All websites require their contents to showcase in a very professional way. Since it is very difficult for a single person or team to do it by himself/herself, they look for help in designing and maintaining the websites. This is where the importance of CMS systems props up. These systems are not only helping to create a good site, but also help in managing and updating the site.

These days, most of the web designers/developers are migrating to open source CMS because they got lot of support on the web from online communities.  The rapid development of these communities have made them popular software and web designers first choice. Depending on the media, online communities, and participants in the plugins / add-ons give you the ranking of these CMS.  Here is a selected 10 Free and Best Content Management Systems.

It always creates confusion when choosing these CMS. There are many things first you should know before choosing the CMS for you.  Major thing is your requirement, It depends on your own needs and situation. what type of website you are going to construct? You must be clear on the type of website to choose the right CMS for you. If your needs aren’t very complex—that is, if you’re planning to hire someone to build you a site that’s less than several hundred pages, is generally hierarchically arranged, and will be updated by only a handful of people in your organization—any of the available systems will work fine. But  if you are trying to build a site for banking sector and any financial sector where you need strong security and reliability, at that time you can compare these CMS security wise which one is high secure or which CMS has the high level of security.

If you’re planning to build your site yourself, however—or if you’re planning a site that requires complex cross-referencing of information, a number of owners and editors, or significant custom functionality— it can be worth carefully comparing the systems to choose the one that’s right for you. It’s time-consuming to switch Content Management Systems once you’re up and running, so it’s worth taking time up front to define an infrastructure that will work for the long run.

Then the question rises, How do these systems actually compare to one another? Read my previous post on  13 ways to compare Open Source CMS.

There you will get 13 different areas to compare open source CMS like Ease of Hosting and Installation, security, scalability,  graphical flexibility etc.

Here i have selected 15 free and Best Content Management systems:

1. Wordpress

WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog.  WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 500 web site without paying anyone a license fee and a number of other important freedoms.

2. Joomla

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

3. Drupal

Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world. Drupal is a free software package that allows anyone to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Hundreds of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power an endless variety of sites.

4. Mambo

Mambo is a full featured CMS platform that can be used in making small websites to large corporate websites. You can find hundreds of plugins and add-on packs which makes your Mambo website do more for you. Some of the extensions include forums, multimedia galleries, e-commerce and shopping carts, document management tools, customer relationship managers and lot more.

Mambo is easy to install and once your site is ready, creating and updating content is easy and even a novice user can do that.

Mambo have got lot of support from online communities and if you get any problem you can find the problem online if not you can post to communities so that they can give you a solution.

5. Media Wiki

Media Wiki invented a whole new way of working on the web, and is a CMS for collective authoring of documents, used to power the one of the largest and most popular sites on the internet, Wikipedia. If you need a wiki, it is the best. But it does not include many other functions / extensions of other CMS platforms, doesn’t theme well, most sites look the same. Follows the model to success of doing one thing extremely well, has the support of the Wikipedia Foundation, very popular authoring model.

6. Pligg

Pligg is an open source CMS (Content Management System) that you can download and use for free. Pligg CMS provides social publishing software that encourages visitors to register on your website so that they can submit content and connect with other users. Our software creates websites where stories are created and voted on by members, not website editors. Use Pligg content management system to start your own social publishing community in minutes.

7. Frog

Frog CMS simplifies content management by offering an elegant user interface, flexible templating per page, simple user management and permissions, as well as the tools necessary for file management. Born as phpRadiant in January 2007, Frog CMS is a PHP version of Radiant CMS, a well known Ruby on Rails application. Although the two applications still share a family resemblance, Frog is charting its own development path.

8. Typo3

A CMS used by the multinational company Philips, Typo 3 is known for its efficiency. It offers amazing features for content management. However, the only point to be noted is that it is not very simple to use, especially as an admin. There are more than 1000 tutorials present to guide you, but reading and understanding these tutorials takes dedication and valuable time. The result of the hard work put in by the Administration side is seen as it takes the end users roughly an hour to set up all the required tools. It is supported by PHP and supports most operating systems. Some of its features include an internal search engine, editing on page etc.

9. Umbraco

Umbraco is open source software which is one of the top contenders for the best ASP.net CMS software. This software focuses on and has achieved high standards in accordance with CSS and XHTML. It has a very short setup time – a mere 10 minutes. Its main features include a compact template engine, scheduled publishing and support for most net languages and Ajax frameworks. Its RDMS is MS SQL.

10. Moodle

Moodle is an Open Source Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It has become very popular among educators around the world as a tool for creating online dynamic web sites for their students. To work, it needs to be installed on a web server somewhere, either on one of your own computers or one at a web hosting company.

11. Liferay

Liferay delivers open source enterprise solutions for portals, publishing, content and collaboration.

Liferay, Inc. was founded in 2004 in response to growing demand for Liferay Portal, the market's leading independent portal product that was garnering industry acclaim and adoption across the world. Today, Liferay, Inc. houses a professional services group that provides training, consulting and enterprise support services to our clientele in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific. It also houses a core development team that steers product development.

12. dotCMS

DotCMS is one such software which covers a wide variety of needs. It does so convincing set of features which can be tailored to suit your needs. It offers site-wide templating, inline content editing, MP3 player streaming, content versioning etc. In addition to the above mentioned features, it also offers “on demand installs”, thereby improving its commercial use. However, the admin screens require time and patience to figure out the details. It uses Java technology and supports OS like Windows and UNIX .It has a setup time of roughly 60 minutes.

13. SilverStripe

SilverStripe CMS takes the bottlenecks out of updating content on our website. Just hours after launching our new website, we used it to broadcast warnings about the threat of the Samoan Tsunami to our region. Now, we allow dozens of staff to contribute content to the website because it's so easy to use.

14. MODx

MODx is an open source Content Management System and Application Framework. MODx is free & distributed under the GPL license and is now run by a professional team of developers from all over the world. It's flexible, you can create documents anywhere on your website, assign template variables to templates and control very page type individually. With MODx you can create unique options for each page.

15. Movable Type

Build a website, blog, or social network with Movable Type’s flexible CMS. More publishers and media companies choose Movable Type than any other blog software. Flexible, powerful and fully customizable, Movable Type enables you to quickly create and publish interactive websites and blogs that foster passionate, loyal audiences.

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