Every open-source content management systems (cms) project we track, scored on maintenance, momentum and licence — so you can tell the live competitors from the abandoned repositories.
Content Management Systems (CMS) has 44 open-source implementations in this dataset, of which 29 show real momentum and 1 are dormant or abandoned. The leader is Strapi with 73k stars against a category median of 1.3k — roughly 56x the typical project. Saturation score 75/100: Crowded. Free, maintained alternatives already dominate this category.
Assume every prospect can find a free version in five minutes. Your wedge has to be something open source structurally cannot deliver: compliance, support SLAs, managed hosting at scale, or a workflow the maintainers refuse to build.
The practical test in this category: Strapi is the reference implementation at 73k stars, and 29 of 44 projects are still shipping. A buyer evaluating you will find at least one maintained free option, so your pricing and positioning have to answer "why not self-host Strapi?" in the first minute.
Alternative to Contentful, Content Management System/ CMS
The most advanced open-source Content Management Framework (headless-CMS) to build powerful API with no effort.
Alternative to Content Management System/ CMS
Developer-first headless CMS and application framework.
Alternative to Web CMS and Blog Engines
World's most-used blogging and CMS engine.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Django content management system focused on flexibility and user experience.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
CMS platform based on the Laravel PHP Framework.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
CMS and web application platform.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
The friendly CMS. Free and open source with an amazing community.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Advanced Content Management System (CMS).
Content Management Systems (CMS)
CMS with a focus on extensible in-context editing tools.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Multi-channel experience and engagement management platform.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Content-first CMS that aims to make life enjoyable for developers and content managers alike.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Headless CMS, based on MongoDB, CQRS and Event Sourcing.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Simple but full featured web publishing software.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
File-based CMS. Easy to setup. Easy to use. Flexible as hell.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Speedy and secure content management system built on the Laravel PHP framework.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Build a site or blog in seconds. Bludit uses flat-files (text files in JSON format) to store posts and pages.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Advanced content management and publishing platform. The current version is called 'Revolution'.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Online lab notebook for research labs. Store experiments, use a database to find reagents or protocols, use trusted timestamping to legally timestamp an experiment, export as pdf or zip archive, share
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Powerful and advanced CMS with a large community.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Powerful and easy to use CMS to build websites, blogs or e-commerce stores.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Comprehensive CMS for small to medium sized businesses and non-profits.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Flat-file content management system and template engine.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Flexible, elegant and easy-to-use CMS.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Open source content management system.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
End-to-end news creation, production, curation, distribution, and publishing platform.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Simple content platform to manage any structured content.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
WonderCMS is the smallest flat file CMS since 2008.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Author-friendly flat-file-cms with a visual markdown editor based on vue.js.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Content Management Tool, which strives to be as simple and straightforward as possible.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Create complex narratives and share rich collections, adhering to Dublin Core standards with Omeka on your server, designed for scholars, museums, libraries, archives, and enthusiasts.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Content Management System for powering database driven websites using JSON schemas. Provides permission management and automatic REST APIs.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Powerful CMS that allows you to create professional websites and scalable web applications.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
CMS for designers.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Simple, flexible and useful content management system (documentation in German).
Content Management Systems (CMS)
The open source Enterprise Content Management software that handles any type of content, allowing users to easily share and collaborate on content.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Powerful translation management and content management system. Manage and translate your website or app content into multiple languages, using AI to translate faster.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Platform for social and solidarity economy networks with blog, e-Portfolios, CMS, RSS, thematic discussion, events agenda and collective intelligence for solidarity economy in the same system.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Faster and easier management of website contents, scalable for small businesses to large corporations.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Advanced open source content management platform.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Neos or TYPO3 Neos (for version 1) is a modern, open source CMS.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Powerful open-source CMS system.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Content management system built on Symfony, where pages are Markdown and themes are Twig, with optional Git-based flat-file storage.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Easy to use CMS with powerful MVC framework underlying.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Publication system for the Internet aimed at collaborative work, multilingual environments, and simplicity of use for web authors.
100 maintained · leader Mastodon
58 maintained · leader Dify.ai
40 maintained · leader revealjs
36 maintained · leader Jellyfin
28 maintained · leader copyparty
27 maintained · leader HyperSwitch
Existence is not competition. A project competes with you only if it is maintained, findable, deployable by your buyer and licensed for their use. Most projects fail at least one of those tests. Run all four before you shelve an idea — or before you assume you have a clear run.
Stars are a lifetime counter with no decay, so a project abandoned in 2022 still looks like a leader in 2026. In this dataset 149 projects are dormant, abandoned or archived, and several of them sit in the top decile by stars. Sort by momentum and commit activity instead — popularity tells you the project was once interesting, maintenance tells you whether it will still be there when your customer needs a bug fixed.
When a prospect says 'we could just self-host the free one', they are usually comparing your price against zero. The real comparison is your price against hosting, upgrades, backups, security patching, integration work and the engineer hours behind all of it. Quantifying that number is the single most effective response to a free-alternative objection — and it is more persuasive coming with a spreadsheet than with a feature list.
Founders treat licensing as a legal footnote and then discover it dictates strategy. Permissive licences allow closed commercial forks, which is why so many managed services exist around MIT and Apache projects — and also why your differentiation cannot be the code itself. Copyleft licences, especially AGPL, remove the closed-wrapper option entirely, which reduces competition but restricts you too. Source-available licences exist precisely to stop the wrapper business.
Search this database by category and by the commercial product you would replace. It covers 1665 projects across 130 categories, each mapped to the paid tool it substitutes. If your category shows a "Crowded" verdict, a maintained free version almost certainly exists and your positioning has to account for it.
No. It means free is your price anchor. Plenty of large companies were built next to a good open-source project — the ones that failed were the ones selling the same job at a price the free tool made indefensible. Find the part of the job the project deliberately does not do, and sell that.
Each category gets a 0–100 score built from three inputs: how many implementations exist, what share of them are still actively maintained, and how far ahead the leading project is compared with the category median. 62+ is Crowded, 38–61 Contested, under 38 Open. 11 categories are Crowded and 88 are Open.
A project has momentum when it committed code in most of the last twelve months, shipped a release recently and is not archived. 736 of 1665 projects qualify. This is the single most useful filter here — it strips out the popular-but-dead repositories that make a category look more competitive than it is.
It depends entirely on the licence. MIT, Apache and BSD let you build and sell closed products on top. GPL and AGPL require derivative work to stay open, and AGPL extends that to network use, which blocks most SaaS wrappers. BSL, SSPL and Commons Clause are source-available, not open source, and usually restrict competing commercial use outright.
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