The 10 Top Content Management Systems (CMS) for Small Businesses in 2021

Weebly is a popular and budget-friendly CMS built for ease and functionality. Whether you're new to building sites or a seasoned web designer, Weebly is perfect to create multipurpose sites or simple informative ones.

It has various free templates to choose from, all of which are easy to customize. You can start with a pre-built website that you could tweak to make it work with your design strategy. Alternatively, you can upload your logo to Weebly and build your site based on your brand's aesthetic.

With Weebly's drag-and-drop tools, you can add elements to your design and easily create pages using its predetermined spacing so that your content stays in place within reason. Although, you don't have complete control of your site as you would with WordPress, you have plenty of freedom to explore design ideas without worrying about "breaking" something.

Weebly’s themes are easy to customize to match your brand's look.

Weebly is self-hosted, which helps with keeping things encrypted and secure. Another bonus of Weebly having its own servers is fast page loading.

It offers a free trial so that you can see if it's the right match for your business. Weebly offers a free plan with some limitations — it must have Weebly advertising, and you can't have a custom domain.

If you don't want Weebly ads on your website, upgrade to the professional plan. For $12/monthly (when billed annually), you get a custom domain and e-commerce capabilities.

Weebly is an excellent choice for startups or entrepreneurs looking for a free site, portfolio, or an online shop.

GoDaddy Website Builder offers a beginner-friendly website builder that uses Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) to help launch your site quickly and easily. It's relatively affordable to get started, plans start at $10/month, and all plans include 24/7 customer support and web hosting. GoDaddy offers a free 30-day trial to see if the site builder is right for your business.

GoDaddy can create a website in under an hour, making it perfect for beginners. You can build a blog, informational site, or even an online store quickly and easily. With built-in marketing tools, GoDaddy makes building and optimizing a site simple, regardless of your knowledge or experience.

What you gain in simplicity, however, you sacrifice in creativity. In terms of look and layout, you’ll find customization options extremely limited, and there’s no app store for plug-ins and add-ons.

If you need to code and customize your site, GoDaddy isn’t the best option. However, it can be a great choice for a no-frills, small business website.

Wix is a huge player in the content management and website building game, hosting 160 million websites. It is all but especially designed for small businesses, restaurants, church websites, e-commerce, and portfolios, thanks to its ease of use and scalable building approach.

One of its best features is its ability to automatically optimize your site for mobile.

The foundation is solid and not too prone to change, which makes it excellent for smaller organizations, or if you are going it solo. That doesn’t mean hindrance and conformity, though, as you can optimize and customize according to your needs.

In fact, it is all about customizing your site. If you have a central image, logo, or aesthetic, you can start with that and Wix will optimize a theme around it.

A site theme with colors based on a logo in Wix.

Wix automatically installs and upgrades security updates, so you’re always protected. Editing is a breeze, with its dashboard that works on mobile or desktop, including photo filters and text animations.

Building sites is a drag-and-drop process, too, so ease of use isn’t an issue. There are built-in help features, online resources, and customer support available to you, so you won’t feel lost.

The pricing is spot on, too. If you have a basic need, Wix has a free plan that never expires. However, if you need something a tad bit more professional, such as your own domain name or the ability to use e-commerce features, you’ll need to opt for a paid plan. They’re pretty inexpensive though, ranging from $13 to $39/month.

Wix is best suited for a smaller scale, though, as integrations are a bit more limited, and you can’t update your template after publishing.

Launched in 2005, WordPress.com is one of the most popular site builders used by top organizations such as Sony and CNN. Fans of the CMS love how it doesn't require coding skills to build a site, and its many plugins that help expand features and scale as your business grows.

Behind the scenes, you'll find two different dashboards you can use. The classic dashboard is available with your site and a newer version located at WordPress.com that's very similar to the original but organized differently. You can use either dashboard to update and manage your website.

With WordPress.com, you can build a website quickly using one of the 350 free website themes that come with its free plan. However, if you upgrade to a paid subscription, you'll have more theme options available for free and to buy.

In the newer WordPress.com dashboard, the right navigation can be used to manage your website.

You can easily create blog posts and pages using the drag-and-drop block editor, access the media library to upload images and videos, and utilize plugins to build landing pages or integrate with other tools. If you're creating multiple pages, you can save them as a template, so you don't have to start over each time.

WordPress.com has a "forever free" plan, but it lacks useful features, such as plugins, custom domain, and support. It also has WordPress.com ads, which get removed when you upgrade to the business and e-commerce plans, which are $300/year and $540/year, respectively.

For site building and managing content, you can't go wrong using WordPress.com. It has plenty of tools to expand and scale, and you can make a beautiful website tailored to your brand aesthetic. Still, you'll have to upgrade to a top tier plan to get the features you truly need.

A super adaptable CMS, Kentico is user-friendly at its core. You don’t need to code much or create pathways from scratch, as it allows for multiple-user management, Google integrations, customer management, and more.

As a software fully integrated APS (APS.NET is a free, open-source, cross-platform framework for building web apps with varied programming languages), it is often preferred by digital marketers and IT-savvy managers specifically.

High customization is the name of the game, with tailored websites and state-of-the-art experiences, all without fear of security breaches or feeling lost, thanks to constantly dedicated support teams and safety updates.

Its editor is easy and simple enough for basic website builds. Still, it also offers the ability to add on more customizations as needed.

A really cool built-in feature? Its automatic translation ability, meaning it can support multilingual sites from the start. It simplifies the translation between audiences and vendors.

Widgets can be embedded and are easily set up by regular users, eliminating the need for ongoing developer maintenance.

It also prioritizes content efficiency, allowing for smart recycling of content, relinking, and cloning capabilities, so you don’t have to rebuild all the time.

The dashboard in Kentico is super intuitive and widgets can be added and removed as needed.

After your free trial, Kentico costs $7,999/year, but it comes with the features, support, and security to back up the pricing.

WordPress is pretty much all-inclusive and easy to use for all levels of content management. While it originated as a tool for creating blogs, it has massively expanded as a top choice for creating all types of websites.

WordPress lets you create entire web pages, publish and update content, and allow multiple users access with varying permissions, everything you need to maintain an active online presence.

Plus, it is designed to be user-friendly. Without having to worry about going into too much backend and coding, you can select readymade templates and follow in-depth guides on getting set up.

With over 50,000 plug-in options available, you can fully customize your site and your content to do exactly what you need. This makes WordPress an extremely ubiquitous and adaptable choice.

You can choose from an abundance of easy-to-install features

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WordPress is free, open-source alternative to other market options. It comes SEO-ready, so you can start out of the gate with the ability to rank on search engines, allowing people to find you.

And with a variety of options on how you can use it, WordPress is an excellent choice for everyone, from beginners to more advanced site builders.

If you value clarity and a straightforward approach, Bolt is the CMS for you. Built by and for front-end designers and developers, Bolt is intuitive at its core, modern in design, and easy to learn.

It is highly preferred by non-technical users, people like content editors who don’t do coding, because it allows the user to focus on producing and editing content, rather than jumping through hoops.

It’s single-minded in being a content management system and focuses on doing that really well rather than being distracted by bells and whistles. Also, it is open-source and so another free option, such as WordPress, for the budget-minded among us.

Clean and organized, from files to templates in Bolt.

The templates are sleek, and the setup is quick and easy. It’s also fast to load, with a built-in cache system to keep page speeds up. The code is clean and maintainable, so it can be easily managed without a fleet of developers.

Security is tight, and bug fixes are quick. Overall, it is clean, purposeful, and efficient as a CMS option.

Built by marketers for marketers, HubSpot CMS is a top content management system.

To get the biggest barrier out of the way first, it is pretty expensive. In fact, it’s one of the most expensive CMSs on this list, starting at $400/month minimum, plus a mandatory $1,000 onboarding fee.

But with that cost comes some pretty amazing features, so if you have the budget, HubSpot CMS may be your best bet.

As a content management system, HubSpot CMS is designed with a marketing bent, making it excellent for creatives, e-commerce sites, basic pages, and more.

It’s also built with non-techies in mind, so it’s very easy to use, as well as having some amazing support in the form of online resources and dedicated account managers.

While you may be used to split testing for emails and landing pages, HubSpot CMS takes that facility a step further and lets you do the same thing with your webpages, which is pretty unique. And very helpful.

Finding a top performer landing page gets exponentially easier with Hubspot CMS.

HubSpot CMS also takes on the dirty work of analyzing search engine algorithms and optimizing your pages.

From giving tips as you’re building to automatically calling out fields and backlinks that will help you rank, SEO is very easy with this system. You also have access to built-in Google Analytics, site hosting, content transitioning, and dynamic content options.

Similar to HubSpot in its one barrier, Magnolia CMS can deter some based on pricing: that is, the fact that they don’t provide any. You have to contact a rep, explain your needs, and begin a free trial before you can find out what it will cost you.

If money, and the ability to invest extra time in something that may not pan out, isn’t really an issue, though, then Magnolia is a top option.

With multiple customizations available and a philosophy based around multitasking and efficiency, Magnolia CMS is a top choice for enterprises, IT businesses, startups, and even government websites.

If your site must have a lot of capabilities, Magnolia is king. In fact, it may even be overkill on power and ability for a more straightforward site.

Magnolia loves organization, and that extends to content management. It can auto-recycle old content and organize everything into levels: smaller blocks, tags, and labels, so you can quickly find old content you are looking for, repurpose pieces, and direct website visitors to what is most relevant.

Content organized down to the last detail in Magnolia CMS.

It also keeps you on top of things with notifications, system backups, detailed cookie tracking, integrated AI search capabilities, and a customer support team at the ready.

Squarespace, much like Wix, is one of the original players in the e-commerce website management software world. The platform has grown to encompass many types of sites and is often seen as one of the biggest alternatives to Wix.

One of its main attractions is all about aesthetics, with a bevy of professional themes and templates. Squarespace lets you create a website that looks sleek and professional.

Building and managing content in Squarespace is too easy, thanks to its drag-and-drop tool and its templates that act intuitively as you build. Very similar to WordPress, it offers several extensions to let you customize it as you need.

Chic themes make designing your site a breeze.

You can really get down to details with its style editor, and it's even easier to integrate high-quality images, thanks to the ability to add on searchable Unsplash and Getty images.

Lastly, the built-in analytics dashboard makes tracking KPIs simple to do so you can easily adjust your strategy. And if you're still not convinced of it's usability, check out our visual, step-by-step guide to Squarespace.

The cost is pretty reasonable, too. After your two-week free trial, you can purchase plans starting at $12/month which allows you up to 20 pages, or upgrade to a $40/month plan with unlimited bandwidth and Squarespace's e-commerce tools.