What is Craft CMS in 2026?
Craft CMS is a PHP content management system built on the Yii 2 framework, sold under a commercial licence and run on your own hosting or on Craft Cloud. Craft 5 is the current major line. Editors work in a clean control panel, and developers model content with fields and sections instead of fixed page types.
Craft has a built-in GraphQL API in every edition, plus the Element API plugin for custom JSON endpoints. That makes it a hybrid platform: you can render pages with Twig, or run it headless behind Next.js or Astro. If the term is new, read what a headless CMS is first.
Who Craft suits
Craft fits agencies and in-house teams that build bespoke marketing sites, publisher sites and editorial products with a lot of structured content. It is a weaker fit if you need a large plugin marketplace of ready-made page templates, or if your developers do not write PHP.
As of October 2026, the Craft pricing page lists these self-hosted editions:
| Edition | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Solo | Free | One user, not recommended by Craft for client work |
| Team | $279 per project | Up to five users, one year of updates, then $99 per year |
| Pro | $399 per project | Unlimited users and groups, branded control panel |
| Enterprise | Custom | SAML SSO, custom licence, premium support |
Keep Craft and add a headless frontend
Keep Craft when editors like it and the content model is sound. The slow part is usually the Twig templates and the hosting, not the CMS. Moving only the presentation layer fixes that without a content migration.
In that setup Craft stays the source of truth. Its GraphQL API exposes a public schema for open content and private schemas guarded by tokens. A Next.js or Astro site reads the schema at build time or on request, and a webhook on save triggers a rebuild. Craft also has a headlessMode setting, which turns off front-end routing so the install serves only the control panel and the APIs. Our Next.js development and Astro development teams build that layer.
When to move off Craft, and to what
Craft is a good platform. We suggest leaving it in a few cases:
- Your team is TypeScript only and wants the CMS inside the application repository. Payload CMS fits that.
- You want a free, open source licence with no per-project fee and a wider plugin base. Look at the open source headless CMS list.
- You need .NET, because the rest of your stack is Microsoft. Umbraco is the closer match.
Whatever the target, we plan the move around content mapping, media and redirects. The CMS migration checklist lists the checks, and our migration services page describes how we run them.
What we build on Craft
- Custom content models, sections and entry types for large editorial sites.
- Plugins and modules in PHP: custom field types, import jobs, search sync.
- GraphQL schemas scoped per client, with token handling and query caching.
- A headless frontend in Next.js or Astro, with preview for editors.
- Upgrades to Craft 5 from older major versions, including plugin compatibility checks.
- Content migration from WordPress or Drupal, with URL mapping and redirects.
- Security patching. Craft shipped an urgent fix for the remote code execution flaw CVE-2025-32432 in 2025, so an unpatched install is a real risk.
If you need developers inside your team instead of a project, hire Craft CMS developers.
