These alternatives to WordPress are all stand alone content management systems. That means, like self-hosted WordPress, you’ll need to install them on your own hosting to use them for your site.
Joomla
After WordPress, Joomla is the second most popular content management system in use. While it does have a healthy hold on second place, it’s nowhere near the popularity of WordPress – WordPress has ~60% market share, while Joomla has 6.7%.
Joomla is a core software that you can extend with templates and extensions. The third-party extension community isn’t as large as WordPress, but you can find many overlapping tools. Joomla has its own page builders.
In the past, people do say, Joomla was more for static websites and WordPress was more for blogs. Obviously, that’s changed as WordPress has developed into a full-service content management system, but some of those biases still remain.
With that being said, Joomla still has some advantages like:
It’s multilingual out of the box. While there are plenty of WordPress translation plugins, they aren’t baked into the WordPress core.More flexible widget system. Joomla’s modules can be assigned to individual pages or menu items out of the box.Access Level Management. Joomla’s user permission management system is more robust than WordPress’.
For these, and other reasons, some people say Joomla is more “enterprise ready” than WordPress. At least out of the box.
With that being said, while Joomla has improved its usability, most people still find it less beginner-friendly than WordPress. And, while the third-party extension marketplace is well-developed, you still won’t find anywhere near as many options as WordPress.
Price: Free
Drupal
After Joomla, Drupal is the next most popular content management system with 4.7% market share.
It is not nearly as beginner friendly. While Drupal does offer modules and themes to extend its looks and functionality, beginners will struggle to create detailed sites with Drupal, at least in comparison to WordPress.
With that being said, that complexity leads to some advantages:
It's better at handling huge amounts of data, which makes it more suited for many enterprise websites.Drupal’s Views module lets you display different types of content in a more flexible manner than WordPress does.Like Joomla, Drupal gives you more control over user access and permissions.
Unless you’re a developer who already knows why Drupal is the right choice over WordPress, you’re probably better off sticking to WordPress.
Price: Free
Ghost
This is a lightweight content management system built specifically for blogging and publishing. It’s not anywhere near as flexible as WordPress – but it’s also not trying to be.
If you’re exclusively looking to blog and are willing to forgo WordPress’ large plugin marketplace, Ghost provides a lightweight foundation that’s built on the latest technologies.
While you can install Ghost on your own server, Ghost also offers a hosted version that you can pay for if you’d rather outsource setup and maintenance to someone else.
You can also find plenty of Ghost themes to change how your site looks.
Price: Free open source software or paid hosted plan
Craft CMS
Craft CMS is a less well-known content management system used by some big brands like Netflix and Salesforce.
It’s a much more developer-focused content management system because it doesn’t provide front-end themes. Instead, Craft CMS exclusively provides the backend for your site. Then, you can use Craft CMS’ templating system (powered by Twig) to design the front-end of your site.
Out of the box, Craft CMS is more flexible than WordPress for defining content types. Instead of predefining content, like a WordPress post or page, Craft CMS puts you in charge of setting up your content types using 18 different types of fields.
While Craft CMS isn’t really accessible to non-developers, I’ve spoken with multiple developers who’ve raved about it. So if you’re a developer, definitely give it a look.
Price: Free for personal projects. Client projects start at $199.
Pulse CMS
Pulse CMS has one major difference right from the start:
It’s a flat content management system. That means it doesn’t use a database.
Instead, you use Pulse CMS to define editable blocks inside an otherwise static website. Then, users can edit those blocks through the Pulse CMS web interface.
That means, if you’re a developer, you can build a static website and easily add backend content editing for your clients using Pulse CMS.
It’s a niche use – but definitely a unique alternative to WordPress.
Price: $297 for unlimited use
Grav
Grav is another flat-file content management system. Again, that means it doesn’t use a database.
Interestingly, Grav is developed by RocketTheme, a Joomla template and WordPress theme shop.
One advantage of Grav is that you can easily define custom fields for any of your content. And you can also use unlimited taxonomies to manage content.
Like Pulse CMS and Craft CMS, Grav is more suited for developers than casual users.
Price: Free
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