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CMS & Content

Open Source CMS

Open-Source CMS

Portrait of Lukas Horvath, co-founder of Roelu Studio
Lukas HorvathCo-founder

What is Open Source CMS?

An open source CMS is a content management system whose source code is publicly available under a license that lets anyone use, modify, and self-host it. Examples include WordPress, Drupal, Ghost, Strapi, and Payload. The CMS itself is free, though hosting, plugins, themes, and developer time often are not. Open source CMS platforms power a large share of the web — WordPress alone runs over 40% of sites.

Why it matters

Open source sounds like freedom and often delivers the opposite. WordPress is free, then you pay for hosting, a premium theme, fifteen plugins, an SEO subscription, a security plugin, a caching plugin, and a developer to keep them from fighting each other. The bill quietly matches a SaaS CMS while the experience is worse. Open source is worth it when the team has the engineering muscle to own the stack and a specific reason to avoid hosted platforms — data residency, custom integrations, regulatory constraints. For most scale-ups, a modern hosted CMS like Sanity gives you the ownership benefits without the plugin tax.

How it works

You download the CMS source code or install it from a package manager. You host it yourself — on Vercel, AWS, DigitalOcean, or a managed host like WP Engine. You configure the database, install plugins or modules for the features you need (SEO, forms, caching, image optimization), and pick or build a theme. Updates are your responsibility, including security patches. Some open source CMSes (WordPress, Drupal) are full-stack — they manage both editing and rendering. Others (Strapi, Payload, Directus) are headless, so you bring your own front-end. Either way, you own the code and the data, and you own the maintenance.

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