Craft CMS

Privately held software company based in Bend, Oregon, founded by Brandon Kelly. Sole maker of Craft CMS, Craft Commerce, and Craft Cloud.

Craft 1.0 shipped June 4, 2013 (public beta had been running since November 2012). Confirmed via Craft's own 10-year anniversary post.

Core product is self-hosted PHP software you install on your own server or a hosting partner. Pixel & Tonic also sells Craft Cloud, an optional first-party managed hosting product for the same software, but Craft itself is not a SaaS platform by default.

Source code is publicly viewable on GitHub and the Craft License permits use, modification, and redistribution, but it is not an OSI-approved open source license: paid editions (Team/Pro) require a purchased license key, license-validation logic must not be circumvented, and each license is restricted to one production environment. Craft itself describes this as deliberately not falling under the FOSS umbrella.

Custom license, not GPL/MIT/Apache. Permits viewing/modifying source and running Solo edition free indefinitely; Team and Pro editions require payment and forbid altering license-enforcement code.

Craft's own positioning emphasizes flexible content modeling and design freedom for 'design portfolios, multinational marketing sites, and everything in between,' with native multi-site as a signature strength. It is a developer-oriented tool, not a no-code builder.

Solo edition is free forever: one user account, self-hosted, with unlimited entries/pages/locales/assets and core developer tools (GraphQL API, Twig, debug toolbar). Requires you to provide your own hosting.

The free tier's real constraint is single-user access, not content or feature caps, which is unusual versus SaaS builders' free tiers.

Not a time-boxed trial in the SaaS sense; it's a domain-based restriction, so evaluation time is effectively unlimited pre-launch.

Craft has no domain restriction at any edition -- even the free Solo edition runs on a fully custom production domain (self-hosted). Solo is $0; the only ongoing cost at that tier is self-hosting (~$10-20/mo market-typical, tracked separately as it's a hosting cost, not a Craft license cost). This is a license-based product, not a subscription, so this figure is not directly comparable to SaaS builder monthly plans; see pricing.typical_total_cost_notes for the full picture.

Craft is license-based, not subscription-based; this is a monthly-equivalent approximation for Pro edition, the most common choice for agency/client work (unlimited users, branded control panel, GraphQL API). $399 one-time (includes 1st year of updates) + $99/yr renewal thereafter, amortized over 3 years: (399 + 99 + 99) / 36 = ~$16.60/mo. Excludes hosting and developer time -- see pricing.typical_total_cost_notes for the full cost picture.

Craft Commerce Pro is $1,199 one-time (includes first year of updates) plus $299/yr renewal, on top of a separate Craft CMS license and hosting -- there is no vendor-quoted 'monthly plan' figure to convert cleanly, and blending license amortization with hosting would be a guess rather than a verified figure. Left null rather than fabricated; see ecommerce.platform_transaction_fee and pricing.typical_total_cost_notes for the real cost components.

Solo and Team both show default Craft branding in the admin control panel; Pro adds 'branded control panel and communications' per the official pricing page. This is about the CMS admin UI, not the public-facing site (which never carries Craft branding at any tier).

Initial license fee ($279 Team / $399 Pro) includes one year of updates and support; continued access to new versions costs $99/yr after that -- roughly 20-25% of the initial price annually, though the underlying license itself is perpetual (you keep using your installed version forever even if you stop renewing).

Could not find an official published refund/money-back window for Craft license purchases; the trial model (test free on non-production domains before buying) substitutes for a post-purchase refund policy in Craft's own documentation, but no explicit day count is stated.

Unlike SaaS website builders, sticker price understates true cost -- developer time is typically the largest line item for any real Craft build.

Craft's control panel is a structured, form-based content-entry admin (fields/entries/elements), not a visual page builder or freeform canvas. Page layout and design come entirely from developer-built Twig templates (or a headless front end via GraphQL); editors fill in structured fields rather than dragging visual page sections.

The control panel supports drag-and-drop for reordering elements within structures and relational/Matrix fields (e.g., rearranging content blocks or category hierarchy), but this is content-organization drag-and-drop, not visual drag-and-drop page building.

Live Preview offers a split-screen view where edits in the content form refresh a real-time front-end preview; this is not true click-on-the-page inline editing (you edit in a form pane alongside the preview, not by clicking directly into rendered page text).

Native Revisions system: every save creates an auditable, recoverable revision; editors can view a read-only prior state and revert content from any revision via the entry's breadcrumb menu.

As soon as a field is altered, Craft auto-saves changes to a private 'provisional draft' for that user; this also powers Live Preview, which refreshes whenever the provisional draft auto-saves.

No native Craft mobile app exists. The control panel is a responsive web app usable in mobile browsers (Safari 11+ on iOS, Chrome 81+/Firefox 68+ on Android), and headless projects can power custom-built native apps via GraphQL, but there is no first-party editing app.

Content is stored independently of presentation (structured fields/elements in the database), separate from Twig templates that render them, so swapping or rewriting templates does not require rebuilding content -- a deliberate architectural strength versus builders where design and content are fused.

Editorial judgment: Craft requires PHP/server hosting knowledge and Twig templating skill to build anything -- there is no drag-and-drop site builder or template gallery. Content editors themselves face a moderate curve once a site is built (structured, well-organized control panel), but standing up or modifying a Craft site is a developer task, placing overall platform learning curve at the steep end versus hosted builders.

Craft ships 2 official 'starter projects' (a Basic Blog, available in Twig/Nuxt/Next.js/Astro front ends, and a WordPress-Inspired Blog in Twig) as developer scaffolding -- these are code starting points, not a visual template gallery to pick a finished design from, since Craft has no built-in visual themes.

No platform restriction; fonts are loaded via standard front-end code (CSS @font-face, web font services) in developer-controlled Twig templates.

Craft has no opinion on front-end styling or breakpoints; the developer writes all HTML/CSS/JS in Twig templates (or a decoupled front end), so responsive behavior is fully custom-coded rather than constrained by platform UI.

Full custom CSS with no plan gating at any edition -- Craft has no visual styling system to work around since templates are hand-built.

Full custom JavaScript with no plan gating; front-end code is entirely developer-authored.

No built-in, no-code animation/interaction authoring tool ships with Craft; any animation is implemented by the developer via custom CSS/JS in templates, same as any hand-coded site.

Craft has no native design-token or global-styles UI panel (no visual theme editor); consistent styling is achieved through developer-authored CSS conventions (variables, base Twig layouts), not a CMS feature.

Editorial judgment: as a code-first, self-hosted platform with a full custom Twig/GraphQL front end and no imposed visual theme system, Craft places no ceiling on achievable design -- the cost is that achieving any of it requires developer skill, not a no-code editor.

Not included by default -- core Craft ships no hosting; you bring your own server, a hosting partner, or optionally purchase Craft Cloud (Pixel & Tonic's own first-party managed hosting, sold separately starting at $120/mo).

Self-hosting is the default mode for Craft CMS -- any PHP 8.2+ server with MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL meeting requirements can run it.

Not included with self-hosted Craft by default (depends entirely on chosen host). Craft Cloud, the optional first-party hosting product, does bundle a global CDN for assets and image transforms via Cloudflare.

Not provided by Craft the software; depends on chosen hosting (most modern hosts include free Let's Encrypt SSL, but that's a hosting-layer feature). Craft Cloud does include SSL certificates as a standard feature of its plans.

SLA only exists at the hosting layer, whether that's a third-party host or Craft's own Cloud product.

Figures are for the optional Craft Cloud product, not the core software.

Craft is a dynamic PHP application backed by a database (Yii framework); it is not a static-site generator and has no native full static HTML export feature. Static caching layers exist (including on Craft Cloud) but that is response caching, not a static export capability.

May 2026 CrUX data via HTTP Archive CWV Technology Report API (technology 'Craft CMS'): combined 67.9% (desktop 7,000/10,392 = 67.4%, mobile 7,420/10,860 = 68.3%).

Native Image Transforms system automatically resizes/crops/re-encodes images on-demand or via predefined named transforms, callable from templates or GraphQL; non-destructive (originals untouched). Format conversion (e.g., to WebP/AVIF) is configurable but requires setup, not automatic by default.

Could not verify that Craft applies lazy-loading attributes automatically out of the box; official image-transform documentation covers resizing/cropping but not an automatic loading="lazy" default. Developers commonly add this manually in templates. Marked false to avoid overstating an unverified automatic behavior.

Native template caching ({% cache %} tag), data caching, and configurable cache invalidation are core Craft features; Craft Cloud additionally adds automatic static caching with edge invalidation.

Not a built-in dedicated meta-title/description field out of the box -- developers add custom fields (e.g., a 'Meta Description' text field in a field layout) to entries, a standard and simple setup pattern. Fully editable once configured, achievable natively without a plugin, though it requires initial developer setup rather than existing by default.

Every entry has an editable URI/slug field, configured per-section with flexible URI format patterns (including dynamic tokens); fully native.

Maximum flexibility, but requires developer configuration -- nothing is preset.

Not in core. Retour (by nystudio107, a well-known Craft ecosystem developer -- not first-party Pixel & Tonic) is the de facto standard redirect-management plugin, auto-creating redirects on slug changes and supporting 301s with hit statistics.

Achievable natively -- Twig templates can output any canonical link tag using each entry's URL/absoluteUrl; not automatic without template code, but requires no plugin.

robots.txt is a standard file at the site's web root, fully editable like any static file or Twig-rendered template in a self-hosted install; no admin-UI toggle, but complete developer-level control.

Not shipped in core. Achievable via a hand-built Twig template looping over entries (documented community pattern) or, more commonly, via plugins like Sitemap (putyourlightson) or Sprout Sitemaps. No first-party sitemap generator exists.

No native JSON-LD/schema.org generator in core. Standard approaches are the Schema plugin (community, MIT-licensed) or the popular third-party SEOmatic plugin, both of which handle schema.org JSON-LD markup outside of core Craft.

Craft's native multi-site system tracks which entries exist across which sites/languages, giving developers the data needed to output hreflang tags in Twig templates, but core does not auto-generate hreflang tags itself -- that requires template code or a plugin like SEOmatic (which automates it based on the native multi-site data).

Achievable natively via custom fields plus Twig template output of Open Graph/Twitter Card meta tags; not automatic out of the box but requires no plugin, same pattern as title/meta description.

Achievable natively by adding a per-entry boolean/select field controlling a robots meta tag output in the template; standard, simple setup requiring no plugin.

Native Assets have a built-in, editable Alt Text field as part of core asset metadata.

Craft has no pre-built blog out of the box -- you define a 'Section' (e.g., 'Blog') and build the listing/entry templates yourself, or start from the official WordPress-Inspired Blog starter project. The content-modeling capability to build a blog is native and simple, but there is no ready-made blog engine that works with zero setup, unlike WordPress or Squarespace.

Defining custom content types (Sections/Entry Types with arbitrary field layouts, plus Matrix fields for flexible nested content blocks) is Craft's signature core strength -- no plugin required.

Categories (hierarchical, parent-child taxonomy) and Tags (flat folksonomy) are both native core element types.

Native Post Date (future-dated = scheduled auto-publish) and Expiry Date (auto-unpublish) fields exist on every entry; a solid core scheduling capability with no plugin needed.

Native Revisions system (view/revert any prior saved state) plus Drafts (named, savable work-in-progress versions) ship in core.

Native user accounts and granular permissions support unlimited authors (Pro edition) or up to 5 users in one group (Team edition); Solo edition is single-user only.

Achievable natively -- a Twig template saved with an .xml/.atom extension can query entries and output a valid RSS/Atom feed; documented as a standard Craft pattern in the official knowledge base, requiring template code but no plugin.

Native GraphQL API (Pro edition) supports both queries (read) and mutations (write, e.g., save_<section>_<entryType>_Entry) once a schema is configured; content is private by default until explicitly exposed via public or token-authenticated schemas.

Craft Commerce is a separate, paid first-party plugin from Pixel & Tonic (not bundled with core Craft) -- Pro edition is $1,199 one-time + $299/yr renewal, on top of a separate Craft CMS license.

Limits are on store/location count, not product volume.

Distinct from hosted ecommerce SaaS platforms that add their own per-transaction fee on top of the payment processor's cut.

Each gateway is installed as its own separate plugin, not bundled into Commerce core.

Craft Commerce supports digital/downloadable products via standard product-type configuration.

Recurring/subscription billing requires the separate Recurring Orders plugin on top of Craft Commerce; the Stripe gateway plugin is the only first-party gateway that supports subscriptions at all.

Multi-currency selling is listed as a native Craft Commerce Pro feature on the official pricing page.

No native or first-party point-of-sale feature in official Craft Commerce documentation or pricing pages; POS-style functionality would require a third-party/community plugin, none of which is officially maintained by Pixel & Tonic.

Craft automatically purges (does not recover/email) abandoned carts after 90 days by default. Actual abandoned-cart recovery (e.g., reminder emails with cart-retrieval links) requires a separate third-party plugin, not a native Commerce feature.

Basic shipping/tax setup is native; advanced automated tax compliance needs a plugin.

Full database export (direct DB access, since you control the server/hosting) plus native GraphQL API export; complete content ownership since Craft is self-hosted.

Because Craft is self-hosted, export is not mediated or limited by a vendor.

Twig templates, CSS, and JS are plain code files fully owned by the site operator, portable to any Craft install or, with rework, another PHP/Twig-compatible platform.

Domains are managed independently via standard DNS/registrar, as with any self-hosted software; Craft imposes no domain lock-in.

Craft runs on any PHP 8.2+/MySQL-MariaDB-PostgreSQL-compatible server; moving off Craft Cloud (if used) to another host requires only a standard code+database migration, not a platform-specific export process.

Native GraphQL API (Pro edition) exposes full read/write access to entities once schemas are configured; Team/Solo editions lack GraphQL, limiting full programmatic access to Pro.

Editorial judgment: self-hosted architecture, full database/code ownership, and a source-available codebase give Craft structurally low platform lock-in versus SaaS builders -- the license restricts running a paid edition without payment, but content, design, and hosting are never trapped behind a vendor. The tradeoff is that migrating away still requires developer expertise to execute, same as Drupal or any code-first CMS.

Smaller ecosystem than WordPress by orders of magnitude, reflecting Craft's smaller, more developer-focused user base.

Native GraphQL API ships with Pro edition (queries and mutations); Solo/Team editions do not include GraphQL per the pricing page.

Not in core, but available via a first-party Webhooks plugin maintained by Pixel & Tonic itself (craftcms/webhooks on GitHub), which sends GET/POST requests on system events for integration with Zapier, IFTTT, or custom endpoints.

Full custom PHP (modules/plugins), Twig, JS, and CSS with no plan restriction -- Craft is self-hosted software you control.

Craft 5.x (current stable, released mid-2024) runs on Yii 2; the in-progress Craft 6 represents a full framework migration to Laravel, expected GA Q4 2026.

Native console command-line interface (the `craft` executable) ships with core, covering database backup/restore, cache management, migrations, GraphQL schema management, and more -- not a bolt-on tool.

Achieved via the first-party Webhooks plugin (Pixel & Tonic-maintained) connecting to Zapier's Webhooks trigger, documented officially on GitHub; not a native, zero-config Zapier app, but an official supported integration path.

Reflects Craft's developer-tool positioning versus all-in-one SaaS platforms with native bundled integrations.

No native AI site-generation feature ships with Craft CMS itself; AI capabilities in the Craft ecosystem are exclusively third-party plugins (e.g., AI Assistant, Content Buddy, CoPilot), none of which is a first-party Pixel & Tonic product.

No native AI writing assistant ships with core Craft. AI-assisted content generation (OpenAI/ChatGPT-powered rewriting, translation, drafting) is available only via third-party plugins (AI Assistant by Solspace, OpenAI Content Writer, Content Buddy, CoPilot) requiring the site owner's own API keys and separate plugin licenses.

No native AI image generation/editing ships with core Craft. Third-party plugins (e.g., Content Buddy's DALL-E 2 integration, AltTextLab's AI alt-text generator) provide this, again requiring separate licenses and API keys.

No native AI SEO assistance ships with core Craft. Any AI-assisted SEO features (meta description generation, keyword suggestions) come from third-party plugins combining AI plugins with SEO plugins like SEOmatic, not a built-in capability.

No first-party AI product from Pixel & Tonic has been announced as of this research date.

Highly granular native permissions system: direct per-user or per-User-Group assignment, additive across multiple groups, covering control panel access, per-section/per-volume content permissions, user administration, and utility access. Team edition is limited to 1 user group; Pro allows unlimited groups.

No real-time, Google-Docs-style simultaneous multi-user editing of the same entry. Each user gets their own private provisional draft, which avoids overwrite conflicts but does not provide live concurrent co-editing of a single draft.

Could not verify a native multi-stage editorial approval/moderation workflow (e.g., draft to review to publish with role-gated transitions) in official Craft 5.x documentation. Craft's native model is drafts plus direct publish/schedule by permitted users, not a formal moderation state machine like Drupal's Content Moderation; approval workflows would need a plugin.

Native Live Preview provides real-time draft preview against the live template. True separate staging environments are achieved via multi-environment config (native support for environment-specific settings in config files) combined with a second hosting environment, or via Craft Cloud's built-in staging environment (included in Team/Pro Cloud plans as a second environment). Core Craft alone (self-hosted, without Cloud) does not provision a staging environment automatically.

Could not verify a native in-editor internal commenting/annotation feature for editorial staff collaboration in official Craft 5.x documentation. No evidence of this in the control panel or drafts-revisions documentation.

Could not verify a native, dedicated audit-log feature (tracking who changed what and when across the system) in official Craft 5.x documentation; revisions provide content-level history but this is not the same as a comprehensive system audit log. Would likely require a plugin or Craft Cloud/Enterprise-level logging.

Paid-license email support is a distinguishing feature versus purely community-supported open-source CMSs.

No published 24/7 support commitment for Team/Pro editions (standard email-based developer support); Enterprise edition offers 'dedicated premium support' but official materials do not explicitly state 24/7 availability.

Editorial judgment: Craft's official documentation (docs, knowledge base, glossary, and an interactive getting-started tutorial) is unusually thorough and well-organized for a developer-focused CMS, with version-specific docs (3.x/4.x/5.x) maintained in parallel and clear separation between system concepts, reference, and how-to guides.

Meaningfully smaller community than WordPress or Drupal, consistent with Craft's niche, developer/agency-focused positioning.

Distinguish infrastructure-provider compliance from a platform's own audited certification; only the former was confirmed.

Native CLI commands (db/backup, db/restore) let developers trigger and restore database backups on demand; not automatic/scheduled by default on self-hosted installs. Craft Cloud does provide automatic backups with 30-day retention as part of its managed hosting.

Accessibility commitment targets the editor experience (ATAG) as much as output; front-end site accessibility remains the developer's responsibility.

Multi-site and multilingual support is a foundational, widely-cited Craft strength: a single installation can power unlimited sites with different languages, domains, or paths, with field-level control over which content is shared vs. localized per site.

Native entry propagation rules (per-site, per-site-group, per-language-group, all sites, or manual per-entry selection) plus a static message-translation system (Yii-based, per-language-code files) support structured translation workflows without a plugin, though there is no dedicated translator-assignment/review UI beyond standard permissions and drafts.

Per-locale URLs are native (same-domain paths like /de/ or separate domains per site), and the data needed to generate hreflang (which entries exist on which sites) is native; automatic hreflang tag output itself requires template code or a plugin (see seo.hreflang), so this is native infrastructure with manual/plugin activation for the tag itself.

Since Craft imposes no front-end template constraints, RTL layout is fully achievable via standard CSS in developer-built templates; the control panel itself also supports RTL languages as part of its localization system.