Now don’t get us wrong, WordPress is one of our favorite applications. With good reason, it’s a high quality, open source blog publishing application. It’s a mature and highly polished application with development starting in 2003, and it has an active community. The largest self-host blogging tool, a full content management system, which can be extended through thousands of widgets, plugins, and themes, is a good fit for many projects. The software was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL.
WordPress instantly springs to mind when any project is planned that needs a content management system. However, WordPress can be complicated, offering more bells and whistles than actually needed or wanted. While it’s always tempting to stick with familiar territory, this can actually stifle creativity and does not enhance an individual’s skill-set.
When embarking on a new project, there’s a lot to be said experimenting with new software. Fortunately, WordPress is not the only option. We identify lightweight open source content management systems / static site generators ready to be deployed that can transform a web site.
Some of the content management systems featured in this article are well publicized, but there are many good management systems that you may not have heard of that are perfectly suited for small projects.
Here is our verdict with our recommendations. They are all free and open source goodness.
Let’s explore the 6 lightweight content management systems at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screenshot, together with links to relevant resources.
| Lightweight Alternatives to WordPress | |
|---|---|
| Hugo | Fast framework for building websites |
| Grav | Super fast modern CMS focusing on speed and simplicity. No installation |
| Jekyll | Blog-aware static site generator |
| Pico | Blazing speed, flexibility, and a lightweight footprint |
| GetSimple CMS | Saves all data to structured XML-files |
| Textpattern | Flexible, elegant and easy-to-use open source CMS |
This article has been revamped in line with our recent announcement.
 Read our complete collection of recommended free and open source software. Our curated compilation covers all categories of software. The software collection forms part of our series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. There are hundreds of in-depth reviews, open source alternatives to proprietary software from large corporations like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. There are also fun things to try, hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. |
Thanks a lot. It is exactly what I needed
Maybe not really lightweight…
ClassicPress – a lightweight, stable, instantly familiar free open-source content management system. Based on WordPress without the block editor (Gutenberg).
That fork of WordPress is most certainly not lightweight. But it looks kinda interesting
Please remove October, it’s now proprietary software.
Alex, thanks for bringing this to our attention. It’s always disappointing when a project abandons the open source model. We’ll be updating this roundup very shortly (and removing October).