#14 in CMS & PublishingUpdated 2026-08

Craft CMS

by Craft CMS · Customisable CMS with Twig templates and a GraphQL API

BenchRank score

52.8

Visit website See full CMS & Publishing ranking

Overview

Craft CMS is a self-hosted content management system with customisable content modelling, multi-site and localisation support, and versioning, scheduling and live preview for authors. Front ends are built with Twig templates or kept decoupled through its self-generating GraphQL API. Editions are licensed per project, and the same team offers Craft Cloud hosting.

Best for: Developers and agencies building custom, multilingual content sites, self-hosted or on Craft Cloud.
Pricing: Solo is free forever; Team costs $279 and Pro $399 per project including one year of updates, then $99/year for updates, with Enterprise priced on enquiry.
Runs on: Web

Strengths and trade-offs

Strengths

Free Solo edition, with unlimited content types, entries and locales
Twig templates or a self-generating GraphQL API for decoupled builds
Control panel translated into 25 languages
Plugin Store and plugin framework for extending the CMS

Trade-offs

Forms and SEO need plugins; not built in on any edition
Solo is one user account and is not recommended for client work
Licence updates cost $99/year after the first year
SSO/SAML is Enterprise-only and Enterprise has no published price

Pricing

Published plans and prices from Craft CMS’s own pricing page.

How this score is made up

Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.

MCP support
Whether an agent can drive the product through the Model Context Protocol, and how much setup that takes.
Documentation
Publicly reachable docs — coverage, freshness, code samples and machine readability.
Agent friendliness
How readable the site is to an automated client: llms.txt, structured data, server-rendered content, crawler access.
Pricing transparency
Whether real prices are published, self-serve signup exists, and usage costs are knowable without a sales call.
Changelog
A public, dated record of what shipped and when — the clearest signal that a product is still alive.
Marketing site structure
Whether the site answers a buyer's questions: clear positioning, the pages that matter, and accessibility.
Page speed
How fast the site loads for real visitors: Chrome UX Report 75th-percentile LCP, INP and CLS, with a Lighthouse mobile run standing in where a site has too little traffic for field data.
Operational trust
Status page and incident history, security disclosure, compliance and data-processing documentation.

Measured, but not part of the score

Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.

Openness
Source availability, self-hosting, data export and open standards. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — paid SaaS is not worse for being paid SaaS.
Maintenance
Release cadence and repository activity. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — it is only measurable for open repositories.

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Where this comes from

The Craft CMS pages BenchRank reads when it scores the product — its documentation, release notes, status and security pages, and its repository where there is one.

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