In an age where content is playing a key role in the scalability and management of one’s presence online, succeeding in your business journey is almost impossible without a reliable Content Management System (‘CMS’). Back in the early 2000s, there were not many productised CMS systems available on the market, with the more profound one’s costing thousands of U.S dollars. Considering the recent growth in size and accessibility of relevant software markets, not finding a CMS that will allow you to elevate your idea and become a key influence is rare. However, highlighting the bet system that will cater for your specific needs and budget can be a challenge. In this analysis, we will be highlighting the most disruptive systems that are growing and changing relative markets in 2020. With allot of self-hosted CMSs, that where heavily based in PHP and MySQL, taking the lead for the previous decade, the more user friendly and non-tech-savvy interfaces are now in high demand. 1. Shopify Shopify is quickly catching up to Wordpress and is becoming a major contender and disrupter in retail and software markets. In a survey carried out by W3Techs, Shopify has been seeing an overall growth in usage and market share and is reporting a consistent growth rate. Shopify is enabling users to host their website on Shopify’s own servers and is being considered as an all-in-one e-commerce solution Business owners and users of different sizes can use the platform to design, set up, and manage their stores across multiple sales channels, including web, mobile, social media, marketplaces, brick-and-mortar locations, and pop-up shops. Like WordPress, you can also install different themes and build a website using text, images and video. Shopify is a self-hosted CMS that currently provides merchants with a full e-commerce solution with powerful back-office and a single view of their business. Shopify has been disrupting the market ever since their initial entry in 2004, and its success has been something one simply can’t ignore when looking at intuitive CMSs. Shopify is used by 3.5% of all the websites whose content management system we know of. This is 2.0% of all websites. According to a recent market analysis, Shopify is outranking Wordpress, Squarespace, Joomla and other content management systems in terms of popularity and traffic. 2. Squarespace Squarespace is a hosted web publishing platform originally developed by Anthony Casalena round the same time of Wordpress. Much like Shopify, Sqaurespace is not open-source. Instead it is an integrated website builder and blogging platform with a highly intuitive e-commerce component. Sqauarespace is perhaps the biggest competition opposing Shopify due to the obvious similarities in the systems. This CMS is also subscription based that grants the user their own domain, unlimited bandwidth and storage, SSL security, Zapier (an automation tool), and Google AdWords credit. Square has been a manager disrupter in multiple commerce and payment markets. Squarespace’s website is currently ranked number 462 of all websites according to Alexa. If it wasn't for Square’s disruptive nature in payment systems, they would be finding themselves much lower on this list. 3. Krepling Krepling is a centralised e-business platform that enables the user to run any type of online business without any constraints. Krepling disrupted the relative software industries upon market entry by creating new value amongst business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs through a more user-friendly open source platform without limitations in terms of scalability and creativity whilst also providing the retail industry with a lower cost version of other premium CMS products like Shopify. Krepling puts an integrated website builder, email and domain management system under one roof, alongside a powerful and intuitive hosting interface, coupled with an e-commerce component, these are components that none of the other CMSs on this list have been able to put together whilst still catering for the non-tech-savvy audience. This is opening the doors to what entrepreneurs are calling ‘open commerce’. Krepling is providing millennials and college students with very little capital with an opportunity to get a business up and running whilst still catering for the larger enterprises. As a newcomer Krepling have been able to harness current trends and expertise to lead a disruption change in relative markets. Large organisations like Wordpress and Sqaure are always vulnerable to disruption due to favouring repetition of what works over innovating. Krepling is automatically becoming more popular as it has relentlessly gone to seek out a market fit by providing a more centralised CMS for the less tech-savvy audiences whilst still providing premium grade elements such as custom domains and unlimited bandwidth for their users' sites. 4. Wordpress If there is one CMS that most people, tech savvy or not, have most certainly heard of, it’s WordPress. Launched in 2003, WordPress has most certainly reigned supreme for some years. It is the most popular content management system in the world and powers 35.2% of all websites on the Internet. The platform is based largely on PHP and MySQL, and it provides users with the tools to create a feature-rich website or blog using written content, videos, images and more. However, WordPress as a global CMS has been relatively undisruptive and has seen very little innovation over recent years. The same cannot be said about it’s sub categories and plugins. WooCommerce alone is used by 16.3% of all the websites who use WordPress according to W3Techs and is a key player in the e-commerce industry. If we are looking at the best CMSs of 2020, WordPress would outrank all of the above, but when it comes to growth, innovation and nature to lead change, WordPress is not realising the same innovative trends as the other 3 systems above it. Millennials are opting for more user-friendly platforms and are expecting certain components to be much more intuitive than before, such as domain management and website building, which unfortunately for WordPress users, requires the activation of third-party components and plugins. 5. Magnolia The java-based Magnolia is a very targeted CMS geared specifically towards companies in need of websites that can perform a variety of different functions. Its system integrates e-commerce, marketing automation, social media, analytics, CRM and ERP under one interface. Magnolia encourages its user base to continuously add these functions as your business develops, making it a hub for online scalability. Magnolia is without question a major disrupter in the CMS industry, acting a multi award-winning, fast and flexible CMS that powers the digital presence of large enterprises. Magnolia’s flexibility gives its users the ability to host in the cloud or on premises, used in headed or headless architectures. The Magnolia CMS is currently the only headless content management solution and the company is currently focused on empowering users on a global scale to create compelling omnichannel experiences. The platform's flexible architecture, open standards and rich set of integration points allow the user to employ their own microservices aimed purely at delivering customer experiences with a headless approach that is fully server-rendered. 6. Wix Wix is a completely cloud based component that allows the user to create HTML5, which are optimised for mobile, with minimal developer knowledge. The CMS's drag-and-drop website builder is one of the most powerful in the CMS industry, outranking even that of Shopify and Wordpress in terms of simplicity. Wix are also moving towards the more "open-source" and "e-business" field through the offering of email marketing and e-commerce, and are the only other CMS on this list, besides Krepling, to offer it's own complete email element, completely housed and accessible on the CMS itself. A common element amongst allot of CMS platforms in the new age is the headache that is advertisements, and Wix, much like many other CMSs on this list, are no exception. Their premium plans give the user the ability to remove in-site advertisements, use your own custom domain, and increase your bandwidth. In February of 2019, Wix disrupted elements of the CMS industry through the induction of "Wix Turbo", which is an element that allows the user to notably increase their website speeds. Wix plans start at around $4.50 a month, that allow you to benefit from uncapped bandwidth with 20GB of storage. 7. Bynder CMSs always come in handy when it comes to working across different teams. Bynder is one of, if not the most, successful CMS that is completely marketing orientated. The platform enables brands to create and use content across teams with ease. It provides the company with a wide range of different workflows to enable brand managers and content designers approve and regulate new marketing content. The platform is also equipped with the ability to create a style guide in order to assist the company in maintaining a certain brand image and style that is consistent throughout all it's marketing content. While there is certainly no other CMS like Bynder, it most certainly comes at a price. Although it comes with a free trial, you are required to contact the company for an exact pricing and you are expected to at least pay $430 a month, and the prices can reach the thousands. Conclusion Content management is playing a key role in today's economy, which is now hugely information-based. Content will always reign supreme, and will constantly be generated regardless of any economic conditions. Once was an era where most web applications where built purely on developing code that was executed entirely on the server and output into HTML. This type of scripting language (PHP) powered Wordpress, Magento, Joomla and many other platforms. Today's tech is working in a much different manner. Instead just grouping together the end-user code with the back-end function, modern and more sleek frameworks just request data from a location that is centralised and then work to parse and display that specific data. Most of the time, this process happens via an API, or a system to transmit and share data from one system to another. The benefits of this new found architecture are going to be felt way into the future, and are apparent with the new leaders like Shopify and are going to be felt with major contenders like Krepling and Magnolia.
