Thomas Bellink
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WordPress VIP Plus
2
Storipress
3
Rebelmouse
4
Arc XP
5
Publisher Plus
6
Superdesk
7
Contentful
8
PurplePublish
9
Wehaa
10
Quintype
11
Drupal
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Hocalwire
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Ghost
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Glide
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Cue
Content management systems (CMSs) are an essential component of the publishing industry, pulling together and centralizing key aspects of the editorial process. But with so many options on the market, picking the best CMS for a news website can be daunting.
A good CMS not only simplifies the process of content creation and editing, it also automates content distribution, helping publishers reach audiences through various omnichannel distribution strategies.
A publisher’s choice of CMS affects not only content creation and distribution, but also factors such as search engine optimization (SEO) and site load time. Choosing poorly can have serious consequences on a publisher’s audience engagement.
With this in mind, we’ve organized a list of the 15 best CMS platforms for news websites.
A content management system is an application that allows users to create, manage and publish digital content at scale.
With a CMS, users can create, edit and publish digital content without needing technical knowledge such as coding. The user-friendly interface of a CMS allows users to input text, images, video and other content, and organize it into pages on a website or a blog. CMSs may also provide features for SEO and other tools to help market the content.
Running a news site can be challenging, especially with the constant pressure to provide accurate and timely information to readers. Without a content management system (CMS), managing and publishing news articles can be a daunting task.
Here are some of the challenges of running a news website and how CMS can help overcome them.
By leveraging a CMS’ power, news sites can stay ahead of the curve and continue to provide their readers with the latest and most relevant news content.
There are a few things that set the best content management systems (CMSs) apart from the crowd. These are speed, reliability, feature integration such as omnichannel distribution, automation, modular elements, SEO and scalability.
Let’s briefly look at each of these below before moving on to our list.
How fast a page loads is important because it can determine its ranking within search engine results pages (SERPs) and it impacts its bounce rate.
According to Google, bounce rates climb by 32% after just three seconds of page loading. In five seconds, that number rises to 90%. Those statistics alone showcase just how important site speed is in this digital era.
Since page speed is a key aspect of core web vitals (CWVs), it can also impact a page’s position in search rankings.
Social media is becoming one of the leading sources of news, with nearly one-third of all Americans receiving news from Facebook alone. With such a large portion of readers spread across multiple platforms, it is important for publishers to be able to publish content across multiple media channels simultaneously.
It is an important feature, then, for a CMS to be able to streamline this process down to a single push of a button.
Being able to automate several newsroom functions is another key thing to look for when choosing a CMS. Being able to create personalized article templates can dramatically increase productivity levels.
The less a content creator has to worry about coding, the more productive they can be. Modular block elements can reduce the amount of effort required for both an article’s design and interactivity.
Modular elements can take the stress out of trying to embed rich media, with images, audio and videos easily added with just a few clicks
A CMS should automate some aspects of SEO for publishers and be able to make suggestions on how to optimize their content.
As a publication steadily grows traffic, the CMS should be able to adapt to that growth without tripping over. Moreover, additional staff members may need to work on the backend as the site expands, and a good CMS should be able to scale here as well.
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WordPress is by far the most popular CMS on this list — and for good reason. Headless WordPress websites make up one-third of all websites on the internet, and WordPress VIP Plus is used by popular brands and companies such as Facebook, Salesforce and CNN.
WordPress is a modular-based CMS, meaning it offers many block-like elements that publishers can arrange as they desire. This system is designed to be easy to use and can boost the productivity of contributors by simplifying the construction of design and structure elements. WordPress VIP Plus even allows publishers to create their own “blocks”, adding an extra layer of customization or automation.
WordPress VIP Plus boasts an average four-fold return on investment. The platform also offers omnichannel distribution, allowing for content to be automatically posted across multiple media channels and platforms from within the CMS. Because WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS, it tends to be one of the first ones supported by emerging technologies as well.
WordPress VIP Plus’ price starts at $25,000 per year. This price is variable, however, as the actual price is based on the number of HTTPS requests — or page views — a site receives.
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Storipress is a CMS that is purpose-built for the editor and includes many tools and features that can be used for tracking content and increasing workflow productivity. Storipress can double as an editorial calendar, providing a birds-eye view of content and projected publishing dates.
Storipress’ laser focus on the editorial process is reflected in its impressive suite of features. It comes with visual editing, meaning editors can make adjustments to the publication’s content and see how their changes impact the user’s experience in real time.
Storipress also features collaborative editing where multiple editors and writers can contribute to content simultaneously and even allows editors to leave comments within the content just like in word processing software such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs.
Storipress claims to be one of the fastest-loading CMS on this list, noting that it’s twice as fast as Google’s AMP and 50% faster than the New York Times site. This is achieved by reducing the size of their web pages by using the web development architecture JAMstack.
The editor-focused approach can even be traced to Storipress’s pricing structure, where publishers only pay for the number of admins — individuals in control of publishing content — they wish to have. Contributors, such as writers, come free.
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Rebelmouse is dedicated to optimizing user experience and SEO for publishers by generating some of the fastest load times for sites. A variety of companies use Rebelmouse, including Upworthy, Indy100, OZ and Market News, and the platform serves an audience of 120 million users a month.
This CMS automatically adjusts publishers’ content to match the ever-changing guidelines of SEO. It is a completely version-less CMS, receiving automatic updates that are applied by the developers behind the scenes. Rebelmouse also guarantees a 99.99% uptime for the site making it a reliable CMS for keeping a site online and generating views.
Rebelmouse claims to create the fastest sites on the web, with its first input delay (FID) a tenth of that of a traditional CMS. This makes Rebelmouse a strong contender for sites that generate a high amount of traffic, as speeds will stay consistent across a wide range of readers.
Rebelmouse has a price tag of $5,000 per month, which makes it one of the more expensive CMSs on this list. As such, its a more obvious choice for large publishers who stand to gain the most with its improved page speeds and reach.
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Arc XP is an industry-leading CMS that pushes an agile content creation strategy. It is used by well-known corporations and groups such as Graham Media Group, BP and the Golden State Warriors.
The CMS presents a streamlined workflow for editors by including rich text editing software and the ability to templatize content. Arc XP is a centralized management tool for digital assets and can be used to distribute content across a variety of platforms such as social media sites and off-site platforms such as Apple News.
Arc XP has many built-in features that can be used to engage readers through interactive elements, such as a video player, and a built-in subscription service allowing for an easy-to-set-up paywall and other monetization methods. The CMS also offers inbuilt identity resolution features such as account generation and bit filtering such as CAPTCHA.
The CMS comes in at around $9,000 per month, but also includes a variable cost depending on the amount of traffic a publisher’s site generates.
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Publisher Plus is a CMS with deep social integration for social media marketing — a singular platform publishers can use to post across multiple media channels. Companies such as Business Post, JOE and the Irish Post use the platform.
With tools such as image and video management, content tagging and categorization, Publisher Plus serves as a competent media indexation tool. Publisher Plus also has an Adobe InDesign plugin that can help enhance content and tailor it to targeted audiences.
Publisher Plus also has an advanced level of statistics available to its clients. The CMS can provide data on bounce rates, session duration and social shares, which help to measure audience engagement.
Publisher Plus supports several different ways to monetize content. The CMS is fully integrated with Google Adsense, and also helps to connect with various ad tech partners, such as supply-side platforms (SSPs) and ad block monetization providers.
Publisher Plus also includes a customizable online newspaper subscription service with their Paywall Plus, which includes secure payment methods through a custom portal.
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Superdesk functions as a digital workspace, set to automate all the functions of a newsroom. It is used by various press agencies such as the Australian Associated Press, Belga Press and the Canadian Press and serves up to 80 million users per month.
Superdesk has a modular, API-centric design. Features can be built, re-used and templatized to fit a publisher’s needs. The modular design enhances workflow productivity and ensures consistency throughout articles and content.
Superdesk has been built alongside journalists, making sure the CMS has been created to their specifications. The CMS allows individual journalists and editors to customize their workspaces and dictionaries and allows them to rapidly update stories to reflect breaking news changes.
There are three different options when it comes to pricing. There is a lite version that allows up to 25 concurrent users and costs €250 (~$245) per month. There is also a Pro version that allows up to 100 users and costs up €2,990 (~$2,915) per month. If a publisher needs more, they can contact Superdesk directly for a quote.
For a closer look at Superdesk’s various features and how they work, check out our deep dive with the digital newsroom platform.
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Contentful is a CMS that hosts more than 30,000 websites with over 400,000 community members. The CMS has been employed by companies such as Intercom, Vodafone, and Scotiabank.
Contentful, similar to others on this list, provides a multichannel publishing solution. Contentful’s UX is entirely customizable and able to be shaped to a publisher’s need with no prior coding experience. Contentful also guarantees a 99.99% website uptime whilst maintaining compliance and security standards.
The CMS has several strategies to optimize site load times to reduce bounce rates. These strategies include advanced caching techniques that use external content delivery networks to reach load times below 100ms. The CMS also supports the AVIF format for images to further reduce the load time.
Contentful has a base option that is completely free, which is useful for smaller publishers and for larger ones that wish to test out its features. The team version of Contentful starts at $300 per month and allows upgrade to Medium for an additional $350 per month. For major publications, the higher tier of features may be a necessity, as the mid-tier option is limited to only a few projects and a single team.
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PurplePublish is a CMS that is particularly strong in creating articles for both news sites and entertainment. The CMS is used by corporations such as NewsCorp, National Geographic and Vogue.
One unique feature of PurplePublish is its use of AI automation for various features that enhance contributor workflow. These features include automated article linking, a recommendation engine and a system that allows publishers to find up-to-date news. This is all bundled together in a modular creation system that provides a substantial boost to content generation.
PurplePublish includes several unique interactive elements within its CMS that can be used to create a unique reading environment, such as a survey in the form of a value-based slider and videos.
The system has an annual subscription payment method based on the projected amount of page impressions a site generates. However, alongside the annual subscription, publishers also incur a one-time customer transfer fee when they onboard their customer data for use in email lists, newsletters and account generation.
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The mobile-based CMS, Wehaa, has been manufactured to optimize site speed and SEO for mobile devices. Companies that use it include the likes of The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and Black Press Media.
As a mobile-friendly CMS, Wehaa is a particularly strong option for publishers with audience segments who usually browse their content through mobile devices. The ad placement on Wehaa has been optimized for mobile screens, meaning more ad revenue for publishers from mobile users. This includes an option for a featured banner that provides exposure for a publisher’s sponsor.
The CMS also specializes in certain industries, such as the real estate and automobile industries, with programs that can showcase guides and contests. Particularly of interest to some marketers, especially those that deal with listings, is Wehaa’s search engine, which can direct customers to valuable listings through the use of keywords.
Wehaa also includes features dedicated to election coverage, with interactive elements to track outcomes in an engaging format. This alone makes it a strong contender for publishers who deal with political news.
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Quintype’s Bold is a headless CMS designed to help distribute and monetize content, and it is one of the cheaper ones on this list. Quintype is employed by companies such as the Sakal Media Group, Karjalainen and the Free Press Journal.
Despite the lower costs, this CMS can still perform all of a typical CMS’ standard functions. Quintype can provide a live preview of content before it’s published, provides omnichannel distribution and is also integrated into Google AMP, ensuring faster load times for sites.
One of the most interesting features that Quintype provides is a machine learning algorithm, which the CMS uses to tailor publishers’ content to their audiences, as well as a suite of analytical tools that can be used to measure performance.
The pricing for Quintype depends on the specific products that users decide to subscribe to. For instance, if users opt for Pagebuilder and Ahead in addition to the Bold CMS, the pricing will begin at $100. The overall cost will vary depending on how many features a publisher needs. However, Quintype is one of the cheapest options on this list.
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Drupal is a decoupled CMS with a malleable front end. While Drupal’s content management process is an easy-to-use, simple experience for publishers, there is an extensive amount of customization available to an experienced developer. Drupal is used by companies such as Viacom, Walt Disney and Twenty First Century Fox.
Drupal is integrated with a content delivery network (CDN) which, alongside other performance-enhancing features, ensures that sites hosted via drupal load quickly. The site performance also works alongside sites with high-burst traffic, such as during the GRAMMY awards, and scales upwards to handle the stress. Drupal also features a seamless translation of various languages.
One thing to be wary of is that Drupal has experienced multiple security breaches previously — including a breach where the information of more than 1 million accounts was leaked. Although this particular data breach was in 2013, Drupal continues to experience some critical flaws.
Drupal has a pricing structure that scales with the size of a company. This means smaller companies can experience relatively low costs. For a larger company, a standard Drupal project with minimal custom development initially takes between 6-8 weeks to build might cost between $30,000 and $40,000 on average, although this is a figure put forward by competitor Zesty.
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Hocalwire is a digital newsroom platform and CMS used by more than 70 newsrooms globally and is dedicated as a single-point reporter module that sports more than 1 million users.
Hocalwire provides a seamless, automated workflow for newsroom processes such as monitoring, gathering, creating and packaging, distribution and monetization, while also helping to cut costs. The CMS also claims to be one of the fastest-loading systems on this list with a load time it says is four times faster than the average CMS.
Hocalwire has two different purchasing options: a basic plan that costs around $500 per month and a more advanced plan — that offers more third-party integrations, custom schema support and an advanced SEO package — that costs around $1,500 per month.
Publishers can add additional features to the basic plan to create a custom price. There is also a one-time onboarding fee based on the amount of data and website design.
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Unlike other CMSs on this list, Ghost’s business model markets towards individual, independent journalists and blogging platforms more than large media publications and newsrooms. The CMS features independent publications such as The Lever by David Sirota and Tangle by Isaac Saul.
Ghost’s strength lies in its simple UX. The CMS is designed for making detailed, professional-looking articles with uncomplicated, easy-to-use tools. Ghost provides a set of free themes for journalists to keep their style consistent, while also allowing them to craft their own.
Ghost has a built-in distribution method via email and newsletter, and offers journalists the ability to segment their audiences to send articles based on user preference, keeping audiences engaged with the content they want to see. Ghost also provides journalists with an integrated monetization system in the form of paywall content with native analytics to provide insights into audience engagement.
Ghost offers four pricing options that vary based on the size of the audience. This system allows Ghost to be affordable for small-scale publications. The prices below pertain to a 500-member audience:
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Glide is a next-gen, cloud-native publishing platform built on the back of Amazon Web Services. Glide is also signed off on the highest level of Amazon certificate, making it one of the most agile CMSs. It is used by the news website The Sunday Times, as well as Daily Mail and Hello!.
There is no back-end in Glide — using the CMS requires absolutely no development knowledge. Glide is entirely cloud-based, meaning that the product is also version-less. Updates happen regularly with no disturbance to workflow.
With its wide range of editorial tools, Glide boasts an impressive 75% increase in production. Glide utilizes APIs and automation to cut down on unnecessary elements of content creation. Third-party essential software — such as Slack, Zephyr and Getty Images — can be easily integrated by publishers, making Glide a universal tool for all aspects of content creation.
Currently, the trial build of Glide costs $7,500 per month.
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Stibo DX’s Cue is a popular, cloud-based CMS made expressly to tackle newsroom challenges. Major publications including The New York Times, The Economist and The West Australian use the platform.
Cue’s story editor can combine text with rich media such as images and videos, as well as integrate and embed social media content. From Cue, publishers can add a variety of media channels to publish their content everywhere at once. It’s an open-source platform that can integrate a wide range of third-party software.
One of Cue’s key features is how it can boost the efficiency of its users by consolidating the UX. Third-party software, such as Slack, can be integrated into Cue’s taskbar, letting publishers move across important channels without having to juggle different software and windows.
Cue can scale with a publisher, with the cost rising alongside the number of features needed and the volume of traffic received. Cue also integrates with Amazon Web Services to guarantee site uptime and durability as the number of people using the site climbs.
There are three CMSs whose load times beat the rest: Rebelmouse, Storipress and WordPress VIP Plus. Of those three, the clear winner is Rebelmouse.
Rebelmouse continuously shaved its load times down to milliseconds. It has managed to do so by rigorously following Google’s guidelines, and constantly evolving its specifications to match. Rebelmouse’s code has been simplified to speed up load times but is still able to run features like advertisements and rich media.
The core web vitals (CWVs) for sites hosted on Rebelmouse are generally well above its competition, especially in its most recent months. However, Rebelmouse’s pool of data is far more limited than WordPress, with Rebelmouse only containing 95 data sets vs WordPress’s 5.5 million. With such a difference in website numbers, the data set is not fantastic for a comparison — however, Rebelmouse does provide case studies to support its claims about page load speeds.
While Rebelmouse delivers on SEO and site speed, what makes the other two CMS able to compete with it, are the in-depth, brilliant content management tools both WordPress and Storipress provide.
Storipress a rather new CMS, only seeing its open beta released in 2021. Unfortunately, the statistics for its web vitals haven’t been added to the Core Web Vital Technologies (CWVT) report. However, its website elaborates a little more about its performance.
Using Google’s PageSpeed Insights, Storipress showcased a page load time of 1.2 seconds and a page vitals score of 91 on its website.
We decided to test these speeds for ourselves on a site hosted by Storipress called Missing Perspectives, and came out with a page load time of 3.7 seconds but a page vitals score of 93. PageSpeed Insights may be a bit fickle at times, but when visiting the site ourselves its first paints loaded near instantly.
These are competent times and come alongside features such as visual and collaborative editing, which makes for good editorial additions to a publisher’s workflow.
Likewise, WordPress also features a page load time in their case study with Sneaker News of 1.2 seconds. However, WordPress’s page vitals are a little more complex, with several different data sets in the CWVT report. Overall, the page vitals for free WordPress fell short except for the WordPress AMP sites — although those still fell short compared to Rebelmouse.
However, WordPress tends to be the go-to CMS for many publishers and enjoys the many benefits that come with that title, such as being one of the first CMSs to be integrated with emerging technologies.
In a competitive digital landscape, a CMS has become a necessary tool for publishers to streamline their editorial workflows and produce content that stands out. They can be an important factor when it comes to determining search engine rankings for a publisher’s site — especially when it comes to loading times.
While there are some standouts — such as Rebelmouse, WordPress VIP Plus and Storipress — choosing the best one is ultimately determined by publishers’ specific needs.
Although a CMS can enhance the efficiency of the editorial workflow, it is only the tip of the iceberg. Consider checking out our guide on how to develop and optimize editorial workflows.
WordPress is the most widely used Content Management System (CMS) in the world, powering more than 43% of all websites. Other popular CMS platforms include Joomla and Drupal, but they have a significantly smaller market share compared to WordPress.
The BBC primarily uses its in-house developed platform called the BBC CMS. However, it also uses other third-party CMS systems for some projects.
WordPress is one of the most popular CMS platforms, with a large user community and a wide range of plugins and themes available. It is well-suited for blogs, small businesses and simple websites. However, whether it’s the “best” CMS depends on the specific needs and goals of each individual user.
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Subscribe to our newsletter and receive the ultimate list of smart technologies and free resources to boost your publisher SEO and content efforts.
Join 3,000+ publishers around the world and get exclusive tips and resources delivered to your inbox.
Being a part of the SODP Community has made a real impact on my problem-solving at work. From bouncing off paywalls solution ideas to thinking about an SEO strategy for my paywall, it’s the most value-adding professional community I’m a part of.
Yvette Dimiri, Head of Growth, Stears
