Turns Out · November 1, 2026 · 14 min read

What is Craft CMS? Pricing, pros, cons and who it's for in 2026

A plain-English guide to Craft CMS from a Verified Partner: how it works, what it costs, where it beats WordPress, and when it's the wrong choice.

Craft CMS is a commercial, PHP-based content management system by Pixel & Tonic that ships with no theme, no default content model and no front end. You define the sections, entry types and fields your content needs, then render them with Twig templates or pull them over a generated GraphQL API. If you are asking what Craft CMS is because an agency proposed it, the short answer is that it is the CMS we see teams pick when the content has structure and the editors have opinions: the back end is built around your data, not around a blog post with a sidebar.

We build on Craft CMS most weeks, we migrate sites both onto it and off it, and we are a Craft CMS Verified Partner, so read the pros with that in mind. This is the guide we send to a CTO or marketing lead who asks what Craft CMS is before a kickoff: how it works, what it costs in 2026 once plugins and hosting are on the invoice, where it beats WordPress, where WordPress still wins, and what the Craft 6 rebuild on Laravel means if you are choosing right now.

What is Craft CMS and how does it work

Everything in Craft CMS starts with the content model, not the page. You create sections (a Single for a one-off page like “About”, a Channel for a stream like news, a Structure for a hierarchy like documentation), give each section one or more entry types, and attach fields to those entry types. Craft CMS ships more than 20 built-in field types, by Pixel & Tonic’s own count: plain text, rich text, assets, dates, relations to other entries, and Matrix, the repeatable-block field editors use to build a page from components in an order they choose. Since Craft 5, Matrix blocks are entries themselves, so a “Testimonial” block is previewed and queried like any other entry.

The front end is yours. By default you write Twig templates that query entries and print fields; there is no theme marketplace and no page builder unless you install one. Flip on headless mode and the same content is available over GraphQL for a Next.js, Nuxt or mobile front end. The control panel is one of the reasons editors ask for Craft CMS by name: fields appear exactly where the developer put them, drafts and revisions are built in, and live preview shows the real template.

Around the core sits the Plugin Store, first- and third-party plugins for SEO, caching, forms, image handling and commerce in 17 categories (as listed on plugins.craftcms.com today). The building blocks, in the order a new developer meets them:

• —Sections and entry types — the shape of your content: what exists, how it is organized and which URL pattern each thing gets.
• —Fields and Matrix — the data each entry type holds; Matrix gives editors ordered, reusable blocks without a drag-and-drop builder.
• —Twig templates or GraphQL — how content reaches a browser: server-rendered pages, a headless front end, or both from one install.
• —Project config — a YAML copy of every setting, field and section, committed to Git so staging and production stay identical.
• —Plugins and modules — Composer packages from the Plugin Store, or your own module in the project for anything client-specific.

Craft 5 needs PHP 8.2 or newer, MySQL 8.0.17+, MariaDB 10.4.6+ or PostgreSQL 13+, Composer 2 and 256 MB of PHP memory as a floor (512 MB is the recommendation). A template that lists the ten latest posts looks like this:

{% set posts = craft.entries().section('blog').limit(10).all() %}
{% for post in posts %}
  <a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a>
{% endfor %}

Craft CMS pricing in 2026: what you actually pay

Craft CMS pricing is one payment per project, with updates included for a year. Current list prices on craftcms.com, checked 1 November 2026:

• —Solo — free. One user account, every content feature, Twig and GraphQL, the Plugin Store, Stripe and Shopify integrations. Pixel & Tonic aims it at developers building sites for themselves and friends, and its advice is that “any professional work is done on Craft Pro or Craft Team”.
• —Team — $279 per project, then $99 a year for updates. Up to five user accounts and one user group, plus developer and email support. One footnote to know: “Only available for Craft 5”. Nothing on the page says what replaces it in Craft 6, so ask before buying Team for a site you plan to upgrade.
• —Pro — $399 per project, then $99 a year for updates. Unlimited users and groups, custom roles and permissions, a branded control panel, and the edition the pricing page lists Craft Commerce under. This is what we quote on almost every client build.
• —Enterprise — price on request. Pro plus first-party SAML SSO, a custom license agreement, procurement support and invoicing with terms.

Two things most Craft CMS review posts miss. First, the license is perpetual: the $99 renewal buys another year of updates, and the knowledge base is explicit that if you stop paying, php craft update all marks the package EXPIRED and leaves the installed version running. Second, renewals run at about a quarter of the license price for Pro and for Craft Commerce ($99 on $399, $299 on $1,199) and more than a third for Team, so three years of Craft Pro cost $597 with no per-seat pricing; one license covers every site in a multi-site install, and a separate project is a separate license.

The lines that are bigger than the license start with Craft Commerce, the first-party e-commerce plugin: $1,199 for the Pro edition plus $299 a year after the first year (version 5.7.7, released 28 October 2026). Then the plugins. The five we install on most marketing builds, priced from the Plugin Store today, are SEOmatic $99, Blitz $99 (static caching), Formie $99 (forms), Retour $59 (redirects) and Imager X $49 to $99 (image transforms): $405 to $455 before renewals, a little more than the Pro license they sit on. Verified non-profits get a flat 15% off the Pro and Team license fee; the discount does not apply to renewals.

Hosting options for Craft CMS

Craft CMS is self-hosted software with a first-party hosting product beside it. Three realistic options:

• —Your own server or cloud account — a VPS, or an AWS setup with a load balancer, RDS and a CDN for anything that spikes. Full control over PHP, Redis, queues and image transforms, and the only option that lets you put static-cache files on disk. This is what we run for most clients, including the AWS platform behind ABC Homes.
• —Craft Cloud — Pixel & Tonic’s serverless platform. Team is $120 a month (two environments, 10 GB of assets per environment, 250 GB bandwidth), Pro is $240 a month (three environments, 20 GB, 500 GB), each including the matching Craft CMS license, so the $279 or $399 above falls away. Regions are Oregon, Quebec, Frankfurt and Sydney. Limits from the FAQ: MySQL 8 or Postgres 15 only (no MariaDB), no SSH, no .htaccess or nginx edits, an ephemeral filesystem that rules out on-disk static caches, and bring-your-own email provider.
• —Managed PHP hosts — the middle ground: a host that knows Craft CMS runs the servers and deploys; you keep SSH and a normal filesystem. Pricing varies too much to quote; compare on PHP 8.5 availability, because Craft 6 will require it.

At $2,880 a year, Craft Cloud Pro is the biggest line on most Craft CMS budgets short of developer time, and for a marketing team with no DevOps it is a fair trade: zero server maintenance, a Cloudflare WAF (the FAQ names it) and the license thrown in. For a site that needs Blitz cache files, a MariaDB database or a cron job that shells out, self-hosting is the better fit.

Craft CMS pros: where it beats WordPress

Our judgment, from the client sites we audit rather than from a benchmark:

• —The content model is the product. Structured fields instead of a blob of HTML in a page builder means the same entry can feed a Twig page, a GraphQL front end, an RSS feed and an AI crawler without clean-up. Redesigns reuse the data; migrations keep it.
• —Structure is core, not a plugin stack. What takes five plugins from five vendors with five update cadences elsewhere is one install here, updated together through Composer.
• —Multi-site and localization are built in. One install, many sites or languages, with per-site propagation rules and fallbacks, and no add-on to buy.
• —A smaller attack surface. Updates come through Composer, there is no theme marketplace, and the Plugin Store is one you can read end to end in an afternoon rather than a marketplace of tens of thousands. Fewer moving parts, fewer things to patch at 2 a.m.
• —Editors like it. In our handovers the control panel training is one call, not a course, because the fields sit where the content lives and nobody has to learn a page builder’s idea of a column.
• —Craft Commerce for content-heavy stores. When the catalog is really a publication with a cart, Craft Commerce keeps products, articles and landing pages in one model with one editorial workflow.

Craft CMS cons: where WordPress still wins

The honest list, because a post that only sells is useless for the decision you are making:

• —The ecosystem is a fraction of the size. Craft CMS runs about 0.1% of all websites against 39.5% for WordPress (W3Techs, 31 October 2026), which means fewer tutorials, fewer ready-made integrations and, when a niche SaaS ships a “CMS plugin”, it is a WordPress plugin.
• —The talent pool is smaller. The official partner directory shows 243 results worldwide. You will find a competent WordPress freelancer in any city; a Craft CMS developer is more often a remote hire.
• —Marketing-stack plugins. If your stack is a membership plugin, three form plugins, an affiliate tracker and a page builder the marketing team already knows, WordPress has every piece off the shelf and Craft CMS has a developer building two of them.
• —There is a license line. $399 and $99 a year is small against developer time, but WordPress has no such line, and procurement will ask about it.
• —High-volume standard stores and $0 brochure sites. A catalog of 5,000 SKUs with standard checkout is cheaper to run on WooCommerce or Shopify than on Craft Commerce, and five static pages with one editor are fine on a free WordPress theme and a $5 host.

Craft 6 on Laravel: is it out yet, and should you wait for it

Craft 6 moves the framework underneath Craft CMS from Yii to Laravel. The first alpha was tagged on 6 May 2026; the plan Pixel & Tonic published is roughly six months of alphas, three months of beta, and a 6.0.0 release “near the end of 2026 or in first quarter of 2027”. As of 1 November 2026 the newest tag on GitHub is 6.0.0-alpha.20, there is no beta tag, and the current stable release is Craft 5.11.5. The dates matter more than the tags: Craft 5 has active support until 31 December 2030 and security fixes until 31 December 2031, so a site started today has a longer published support window than most redesign cycles.

What the rebuild changes for a buyer is less than the headline suggests. Content, fields, Matrix and Twig carry over; the project structure moves (templates to resources/views/, web root to public/, CRAFT_DB_* variables to Laravel’s DB_*), plugins ship a new major version for Craft 6, and a temporary craftcms/yii2-adapter package keeps Craft 5 plugins running in the meantime. The upgrade guide’s craftcms/craft6-revamp tool handles the Composer requirements, the directory moves and the environment-variable renames, and confirms before anything destructive. Craft 6 requires PHP 8.5, and Pixel & Tonic’s transition guide says Craft 5 is already fully compatible with it, so hosting can move first. We ran the Craft CMS 6 alphas against copies of client sites, and the biggest risk we found was an abandoned plugin already sitting in a Craft 5 install, which a plugin audit catches before the upgrade does.

So if you are choosing a CMS in late 2026, you are choosing Craft 5. On a Pro license the Craft 6 license update is included if 6.0 ships inside your first year of updates (the pricing FAQ says so; the migration work is yours, and the Team footnote above is the open question). Pick plugins whose maintainers have published a Craft 6 plan, keep deprecation warnings at zero, and schedule the upgrade for 2027 once 6.0 has a few point releases behind it. Our page on Craft CMS 6 on Laravel covers what the rebuild is in more depth, and the free Craft CMS 6 readiness check tells you which of your plugins, if any, will be the problem.

Who Craft CMS is for, and who should not buy it

Craft CMS is the right call when at least two of these are true:

• —An editorial team publishes weekly or more and needs drafts, revisions, scheduled entries and a preview that shows the real page.
• —Your content has real structure — products with specs, locations with hours, courses with sessions, anything you would otherwise model in a spreadsheet.
• —You run more than one site or language from one team: regional sites, brands, or a shared component library across properties.
• —The front end is custom — a design system, a Next.js app, or performance targets a theme cannot meet — and you want the back end to stay out of its way.
• —Integrations are the job: CRM, recruiting, booking or data feeds, where a developer will be involved anyway.

It is the wrong call when nobody on your side will own a developer relationship, because Craft CMS has no theme store to fall back on, and when the budget is genuinely zero, because the free edition is built for one person’s own site rather than a client’s.

Three of our own Craft CMS projects show the pattern, one line each. ArchLynk: three legacy brands and their WordPress sites became one Craft CMS content model with Greenhouse and HubSpot integrations. The Australian Ballet: we supported the in-house team with a mobile-first ticket purchase front end and flexible content models for media-heavy landing pages. ABC Homes: a headless build where a customized Craft CMS back end serves the front end through an API layer on AWS.

Frequently asked questions

Is Craft CMS free?

For one person, yes. The Solo edition is free indefinitely for a single user and carries every content feature; Pixel & Tonic positions it for personal and friends-and-family sites. Professional builds use Team ($279) or Pro ($399) per project, each with one year of updates included and an optional $99 a year after that. The license is perpetual, so a lapsed renewal never switches the site off.

Craft CMS vs WordPress: which should I pick?

Pick Craft CMS when the content has structure, more than one editor, more than one site or language, or a custom front end, and you have a developer relationship. Pick WordPress when the budget is close to zero, the plan is built on specific WordPress plugins, or the store is a standard WooCommerce catalog. We migrate sites in both directions and will say which way yours should go.

Is Craft CMS headless?

It can be, and it does not have to be. Craft CMS ships a generated GraphQL API and a headless mode, so the same install can serve Twig pages today and a Next.js front end next year. In our experience, a classic Twig front end is faster to build and cheaper to host for most marketing sites; go headless when you have a front-end team, several consumers of the content, or an app that already exists.

If you want a second opinion on whether Craft CMS fits your project, our Craft CMS development page explains how we scope a build or a migration, and a Verified Partner will tell you when the answer is WordPress.