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Craft CMS
Craft CMS is a self-hosted content platform replacing WordPress and headless SaaS with clean relational modeling, native GraphQL, and Git project configs.
Open-source alternative to — compare it against:
Overview
WordPress couples layouts to third-party plugins and stores configuration directly in runtime database tables. Craft CMS isolates content modeling into clean relational schemas and serializes architecture settings into version-controlled YAML files. For self-hosters and sysadmins, this turns site maintenance from firefighting database drift into a standard Git deployment pipeline.
Why Craft CMS instead of WordPress
WordPress manages content through generic post and postmeta database tables, relying on add-on plugins like Advanced Custom Fields for structured data and wp-cron triggered by web traffic for background jobs. Craft CMS models content as explicit database elements—entries, assets, and categories—with relational integrity in PostgreSQL or MySQL. Asynchronous workloads like image transforms, search indexing, and email delivery run in a dedicated CLI queue daemon (php craft queue/listen), preventing admin tasks from stalling page requests.
The operational difference is most visible during deployments. WordPress stores configuration in the database, forcing operators to run complex database syncs or risk overwriting production content. Craft CMS separates content from configuration through Project Config (config/project/), tracking schemas in Git. Running php craft up applies schema changes deterministically, while allowAdminChanges => false prevents configuration drift in production.
What it does well
- Declarative Project Config: serializes sections, fields, and settings into Git-tracked YAML under
config/project/, applying schema updates viaphp craft upwithout database dumps. - Dedicated queue daemon: offloads image transforms, search indexing, and mail delivery to a CLI background worker managed by systemd or Docker supervisor.
- Native PostgreSQL and MySQL: connects to PostgreSQL 13+ and MySQL 8.0+ via PDO prepared statements, integrating into existing homelab database servers.
- Built-in GraphQL API: exposes structured content models through token-scoped schemas and an embedded GraphiQL explorer without third-party plugins.
- Local asset transforms: generates responsive image variants and WebP conversions directly on local disk or S3-compatible storage using GD or Imagick.
