The CMS Landscape — WordPress to Headless and Everything Between
WordPress, Contentful, Sanity, Strapi, and Payload compared: market share, architecture, and use cases.
Content management systems are everywhere. Every marketing site, blog, documentation portal, and news outlet runs on some form of CMS. WordPress alone powers over 43% of all websites on the internet. That's not a typo — nearly half of the web runs on a single platform.
But the CMS landscape is shifting. A new generation of headless, API-first platforms is challenging WordPress's dominance, and the choice between them has real architectural implications. Whether you're building a new site, maintaining an existing one, or advising a client, you need to understand the options.
The Two Architectures
Every CMS falls somewhere on a spectrum between two architectures:
Traditional (Monolithic) CMS
The CMS handles everything: content storage, content editing, templating, and rendering
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