Content Management Systems Buyers’ Guide 2025

A Content Management System (CMS) is a type of software that enables users to create, manage, and publish content online, without any in-depth coding knowledge or experience.

• The CMS market was valued at USD 23.2bn in 2025, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 3.9% to reach a total value of USD 28.1bn by 2030. 
• Growth is being driven largely by the global surge in digital transformation efforts, as organizations realize the need to make their content and services accessible online to keep up with competition. This is particularly true within the e-commerce space.
  • “It’s all about the distribution of content to a lot of devices, and it doesn’t matter whether this content is a video, an e-sport or a game.” – Asaf Ashkenzai, COO at Verimatrix, tells Expert Insights in an exclusive interview.
• As the market grows, we’re seeing customer demand grow in a few key areas: 
  • Users continue to ask for user-friendly interfaces, customization and integration options, and security features to help protect website data against unauthorized access and editing.
  • Demand is growing for open-source CMS platforms, which typically offer greater flexibility and customization in terms of the control you have over your website. 
  • Users are prioritizing cloud-based CMS platforms to help increase scalability and content accessibility and reduce infrastructure costs.

Why trust us: We’ve researched, demoed, and tested several leading content management systems, spoken to organizations of all sizes about their online publishing challenges and the features that are most useful to them, and interviewed executives from leading providers in the content management and website developmentspaces.

You can find our product reviews, interviews, and Top 10 shortlists to the best content management systems on the market in our DevOps Hub.

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Know Before You Buy: Our Recommendations

Before we jump into the details, here are our top tips on how to get the most out of your CMS implementation, before you invest in a solution:

• Make sure you know what types of content you’re planning on publishing to your website. Some CMSs are great for general use, while others are designed around specific use cases, such as creating e-commerce storefronts, blogs, or other business-related functions. If you know what content you’re going to be publishing, you can choose a solution that offers features tailored to that specific type of content. 
• Consider the level of complexity you need. There are lots of CMS solutions on the market, including a wide variety of free and basic tools. While these are easier to use, they may be limited in what they allow you to edit. More advanced CMSs, on the other hand, often have a steeper learning curve, but provide more editing options and additional functionality. Knowing what content you want to publish and what editing capabilities you need before you buy will help you compare CMSs more confidently. 
• Future-proof your investment. Look for a CMS that supports your current traffic and content needs, whilst being able to scale to support future growth, without taking you over budget when it comes to things like hosting, licensing, and plugins.

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How Content Management Systems Work

A CMS is a piece of software that’s made up of two main components: a Content Management Application (CMA) and a Content Delivery Application (CDA). 

• The content management application is an underlying backend database that stores information on all the content on your site—including the content itself, the metadata, and so on. This is hidden from your audience, and it’s the place where you go to edit and manage your content. It’s also where your APIs, servers, and operating systems are located.
• The content delivery application is a frontend interface that takes the content in your CMA and displays it to your users, usually via a website or application. In other words, this is where users interact with your content.

Another way to remember this is by imagining that a CMS is a person; the CDA is the head that people talk to, and the CMA is the brain inside the head.

Depending on the solution, you can usually deploy a CMS in the cloud as a SaaS solution or host it locally using your own resources. Once deployed, the CMS handles the backend coding that comes with building a website for you. In other words, you don’t have to write any code such as HTML, CSS, or JavaScript yourself; you can just focus on creating the content itself and deciding how you’d like it presented. 

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The Different Types Of CMS

There are a three main types of CMS: coupled, decoupled, and headless. 

Coupled CMSs

What it is: A coupled CMS combines the CMA and CDA into one system. This makes it really easy for non-technical users to create content and modify how it’ll look once published.

However, while coupled CMSs are great for building website content, that content isn’t always compatible with other applications or devices, such as mobile apps or smart watches. This means that, if you’re planning on publishing content across different types of platforms using a coupled CMS, you’ll likely have to fine-tune each piece of content you publish to make it accessible. 

Who it’s for: Overall, coupled CMSs are best suited to smaller, non-technical teams looking to create a relatively basic, easy-to-manage website.

Decoupled CMSs

What it is: A decoupled CMS separates the CMA and CDA into two different systems, which connect to one another via an API. This means they allow you to deliver your content across different channels, but that added flexibility comes with an added degree of complexity. 

Who it’s for: Overall, decoupled CMSs are best suited to teams that have a developer or two available to configure and manage the platform, who are looking to create a website that they can easily scale. 

Headless CMSs

What it is: A headless CMS doesn’t have a CDA. Instead, users create, edit, and manage content in their CMA, then the CMS publishes that content through API calls to the designated frontend delivery layer (i.e., the interface via which users with interact with the content). This means that you can publish content to any device or platform, including websites, mobile apps, and IoT devices—which in turn makes your content much more accessible to a wider audience. However, it also means you have a little less control over how your content looks once published, and it’s definitely the most complex type of CMS in terms of management. 

Who it’s for: Overall, headless CMSs are best suited to larger teams with multiple developers available to support the CMS, who are looking to deliver content across a wide range of channels.

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Benefits Of Content Management Systems

There are three main benefits to implementing a CMS:

1. Build and manage your website without writing any code.
   • Most CMSs offer “What You See Is What You Get” or “WYSIWYG” editors, which allow you to easily format text, insert media, and build the layout of your webpages visually. The CMS then turns what you’ve created into a webpage for you, without you having to write any code yourself. 
   • You can usually also extend the functionality of your CMS (particularly if using a coupled CMS) with plugins and add-ons, e.g., for adding contact forms or galleries to your site, or optimizing your search performance with SEO tools. This lets you do much more, without having to develop additional features from scratch.
   • All that goes to say, with a CMS, even non-technical users can easily create and publish web content!
2. Save time by making changes en masse, rather than updating elements individually.
   • CMSs user templates and themes to allow you to make certain changes (e.g., updating a header, footer, or style) only once, and then have them reflected across your entire site. 
   • You can use a CMS’s build editing tools to carry out certain editorial actions—like categorizing or tagging—across multiple posts or pages at once. 
   • You can also create reusable components that you can implement across different pages. These will usually be described as content blocks or widgets. 
3. Improve collaboration and security across your team. 
   • CMSs typically track revisions and edits to your content, which allows you to roll back changes and see who made certain updates.  
   • Most CMSs allow you to implement role-based access controls, which mean you can assign different permissions to team members (e.g., admins, editors, and contributors) based on what they need to access. This not only limits unauthorized access, but it improves collaboration by enabling members to carry out all the tasks they need to without having to request permission each time. 
   • You can also implement additional security plugins for most CMSs, e.g. for two-factor authentication and automatic backups. 
4. Gain a better understanding of how visitors are using your website. 
   • Most CMSs offer built-in reporting features that track user behavior, pageviews, and bounce rates. If you need more detailed insights, it’s also usually very straightforward to connect analytics tools such as Google Analytics or Semrush to a CMS. 
   • You can then use this information to optimize your content based on visitor interactions.

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Common CMS Challenges

There are a few common challenges that you might come across when implementing a content management system. Here’s what they are and how to overcome them:

1. If you choose the wrong type of CMS, you may find it doesn’t support your content needs, or it’s too complex for your team to manage. To avoid this, before you start comparing providers, you need a good understanding of what kind of website you’re trying to build. Generally, if you’re looking to create a simple blog or website with static content, you’ll benefit most from a user-friendly, coupled CMS. If you need to deliver content across multiple different channels or your web content is going to be very dynamic, you’ll be better off with a decoupled or headless CMS.  
2. All CMSs will have some design limitations. At the end of the day, the only way to truly guarantee that a site will be built exactly as you’d envisioned is to build it yourself from the ground up—but that can be both complicated and expensive. If having a flexible design is a high priority, consider implementing a headless CMS. 
3. You need to regularly update your CMS to ensure ongoing stability and, as plugins receive updates, you may find that they develop compatibility issues. To keep your website safe, it’s important that you keep on top of rolling out any security patches released by your CMS vendor. To minimize downtime caused by faulty or incompatible updates, you may wish to roll out patches outside of your company’s usual working hours.

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Best CMS Providers

Our team of software analysts and researchers have put together a shortlist of the best providers of content management systems, as well as adjacent lists covering similar topics:

• The Top 11 Content Management Systems (CMS)
• The Top 10 Headless Content Management Systems (CMS)
• The Top 10 Low Code Web Development Platforms
• The Top 10 Landing Page Building Solutions
• The Top 10 Cookie Consent Software

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Features Checklist

When comparing CMS solutions, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:

1. User-friendly interface: You should be able to create and edit content easily via a WYSIWYG editor, a drag-and-drop interface, and/or block-based editing tools. 
2. Multimedia support: You should be able to easily upload or embed images, videos, and audio files into your content. 
3. Site preview: You should be able to preview what any new content or content updates will look like on your live site before you publish it. If your solution has a live editor, then you may even be able to view changes in real-time. 
4. SEO and analytics integration: Your CMS should offer a range of tools (either built-in or via APIs or plug-ins) to help you optimize your content, meta tags, URLs, etc. to improve search engine performance. You should also be able to integrate the CMS with website analytics tools or marketing platforms to help you monitor your site’s performance over time. 
5. Customization and extensibility: You should be able to extend the functionality of your CMS with themes, plug-ins, APIs (e.g., REST, GraphQL), and even custom code to tailor it to your team’s needs. 
6. Collaboration features: Your CMS should offer a range of features to help improve collaboration across your content team, such as permissions management, change tracking or version controls, workflow management, and commenting. 
7. Content scheduling: You should be able to publish content on-demand, or schedule it for future publication. 
8. Multi-platform support: Your CMS should deliver content seamlessly to your audience, whether they’re using desktop or mobile devices. 
9. Built-in security: Your CMS should offer native security features to help protect your content and website against unauthorized access and changes. As a minimum, these should include role-based access controls, encryption, audit logs, and the automatic roll-out of updates released by your CMS provider.
10. Content translation or localization: If you’re publishing content for a global audience, you may want to look for a solution that offers the ability to translate your content into multiple languages. 

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Further Reading

You can find all our articles on content management in our DevOps Hub.

Want to jump right in? Here are a few articles we think you’ll enjoy: 

• Shortlist: The Top 11 Content Management Systems (CMS)
• Blog: DDoS Protection: A Deep Dive into Securing Your Website from Costly Cyber Attacks
• Interview: How To Protect Your Digital Content And Applications

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