CMS Comparison: the best Content Management Systems

What are Content Management Systems (CMS)?

Content Management Systems (CMS) are digital platforms and software kits that provide a user-friendly interface for creating and managing web content. They offer a variety of tools that allow users without extensive programming knowledge to create, edit, and publish content. Unlike traditional static websites that use fixed HTML code, CMS enables the separation of design templates and content. CMS are widely used in today's digital landscape because they offer an efficient and user-friendly way to create and maintain a professional web presence. Some CMSs have a significant market share due to their flexibility and the broad community that continually contributes to the development of security updates, design templates, and plugins.

What are Content Management Systems used for?

Websites only achieve truly exceptional impact through their content and its perfect alignment. This includes texts, images, graphics, videos, and audio, which ideally provide viewers with real added value, ultimately convincing them of the entire brand. They also have a positive effect on the ranking of the major search engines. Such content must not only be created but also sufficiently managed, played out and updated. The larger the website and the tasks to be accomplished, the more content management can become a real mammoth task. Managing this efficiently today is hardly possible in smaller businesses without suitable content management software or a content management system (CMS). Since modern CMS can usually do much more than just support website operators in organizing content.

Advantages and Features of Content Management Systems:

• They allow editing and publishing text, images, audio, video, and other content on a web presence without significant technical skills.

• Content Management Systems offer templates for creating content and respective editors.

• They allow users to assign particular permissions when deploying and editing content.

• They offer extension options and interfaces to other programs.

• They often enable the alteration of a website's layout and design and form the basis for the entire construct.

• They allow efficient collaboration and approval in the creation and publication of content.

• They enable a flexible and personalized user experience.

• CMS's editing systems allow multiple users to create and edit content, with user rights and accesses precisely configurable.

• For beginners and less technically savvy users, CMS offer easy handling. These hosted solutions are typically chargeable but offer comprehensive support and web hosting in one package. They are ideal for users who want to create a professional web presence without much effort.

What exactly are Content Management Systems and what types are there?

Content Management Systems, or CMS for short, are software solutions which are primarily intended to help web presence operators manage, create and ultimately deploy content to be published. Here the focus is on texts, images, videos, and audio, but web applications or other more complex formats can also be organized. In addition to online CMS, there are also those for offline content, which for example are used in intranet networks or in the context of print media. However, in the latter case, they are more often referred to as file management software. Specific open-source programs are widely used among content management systems. These are suitable for both professional and private users. Users here have the opportunity to make adjustments or improvements for their purposes and general extensions relatively easily. They can quickly adapt the respective system to their individual requirements. There are no licensing costs involved. Alternatively, there is proprietary software, developed by a specific company for a specific corporate context or field of application, and usually distributed as a commercial product. Such proprietary content management systems are virtually always associated with the purchase of a license. They cannot or may not be changed by the users without further ado.

CMS solutions are generally highly scalable, offer complexity and can be used from simple blogs to complex web projects. They are extendable and allow third-party plug-ins or modules to provide additional functionalities. This adaptability is particularly attractive for website operators who want to see their site grow and want to expand accordingly without having to reprogram the base of their website. Although CMS offers a user-friendly interface, beneath it lies a complex structure of source code written in various programming languages. Advanced users and developers can dig deeper into the code to make specific adjustments or write new features. However, this requires a thorough understanding of web development and the respective programming languages.

Whether open-source software or proprietary program - specialized content management systems or modules for individual application areas can be found in all areas of the digital economy. The main ones here being.

Content Management Systems for websites

The focus of content management software for websites is on managing and creating content for the World Wide Web and in particular corporate websites. Such programs are also used privately. In a commercial context, it is usually necessary for several employees to be able to access the backend and its features, and to enable organization – especially in terms of rights. Today, most websites are entirely based on such systems. This means that not only texts, images, and Co. are managed through them - the design, layout and all other important parts of a website are also brought together or can be organized via the CMS.

Content Management Systems for blogs

There are special Content Management Systems for blogs and their content. Often such programs can also be used for more complex websites. The focus is – of course – on the provision and editing of content, but also a sensible linking and categorization of this in terms of the blog goals and the easy coupling with social media or other Web 2.0 functions. They also offer specific features for interacting with the blog readers.

Content Management Systems for Social Media

Social media or other online communities, like forums, require more effort in managing content than blogs. This is already the case because there is generally a much larger group of users to manage and interact with. Consequently, the corresponding content management systems have a larger range of functions than blog programs. They have to be able to respond to an increasingly active group of users, rather than a predominantly passive reader base. It is necessary that their own content can be managed ideally. The content of followers, fans, or members - so-called user-generated content - primarily reactions to their own company activities, should also be organized optimally. There is a lot of potential here for companies.

What key benefits does a CMS provide?

Without content management systems, nothing works in modern online marketing! They not only form the center of active content marketing, but also SEO, lead management, in special cases the measures around online advertisements, e-mail marketing, and social media marketing, influencer marketing, affiliate marketing and further disciplines. Their use generally does not require any programming skills or other advanced technical skills. With drag-and-drop functions, rights assignments, monitoring tools and other helpers, and their - in the case of open-source software - generally high adaptability, they ideally lead to a strong economization of all digital marketing. Content Management Systems can make a significant contribution to achieving a variety of central goals in online marketing. They are heavily involved in setting up web presences, increasing web traffic to them, and of course in designing and managing digital content. CMS can be used specifically to boost impact within a company's marketing efforts. This is done, for example, in the course of creating special landing pages for certain marketing campaigns, steering them, and last but not least, achieving long-term monitoring of these.

Administrators can also automate the publication of content and connect the content management tool with other software - including an e-mail marketing solution - to operate even more efficiently and effectively. Content Management Systems also ideally already have good SEO properties out of the box or provide possibilities to align content in a search engine-friendly way. Coupled with specialized plug-ins, they offer functions that can enormously assist in significantly improving the ranking of each managed page. Often there are specific social media plug-ins that bring the web and social web closer together and make activities in individual channels benefit from each other. Websites or blogs managed by a content management system can, among other things, automatically generate RSS feeds, which not only provide for a larger content cohesion but also increase the number of subscribers and readers of a website. Furthermore, extensions can of course also integrate social media buttons on websites. The editors for the content, implementation structures for plug-ins, and other typical operations in content management systems are also usually kept simple, so that really no extensive technical knowledge is needed to operate such software. In addition, experienced users can also tackle very specific, highly complex tasks with an open-source CMS.

Typical Functions of Content Management Software

Content Management Tools can vary greatly, but at their core, they all have roughly the same basic functions. You can expect the following features in most, if not all, CMS.

• Content Authoring: Writing and publishing content is intuitive.

• Rich Text Editors: Formatting of content is straightforward and effortless.

• Versioning Control: Users keep track of the gradually changing versions of the same content.

• Plug-ins/Widgets/Apps: Available gadgets and modules can be applied as needed to the respective web presence and are easily integrated.

• Approvals: It's easy to set up specific approval processes between authors and editors.

• Content Queues: CMS make it easy to schedule the publication of content and then publish it at a specific time and in a specific order.

• Asset Management: Appropriate systems enable the storage and management of rich media files.

• Internal Search: Content can be categorized and found quickly based on keywords, metadata, tags, etc.

• Content Repository: Content - both published and yet to be published - can be intuitively managed, edited, tagged, shared, and saved.

Other features of content management systems include:

• Pre-Made Templates: The software offers a certain range of free or purchasable site templates that can be tailored to the requirements of the respective web presence.

• Mobile Templates: The same applies to mobile templates.

• Branding Themes: Consistent design elements in pre-made themes make the web presence a coherent and potentially very effective online appearance.

• General Customization: Besides and within templates or themes, the visual appearance of websites can be relatively easily adjusted to the needs of CMS users and ultimately the respective target group.

• Community: Some content management systems have a large community that can help with problems among other things.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): CMS enable the search engine friendly setting of metadata and other SEO important factors or even automate this. They help optimize their content for search engines and thus achieve better visibility. This includes e.g. also the performance and loading times of a page.

• Flexible Navigation Structures: The users of CMS can use the programs to group pages and their content into menus, which are then available to end users in the frontend.

• Multilingual: Some CMSs have special features for organizing multilingual content and websites.

• Dashboards and Reports: Monitoring functions allow continuous control of internal users and the general performance of the respective web presence.

• Application Programming Interface (API)/Integrations: APIs provide the opportunity to use other software in collaboration with a CMS and to operate more comprehensively.

• E-Commerce: Some CMS are specifically designed for e-commerce websites and provide integrated shopping systems with connections to various payment and shipping service providers.

• Security and Backups: Regular security updates are crucial in ensuring the security of a website and avoiding security vulnerabilities. Many CMS allow automatic backups to prevent data loss and enable quick recovery in case of emergency.

Overall, Content Management Systems provide a robust and flexible platform for beginners to advanced developers to realize web-based projects. Their scalability, combined with the ability to customize and extend, makes them an indispensable tool in the world of web design and content management.

What is important when comparing CMSs?

When comparing Content Management Systems (CMS), there are various aspects to consider, which can vary depending on the field of application, individual needs, and goals. For businesses, the following are important

• Technical Requirements: It is important to first determine what requirements the CMS has to fulfill for your own website. This includes aspects such as scalability, security, and whether the CMS supports certain technologies that are necessary for implementing the web project.

• Editing Options: A CMS should offer intuitive editing options for creating and managing content, like creating new pages, editing existing content, and uploading media.

• Support of Different Domains: If it is planned to control different country-domains via the content management tool, care should be taken that the CMS supports multi-domain handling natively.

• User-Friendliness: Especially for inexperienced users, operating a CMS can be challenging. There should be a balance between functionality and user-friendliness.

• Popularity & Community: Positive reviews of a CMS can be an indicator of a large user base and an active community, which can be helpful in case of problems and for finding expansions.

These key factors for selecting the CMS should be thoroughly examined before implementing the CMS. This helps to compare CMS systems based on these factors. The choice of a Content Management System can be a process lasting several weeks to months, in which all stakeholders are involved.