-one solutions.
Are you getting the best support from your CMS partner?
A new software tool often comes with a learning curve. Is it important to you to find a CMS that provides customer service when you need help making it work for you?
Use these resources to find the best content management system for your unique business needs
Content management systems explained
What is a content management system?
A content management system (CMS) is a software application that allows users to create, manage and publish digital content, typically for websites or mobile applications. It provides a user-friendly interface for organizing, storing and updating various types of content, including text, images, videos and audio files. A CMS also enables multiple users to collaborate on content creation and management, making it a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes.
What are the benefits of a CMS?
A content management system (CMS) offers several benefits, including streamlining content creation, simplifying publishing and improving collaboration between teams. It also helps to organize and manage content, automate tasks and ensure consistent branding across all channels. With a CMS, you can quickly and easily update your website or other digital properties, improving your online presence and user experience.
Who needs a content management system?
Anyone who creates and publishes content online can benefit from using a content management system (CMS). This includes businesses, organizations, individuals, bloggers and more. A CMS can help manage content more efficiently, streamline workflows, improve collaboration and ensure consistency in branding and messaging.
How does a content management system work?
A content management system (CMS) allows you to store and manage your digital content, such as text, images, and videos, in a central location. Users can create, edit, and publish content through a user-friendly interface, without needing technical knowledge. The CMS manages the content and presents it to the website visitor through a front-end presentation layer, such as a website or mobile application. This allows for efficient content publishing and updates, as well as the ability to track and analyze content performance.
Visit our guide to CMS architecture to learn more about the different options.
Visit our guide to CMS architecture to learn more about the different options.
How to choose the best CMS architecture for your content management system
To choose the best CMS architecture for your content management system, it is important to understand the various options available. With the increasing number of vendors offering different approaches, it can be overwhelming to make a decision. To simplify the process, we have created guides that explain the differences between the main types of CMS platforms, such as coupled CMS, decoupled CMS and headless CMS. Our guides also outline the advantages and disadvantages of each option to help you make an informed decision.
Related articles & resources for choosing the best content management system
Content experts struggle to deliver personalized experiences while keeping up with new channels and technology. Scaling digital content and expanding needs pose major challenges. Discover how to choose the right CMS, focusing on your unique needs and digital strategy for success.
Stop playing whack-a-mole with outdated articles and buried content assets that are slowing your organization down. The right content management system can help you prevent—and clean up—content debt.
Navigate the CMS selection maze by first understanding the unique content needs of your business. Just because your competitors are doing one thing doesn't mean you should follow.
Is a headless CMS the superior content management system solution? The answer, of course, depends, but ignore the hype and get the information you need to make the most informed decision to suit your exact business needs.
A carefully considered RFP solicitation will attract the right CMS vendors and avert major headaches.
To determine how much you’ll pay for a CMS, start by understanding the options and determining what you need the content platform and tools to do for you. Here's a breakdown of some of the factors you'll need to consider when looking at overall costs for your CMS.
Here are seven things to note about finding the CMS solution that is right for your business and its web content management needs.
A combination of poor marketing and user confusion has created a CMS market where buyers aren’t always getting what’s right for them. With advice from Forrester Research analyst Joe Cicman, learn here how to select the best CMS for your business needs.
Content as a service (CaaS) represents one of the new waves of thinking about content management and the content management systems (CMSs) that are used to create and manage this content. It’s the customizable, simplified way of communicating with customers, employees, prospects and others in whatever format or method is appropriate for the audience and the message.
Delivering exceptional customer experiences requires some combination of product, people, processes and technology to get right every time. It's no simple task, but these challenges can be overcome by truly understanding your target audience and delivering the content and information they seek based on where they're at in the customer journey.
Here are the top eight corporate-friendly CMS attributes to look for if your organization is in the market for a new content platform.
Learn more about some of the most common content roadblocks, why a content creation strategy is crucial and how a CMS can help you achieve your content goals.
Overlooked, legacy content can create more business issues than you might think. Find out how to streamline your site with active content management.
Digital content demands are increasing at an unparalleled clip. Businesses need content solutions to keep pace, but the right CMS is not a panacea—it’s one part of the solution. You need the right content strategy aligned with the right people, processes and technology to deliver truly great experiences for your customers.
We gathered a panel of industry experts from across the editorial, digital product and marketing spectrum to discuss how the digital content landscape evolved in 2022 and get their insights into what lies ahead for content publishers in 2023.
Whatever your goals are, there’s probably a CMS that can help you meet them. But if you get the wrong type of CMS, you may not accomplish your objectives—and you will have wasted time and money. Here’s a quick look at six different types of content management systems to help you discover which type you need.
Having the right content management system (CMS) to manage content creation, publication and distribution can make the difference when it comes to business growth for your mid-sized company. But what features are the most important to have, and what should you look for when you choose your next CMS? Find out here.
Here are nine must-have CMS features that media companies need to create, publish, distribute and optimize their content.
As the need to transform digitally increases, businesses’ likely first question is, "Where do we begin?” Here are the three key things to look for in a CMS as you start on the path toward digital transformation.
When you’re in the market for a new content management system, you can keep your publishers, developers and marketing teams happy by reading this first.
Brightspot was designed to fit into your publishing process, freeing content creators to quickly distribute content to every channel without the need for IT. Your development team gets to focus on innovations; creators get to create.
Learn about some of the key differences between Contentful and Brightspot, and how a move to Brightspot as your CMS solution can drive your business forward with astonishing speed and flexibility.
Whether you are looking to launch fast with a low-code/no-code solution or need the ability to customize to requirements that aren't even yet fully defined, involving your development team from the outset is critical to selecting a publishing platform that can deliver from day one. Join Brightspot’s VP of Product James Clark and Lee Teague, SVP of Engineering, for an in-depth discussion on why this is so important.
Learn about some of the key differences between Contentstack and Brightspot, and how a move to Brightspot as your CMS solution can drive your business forward with astonishing speed and flexibility.
Let's explore some key reasons you may need a content management system. With the right content management system, you can stay focused on your content creation and strategy, rather than get caught up in development lags and coding snags.
With thousands of CMS options on the market, choosing the right CMS can be a daunting prospect. Here, we take a side-by-side look at Brightspot and Drupal to help identify if Brightspot is the right CMS choice for your organization.
A composable DXP is a digital experience platform that is assembled from a series of best-of-breed solutions that work together via APIs and leverage microservices architecture. It's not one product, but a system that links products together and organizes assets as editable modules that are easy to find and update. Find out here why composable DXP matters to your business.
Today's content management systems provide flexible, scalable, customizable capabilities that extend well beyond simply managing content. Hence the introduction of the term digital experience platform to help classify the evolution of what a modern CMS is capable of supporting.
With thousands of CMS options on the market, choosing the right CMS can be a daunting prospect. Here, we take a side-by-side look at Brightspot and WordPress VIP to help identify if Brightspot is the right CMS choice for your organization.
When looking to optimize the productivity and flexibility of your digital operations, keep in mind the goals you’re trying to achieve and closely assess how your choice of CMS can support it. Here, we take a side-by-side look at how Brightspot CMS compares to Sitecore.
Organizations leverage a variety of programming languages to build content management systems. Among the most popular are C#, Java, PHP and Python. And though some technical experts will swear by their favorites, it begs the question—which is the best to use?
At Brightspot, we’re talking with customers every day about how to digitally transform their content experiences, and what they need most from their CMS solution. Here's what we're hearing about the most common challenges.
Learn how to approach multi-layered security to protect from external and internal threats.
A new breed of advanced content management systems are simple and intuitive for end users, but offer a sophistication and flexibility that was simply unimaginable a few years ago. Brightspot’s latest webinar explores these changes and the massive benefits they offer organizations looking to give their audiences convenient, consistent and engaging content at pace.
Global research firm Forrester says, "Agile CMS seeks to enable collaborative, iterative approaches to content and experiences that satisfy both sides of the house." We think Brightspot has embodied all these things for over a decade long before the firm coined the term in 2021 as part of its Forrester Wave evaluation of agile CMSs.
As the web content management space continues to evolve, the concept of DXP or digital experience platform has emerged as a comprehensive solution that encompasses various tools, channels and services required for delivering an exceptional end-user experience. While a CMS remains a crucial component for driving digital identity and engagement, this article explores the differences between a DXP and CMS and how they contribute to the overall content management DNA of modern digital experience platforms.
Content management systems are a key part of a brand's technology stack, yet it can be challenging for buyers to know how to choose the right one. Here's a primer for everything you need to get started when selecting a new CMS.
Companies today are becoming increasingly borderless, meaning it's more common to need multiple sites in multiple languages to support their business. A modern CMS will ensure seamless and consistent multisite management no matter the geography, number of sites or source of original content assets.
Flexibility is a must have feature of a CMS framework. Discover four features you need when selecting a content management system for your business.
The word processing-like experience of Brightspot’s rich text editor (RTE) empowers content creators to draft, edit, publish and repurpose content more efficiently than ever.
In this quick video demo, we explore some of the many ways our next-gen CMS makes the lives of content creators that much easier, thanks to powerful features such as bulk upload, live preview, suggested tags and more.
From personalization to artificial intelligence, here are six themes currently shaping the digital landscape and the way content creators publish.
Learn what to watch for—and learn five ways you’ll benefit from an upgrade.
To become a well-oiled publishing machine, your content management system (CMS) must be equipped to sustain this kind of volume.
Now you can replatform faster than the time it took for you to decide to redesign and relaunch your site—in less than six months.