CMS comparison: Find your way in the content management jungle

Content Management Systems (CMSs) get a lot of attention nowadays. There are plenty of solutions on the market that allow us to create and manage digital content without the need for programming skills. CMSs come in all shapes and forms, each with its own set of available features, possible customisation and support options, integration and extension points, and scalability and maturity of the product and the ecosystem.

At NoA Ignite, we have been working with various CMS solutions for more than 15 years. During this time, we have worked with many different CMS platforms, including Episerver (currently Optimizely), Umbraco, Sitefinity, Sitecore, Contentful, and WordPress. All of them have their own strengths and situations where they shine the most. We do however enjoy certain products more than others, because of their maturity, reliability, high customisation options, and the fact that they cover a wide set of customer needs. These products range from relatively small but often highly specialised business cases to large-scale enterprise solutions handling millions of requests per day. These are the tools we recommend to our customers that are looking for a professional CMS solution.

In this article, we will dive deep into the functionality of these platforms: highlight their core features, show their strengths and weaknesses, and give you some hints on the situations where they are most useful. We hope that this summary will help you to find the optimal CMS for your needs.

Types of CMS platforms

Before we dive into the actual comparison, let’s take a look at the different types of CMS solutions available these days.

Traditional CMSs

The most common CMSs are the traditional ones, which combine content and presentation. They consist of a back-office UI used by the editors to prepare and manage the website content, as well as a templating engine responsible for rendering the prepared content according to the available templates and displaying it to the end users.

Figure 1. Traditional CMSs

They have everything in one place and the editor can easily choose the required functionalities directly in the tool, edit the content there, and see the result in the same place immediately.

They are great for the most common use cases of building websites. Popular solutions such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal work exactly like this. A few examples in the .NET world are Episerver (currently Optimizely), Umbraco, Sitefinity and Sitecore.

Headless CMSs

On the other hand, we have headless CMS platforms. They provide almost the same functionality to create and manage content as traditional CMSs, however they do not usually have any built-in templating or rendering engines, so displaying the content needs to be handled outside of the CMS. This is possible because the content definition, content management operations, and the content itself are made available through an API, so it can easily be consumed by other systems.

Headless CMSs

This approach is suitable when the CMS acts as a source of content for a bigger ecosystem. The content can be presented through a decoupled user interface (a single page application, a mobile app, an IoT device, a digital assistant etc.), consumed by another system or site, or a mix of both.

A headless solution does not only provide the flexibility of selecting the final front-end technology, it is also easier to scale. It is a pragmatic and rational choice for all scenarios without a traditional web UI – it simply does not make sense to invest resources into preparing templates for items that will never be displayed through the CMS.

Examples of headless CMS platforms are Contentful, Prismic and Ghost. It is also worth mentioning that there are some hybrid solutions available, where a traditional CMS can act as a source of content made available programmatically. An example is Episerver Delivery API (currently Optimizely Content Delivery API), which returns content created in a traditional CMS through an API.

CMSs used at Making Waves

We have built CMS-based solutions on most of the platforms mentioned above. We recommend a few of these more than others because of their stability, maturity, developer- and editor-friendliness, and the fact that they cover a wide range of usage scenarios. These platforms are Episerver (currently Optimizely) and Umbraco for traditional websites, and Contentful for headless solutions. Here is a short description of their characteristics and our recommendation about when to use them.

Photo by Philipp Katzenberger on Unsplash

Episerver (currently Optimizely)

Episerver (currently Optimizely) has been available since 2002. It’s an extremely mature and constantly evolving platform with a huge number of high-quality built-in features (listed in the next section of this article) to support editors and developers in their everyday work.

The CMS is only one part of the platform. The Episerver (currently Optimizely) ecosystem consists of the following products:

• Episerver CMS (currently Optimizely CMS) – providing a wide range of CMS, an enterprise search engine, an AI-powered personalization engine, and a visitor traffic analyser.
• Episerver Commerce (currently Optimizely Commerce) – in addition to the CMS and e-commerce functionalities, it provides a personalised find, ratings and reviews storage, a management module, and a mailing solution with personalisation options.
• Episerver Campaign (currently Optimizely Campaign) – to create, automate and personalise campaigns in the omni-channel environment.

Such an ecosystem of products, developed by the same company, combined with professional support and a long-term roadmap, guarantees smooth integrations and convenient usage. In addition, the Episerver (currently Optimizely) platform is one of the most developer-friendly CMSs out there. From a code perspective, it introduces all CMS-related features in a graceful and non-intrusive way, making it possible to write clean and maintainable code with great flexibility.

Read more on Optimizely's website.

Umbraco

Umbraco is an open-source solution with strong community support. It consists of the core platform, which provides crucial CMS functionalities, and a wide set of extensions and plugins created by the community. It is intuitive and easy to use both for developers and editors. It gives full flexibility in terms of selecting the most suitable hosting option – it could be hosted on-premise, in a custom cloud or in the dedicated Umbraco cloud.

Read more on Umbarco’s website.

Contentful

Contentful is a headless CMS used to create and manage content, accessed programmatically through the available API. Content definition and the actual content can be created and managed manually through the portal or programmatically through the provided RESTful API. This separation between the content model and the content itself gives huge flexibility in terms of the final front-end technology, and allows to focus on the actual model, not its presentation. In contrast to Episerver (currently Optimizely) and Umbraco, Contentful operates in a Saas model (without an option to host on-premise), where the final pricing plan selection is based on the required features and the actual size of the site.

Read more on Contentful’s website.

CMS comparison – the details:

Below is a detailed comparison of Episerver (currently Optimizely), Umbraco and Contentful features. We hope it will help you to compare and select the best solution for your project.

That’s it! We hope that you found the above information useful and that it helps you to understand different CMSs better, and hopefully decide which CMS to use. If you have any questions or if you would like to consult with us on the topic of CMSs, you can reach us at business@makingwaves.pl or at the phone number: +48 664 769 486.

Editor: Anja Wedberg