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What is Craft CMS?

A content management system built for teams who want full control over how their site works — not a template you bend to fit.

Craft CMS in plain terms

Craft CMS is a self-hosted, developer-first content management system. Instead of giving you a fixed structure and asking you to work around it, Craft hands you a blank slate and lets you model content exactly the way your business thinks about it.

That's the whole idea. A blog gets a blog structure. A product gets a product structure. A case study, an event, a location, a team member — each becomes its own content type with its own fields, instead of everything being forced into one generic "post."

The result is a CMS that mirrors your business, an editing experience your team actually understands, and a front end your developers can build any way they want.

A CMS with a track record

Craft is made by Pixel & Tonic and has been around since 2013 — long enough to be proven, stable, and trusted by serious teams worldwide. It's not a side project or a trend.

The current major version is Craft 5, a long-term support release with two years of active support and an additional year of security fixes. The next generation, Craft 6, has been fully ported to the Laravel framework and is scheduled for release in Q4 2026. End of Life Date + 2

Under the hood, Craft is a self-hosted PHP application that runs on MySQL or PostgreSQL, with a Twig-based templating system, an auto-generated GraphQL API, a built-in ecommerce platform, and a Plugin Store with hundreds of free and commercial plugins. Powerful where it counts, lean everywhere else.

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What Craft CMS is built to do

Craft isn't a one-size-fits-all tool. It's built around a few things it does exceptionally well.

Custom content modeling
Your own fields and entry types. The CMS fits your content, not the reverse.
Multi-site & multi-language
One install, many domains and languages, one control panel.
Headless or traditional
GraphQL for any framework, or Twig out of the box. Your call.
Built for both sides
Clean API for developers, intuitive panel for editors.

What makes Craft different

The differences you don't see on day one — but feel by year three.

  • Config lives in code

    Project Config tracks your site's structure in Git. Changes move dev → live cleanly, no rebuilding by hand.

  • You own everything

    Self-hosted, on your own servers and database. No platform holding your content hostage.

  • Live Preview

    Editors see edits in the real design as they type. No "save and check."

  • Upgrades that don't bite

    A predictable release cycle. New versions won't break your site or force a rebuild.

  • A real plugin ecosystem

    Hundreds of vetted plugins in the Store. Extend without bloating the core.

Proof is in the pudding

Who uses Craft CMS

Craft attracts teams serious about what they build.

  • Editorial platforms publishing daily
  • SaaS marketing sites teams can run themselves
  • Ecommerce brands that outgrew off-the-shelf tools
  • Multi-brand, multilingual organisations
  • Agencies needing a flexible foundation

From Fortune 500 to independent publishers — where structure and control matter.

FAQ

  • What is Craft used for?

    Content-heavy sites with complex structures — editorial, SaaS, ecommerce, multilingual. Less so for simple blogs.

  • Is Craft free?

    Free Solo edition for single users; paid Team and Pro for bigger teams.

  • How is it different from WordPress?

    Cleaner, more flexible, easier long-term. Models content around your business.

  • Good for SEO?

    Yes — full control over markup, metadata, URLs, and speed.

  • Does it work headlessly?

    Yes — GraphQL for any framework, or Twig.

Thinking about building on Craft CMS?

We help teams choose, build, and migrate to Craft. Let's talk.