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  5. Craft CMS vs Wagtail

Craft CMS vs Wagtail

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Wagtail
Wagtail
Stacks163
Followers288
Votes132
Craft CMS
Craft CMS
Stacks104
Followers114
Votes5

Craft CMS vs Wagtail: What are the differences?

# Introduction

Craft CMS and Wagtail are both popular content management systems (CMS) that offer powerful features for building websites. While they share some similarities, there are key differences that set them apart. Below are the main differences between Craft CMS and Wagtail.

1. **Architecture**: Craft CMS follows a traditional MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture, making it more familiar to developers who are experienced with this pattern. On the other hand, Wagtail is built on Django, a high-level Python web framework that follows a different architectural pattern, resulting in a different development experience.

2. **Flexibility**: Craft CMS is known for its flexibility, allowing developers to create custom content structures easily. Wagtail, on the other hand, offers a more structured approach to content modeling, which can be beneficial for maintaining consistency across a website.

3. **User Interface**: Craft CMS provides a clean and intuitive user interface that is beginner-friendly, making it easier for non-technical users to manage content. In comparison, Wagtail's admin interface offers more advanced features, targeting users with more technical knowledge.

4. **Community Support**: Craft CMS has a smaller but dedicated community of developers who actively contribute plugins and extensions to the ecosystem. Wagtail, being built on Django, benefits from the larger Django community, providing a wider range of resources and support.

5. **Licensing**: Craft CMS follows a paid licensing model, where users need to purchase a license for each website they build. Wagtail, being open-source, is free to use, making it more accessible for smaller projects or budgets.

6. **Performance**: Craft CMS is known for its performance optimization capabilities, allowing developers to fine-tune websites for speed and efficiency. Wagtail, although capable of good performance, may require additional configuration for optimal speed in certain scenarios.

In Summary, Craft CMS and Wagtail differ in architecture, flexibility, user interface, community support, licensing, and performance, catering to different preferences and requirements of website developers and users.

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Detailed Comparison

Wagtail
Wagtail
Craft CMS
Craft CMS

Wagtail is a Django content management system built originally for the Royal College of Art and focused on flexibility and user experience.

It is a flexible, user-friendly CMS for creating custom digital experiences on the web and beyond. It is a WordPress alternative for development-oriented publishers who want deeper control and more powerful performance from their content management tools. It is built to be exceptionably scalable, and offers native features for complex content management relationships.

A fast, attractive editor interface;Complete control over design with standard Django templates;Configure content types through standard Django models;Tightly integrated search (with an Elasticsearch backend for production);Strong document and image management;Wide support for embedded content;Simple, configurable permissions;Support for tree-based content organisation;Optional preview->submit->approve workflow;Fast out of the box. Varnish-friendly if you need it;A simple form builder;Optional static site generation;Excellent test coverage
Robust support and SLAs ; Fully custom content modeling; Powerful templating; Built-in localization
Statistics
Stacks
163
Stacks
104
Followers
288
Followers
114
Votes
132
Votes
5
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 23
    Highly customizable
  • 18
    StreamFields are amazing
  • 18
    Very Flexible
  • 15
    Web content management
  • 13
    Non-tech colleagues can update website content
Cons
  • 3
    Not a full CMS: basic components require heavy coding
  • 2
    Small developer community
  • 1
    Expensive to develop
Pros
  • 1
    Easy to use
  • 1
    Extensible
  • 1
    Secure
  • 1
    Graphql
  • 1
    Headless
Integrations
No integrations available
Mailchimp
Mailchimp
Xero
Xero

What are some alternatives to Wagtail, Craft CMS?

WordPress

WordPress

The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.

Drupal

Drupal

Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.

Strapi

Strapi

Strapi is100% JavaScript, extensible, and fully customizable. It enables developers to build projects faster by providing a customizable API out of the box and giving them the freedom to use the their favorite tools.

Ghost

Ghost

Ghost is a platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing. It's beautifully designed, completely customisable and completely Open Source. Ghost allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do.

OctoberCMS

OctoberCMS

It is a Laravel-based CMS engineered for simplicity. It has a simple and intuitive interface. It provides a consistent structure with an emphasis on reusability so you can focus on building something unique while we handle the boring bits.

Twill

Twill

Twill is an open source CMS toolkit for Laravel that helps developers rapidly create a custom admin console that is intuitive, powerful and flexible.

ProcessWire

ProcessWire

ProcessWire is an open source content management system (CMS) and web application framework aimed at the needs of designers, developers and their clients. ProcessWire gives you more control over your fields, templates and markup than other platforms, and provides a powerful template system that works the way you do

Typo3

Typo3

It is a free and open-source Web content management system written in PHP. It can run on several web servers, such as Apache or IIS, on top of many operating systems, among them Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, macOS and OS/2.

Directus

Directus

Let's say you're planning on managing content for a website, native app, and widget. Instead of using a CMS that's baked into the website client, it makes more sense to decouple your content entirely and access it through an API or SDK. That's a headless CMS. That's Directus.

Joomla!

Joomla!

Joomla is a simple and powerful web server application and it requires a server with PHP and either MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server to run it.

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