What is the best free CMS platform?

The best free CMS depends on which kind of free you mean. If you're happy to run a server, self-hosted WordPress is the safest default and Ghost is the nicer place to write. If you want no server and no monthly bill at all, Hugo or Astro on a free static host is the cheapest setup that really works. If you want a no-code start, the free tiers of WordPress.com and Wix will get you online, with real limits attached: no custom domain on either, and a banner ad on Wix.

Disclosure: I work on VeloCMS, and it's in the list. It sits last, gets an entry about the size of its neighbours' (weaknesses included), and I'll say plainly that it is not the pick for a zero-budget reader. It has no free plan, only a 14-day trial.

Last verified: 2026-10-10.

A note on method. Every price, limit and licence below was read from the vendor's own page or repository on 2026-10-10. Where a page wouldn't load or wouldn't show a clear number, I say so instead of quoting a number from memory. Wix's paid prices rendered in a currency I couldn't pin down, so I've left them out. Opinions are marked as mine.

What does "free CMS" actually mean?

Three different things hide behind the phrase, and mixing them up is how people end up with a surprise bill or a site they can't grow.

The first is free software that you host yourself. The licence costs nothing and you can run it anywhere, but you supply the server, the database, the updates and the backups. WordPress.org, Ghost, Strapi, Decap CMS, Hugo and Astro all live here.

The second is a free tier of someone else's hosted product. Nothing to install, nothing to patch, and the vendor decides the walls: a subdomain instead of your own address, a page cap, a bandwidth cap, a banner, a feature that's switched off until you pay. WordPress.com, Wix, Webflow and Sanity are in this group.

The third is the stuff that stays on the bill whichever of the first two you pick: the domain name, email delivery, backups, monitoring, and your own hours. That one has no logo and no pricing page, which is why it gets forgotten.

Keep those three apart and the question gets easier. "Best free CMS" for a hobby blog and "best free CMS" for a client who will pay you for the site are different questions with different answers.

Is a free CMS really free?

Rarely, once the site is live. The software can be zero. The things around it usually aren't.

Ghost does something unusual for a vendor: it prints the arithmetic. Its hosting documentation (accessed 2026-10-10) says self-hosting starts "from $10/mo" for a server with at least 1 GB of memory, then lists services you'd add separately: a CDN and WAF from $20/mo, newsletter delivery from $15/mo, analytics from $10/mo, backups from $5/mo and an image editor from $12/mo. Ghost sells the managed version, so read the list with that in mind, but the categories are the useful part. A self-hosted anything needs a server, a way to send email, a place to put backups and something to tell you when it falls over.

Domains are the other classic. A few vendors throw in a first-year domain: WordPress.com says all paid plans include a free custom domain for the first year, Wix's domains help page offers a one-year domain voucher with select yearly or multi-year Premium and Studio plans, and Ghost's pricing page carries a one-year .link domain promotion with the line that registrations "renew at standard rates after the first year." If you'd rather buy it yourself, Cloudflare says its registrar does not mark up domain prices, charging only what registries and ICANN charge (the page gives no example price, so check the live number for your extension).

Email is where free tiers run out fastest. Resend's free plan allows 3,000 emails a month with a 100-a-day cap and three domains, and its Pro plan starts at $20 a month for 50,000. Brevo advertises a free-forever plan that sends up to 300 emails a day once your account is approved. Those are fine for a form notification or a small list, and tight for a weekly newsletter that's growing.

Then there's time, which I'd call the biggest line item and which no vendor prints. A self-hosted stack means you are the on-call engineer for your own blog. That's a fair price for some people (it's how many of us learned) and a poor one for a small business owner who just wants the contact form to work. The free tiers of hosted products flip the trade: your time is safe, your options are narrow.

Which free CMS is best for a blog?

Here's a quick map before the detail. Each line is a situation, then my pick and the reason.

You want the biggest ecosystem and don't mind running it: WordPress.org, because plugins, themes and freelancers are everywhere.
You want a clean writing tool and a newsletter, and can run Node: self-hosted Ghost.
You're a developer and want the cheapest, fastest-loading site: Hugo or Astro on a free static host.
You want an editing screen on top of a static site: Decap CMS, if you're comfortable with Git.
You want zero setup and zero cost, and accept the walls: WordPress.com free or Wix free.
You're building something custom and need an API: Strapi (self-hosted) or Sanity's free plan.
You want blog, newsletter, membership and shop under one login and can pay: a paid all-in-one, which is where VeloCMS sits.

Now the options one at a time, in the order I'd reach for them on a zero budget.

The options, one at a time

WordPress.org (self-hosted WordPress)

WordPress is licensed under the GPL (version 2 or later, per wordpress.org/about), which gives you the freedom to run, study, change and redistribute it. That's the "free" you can bank on: nobody can switch it off or put it behind a plan. Its requirements page recommends PHP 8.3 or greater, MariaDB 10.11 or greater or MySQL 8.0 or greater, Apache or Nginx, and HTTPS.

The strength is the ecosystem. If a problem exists, someone has probably written a plugin or a tutorial for it, and finding a person who knows the system is easy. The weakness is that the ecosystem is also the maintenance surface. You pick the host, you keep PHP and the database current, you choose plugins and vet them, and you test restoring backups. I haven't priced hosting here because the range is wide enough that any single number would be a guess. Budget something for it, and don't confuse this with WordPress.com, which is the next entry and a different product.

WordPress.com (the hosted free plan)

The free plan gives you a WordPress.com subdomain, 1 GB of storage, unlimited pages and posts, and basic stats for the last seven days. The pricing page also lists what it doesn't include: a custom domain, plugin installation, ad-free browsing for visitors, and premium themes.

So it's a decent place to try writing and a poor place to build a brand. The first paid step is Personal at $4 a month on annual billing ($9 month to month), which brings 6 GB and a free custom domain for the first year. Business is $25 a month on annual billing ($40 monthly) with 50 GB, and Commerce is $45 on annual billing. My read is that the free plan works better as a long trial than as a place to stay.

Ghost (self-hosted, MIT-licensed)

Ghost's repository is released under the MIT licence, and the project describes itself as independent technology for publishing, memberships, subscriptions and newsletters. If you like a focused editor and want newsletters and paid memberships in the core product, that focus is its appeal.

Be clear about what "free" means here. Ghost(Pro), the hosted service, has no free plan: Starter is $18 a month billed yearly for 1,000 members and one staff user, Publisher is $29, and Business is $199. The page shows "Try for free" buttons, which I read as a trial (I couldn't find a trial length on the page, so check before you sign up). The free route is self-hosting, and the docs list an Ubuntu LTS server, Node.js 22, MySQL 8, NGINX and at least 1 GB of memory, plus the extra services priced above. Updates and security patches are yours. Great for a technical writer, a real chore for everyone else.

Strapi (open-source headless CMS)

Strapi's Community edition is MIT-licensed and, per its pricing page, includes role-based access, REST and GraphQL APIs and unlimited entries and API calls. The page says what stays out of the free edition: Strapi AI, Live Preview, Releases and Content History. Growth, the first paid tier, is $45 a month for three seats.

Think of it as a backend, not a website. You get an admin panel and an API, and you build the front end yourself. The CLI install docs require an active or maintenance LTS version of Node, default to SQLite, and list MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and SQLite as supported databases, each with a recommended version. They also note that self-hosted content sits by default in a SQLite file in a .tmp folder, which is a good reason (my view) to set up a real database before you have real content. I found no free tier on Strapi Cloud; its plans start at $35 per project per month. It's a strong pick if your project is more app than blog, and overkill for a personal site.

Hugo and Astro (static site generators)

These are free in the strongest sense: tools that turn files into a folder of HTML, which any static host serves. Hugo is Apache-2.0 licensed per its GitHub repository and calls itself the world's fastest framework for building websites (a vendor claim, not my measurement). Astro is MIT-licensed, describes itself as a framework optimized for fast, content-driven sites, and ships adapters for Netlify, Vercel, AWS and other hosts.

What you get is a site that can sit on a free host, a version history for free because it's all in Git, and almost nothing to patch at runtime. What you give up is an admin screen. There's no login for a non-technical editor, no built-in forms, comments or members, and anything dynamic means bolting on a third-party service. For a developer's blog or documentation, I'd pick this first. For a client who wants to edit their own pages, I wouldn't, at least not without the next entry.

Decap CMS (a Git-based editor for static sites)

Decap CMS is the answer to "can a static site have an editing screen?" It's MIT-licensed and describes itself as open source content management for your Git workflow: content stays in your repository, and the editor writes commits to it. It works with generators such as Hugo and Jekyll.

The catch is in the plumbing. The open-source version asks you to bring your own authentication and backend, so you'll configure a Git provider and a login path yourself. The site mentions a paid extension, Decap Turbo, for hosted authentication and roles, which is useful to know about and not something I've priced. Decap suits a small team that already lives in Git and wants an editor for the one or two non-developers. It's less comfortable if "Git" is a foreign word to your editor.

Wix (free plan)

Wix offers a free plan with no credit card required, a drag-and-drop editor and a template library. The free site lives at a Wix-branded address instead of your own domain. Wix's support page on the banner ad says a free site includes a Wix banner ad at the top and a Wix favicon in the browser tab, and that removing the banner needs a Premium plan.

It's the lowest-effort way for a non-technical person to get a visual site online, and for a first look at whether you want a website at all, that's useful. It's a weak choice for a serious blog, because the cap isn't a feature cap but an identity cap: your readers see Wix's address and Wix's ad. Wix says select yearly Premium plans come with a free domain for a year. I won't quote the plan prices, because the page showed them in a currency and tax format I couldn't confirm.

Webflow (Starter plan)

Webflow's free Starter site plan, per its pricing page, gives you a webflow.io domain, a limited CMS, 2 static pages, 1 GB of bandwidth and 50 form submissions. That's a sandbox. The next step, Basic, is $15 a month billed yearly and adds a custom domain, 300 static pages and 10 GB of bandwidth and is pitched at simple sites that don't need a CMS, while Premium, the plan that adds the CMS, is $25 a month billed yearly.

Webflow is a design tool first. If you care about pixel-level control without writing code, nothing else here comes close, and a free Starter site is a good place to find out whether you can stand the learning curve (my view). I couldn't open Webflow's help article on plan limits (it returned a 403), so I'm quoting only what the pricing page lists. A blog on this free plan would hit the page and CMS ceilings fast.

Sanity (free plan)

Sanity is a hosted content backend, and its free plan has the most room of the hosted ones here. The page lists up to 20 user seats (administrator and viewer roles only), 2 public datasets, 10,000 documents, 1M API CDN requests and 250,000 API requests a month, plus 100 GB of bandwidth and 100 GB of asset storage. Studio hosting is free, and the page I read mentions no restriction on commercial use. Growth is $15 per seat per month.

The free plan has fences worth knowing about: both datasets must be public, draft change review is limited to three days, and full history isn't included. The deeper catch is the same as Strapi's: Sanity stores content and serves an API, and somebody has to build the website. Pair it with Astro or Next.js and a free static host and you have a capable free stack, assuming you can build it. (Storyblok has a free Starter plan on its pricing page, and Contentful's help center has a page about its Free plan, but Contentful's pricing page rate-limited my requests, so I'm not quoting numbers for it.)

VeloCMS (no free plan, 14-day trial)

VeloCMS is a hosted all-in-one: blog, newsletter, membership and a small store under one login. It has no free plan. Pro is $9 a month, Business $29 and Agency $69, in USD, and every plan starts with a 14-day trial. The pricing page says a card is collected at signup and nothing is charged until day 15; cancel before then and you pay nothing.

Pro lists a custom domain, a visual page builder with 70+ blocks, membership and paywall with a 0% platform fee, a newsletter, e-commerce and a WordPress migration wizard, within 5 GB of storage, 5,000 subscribers and one site. Reader payments run through your own Stripe or PayPal account, so their fees still apply.

Now the limits. The developer FAQ says the application is proprietary and managed-only: no self-hosted edition and no source access. It also says third-party plugin and theme development isn't open yet. It's a much younger product with a smaller community than WordPress. For a zero-budget reader it is the wrong answer: every other option above can be free, and this one can't.

Where can you host a free site for free?

Static sites (Hugo, Astro, Decap's output) can sit on free hosts, and the differences between the hosts matter more than the marketing suggests.

Cloudflare Pages lists, for its free plan, 500 builds a month, one build at a time, up to 20,000 files per site, a 25 MiB cap per asset, 100 projects per account and 100 custom domains per project. Its Functions pricing page says static asset requests are free and unlimited on free and paid plans, while Functions requests count against the Workers Free quota of 100,000 requests a day. For a blog, the 25 MiB asset cap is the one you'd hit, with a video.

Netlify's free plan is $0 and credit-based: 300 credits a month, with custom domains and SSL, unlimited deploy previews and a global CDN. The page shows a Personal plan at $9 a month (1,000 credits) and Pro at $20 a month (3,000 credits). The exact conversion from credits to traffic isn't on the page I read, so measure your own usage before you rely on it.

GitHub Pages has a 1 GB size limit on published sites, a soft 100 GB-a-month bandwidth limit and a soft limit of 10 builds an hour. The part that matters for a business: its docs say Pages isn't intended for or allowed as a free hosting service to run your online business, an e-commerce site, or any site primarily directed at commercial transactions or commercial SaaS. A personal blog is fine. A shop isn't.

Vercel's Hobby plan is free and roomy (100 GB of fast data transfer, a million CDN requests), but its docs say it restricts users to non-commercial, personal use only. If the site earns money or belongs to a business, read that before you deploy.

A practical zero-cost stack, then: Astro or Hugo for the site, Git for history, Cloudflare Pages or Netlify for hosting, a domain you register yourself, and Decap or Sanity if someone non-technical must edit. The cost is a domain, plus the afternoon you spend wiring it.

Who is each option best for?

WordPress.org: people who want the largest ecosystem and will own the hosting and patching.
WordPress.com free: someone testing the waters who doesn't need a custom domain or plugins.
Ghost (self-hosted): technical writers who want newsletters and members in one focused tool and can run a Node server.
Strapi: developers building an app or custom site who want a self-hosted API with an admin panel.
Hugo or Astro: developers who want a fast, cheap, version-controlled site with no admin screen.
Decap CMS: small teams already in Git who need an editing screen for one or two non-developers.
Wix free: a first, throwaway look at having a website, accepting a Wix address and a Wix ad.
Webflow Starter: designers evaluating Webflow before paying, not real publishing.
Sanity free: developers with a front end in mind who want a hosted content backend without a bill.
VeloCMS: a solo creator or small team who has decided to pay for blog, newsletter, membership and shop in one login, and who doesn't need WordPress's plugin depth.

When is VeloCMS the wrong choice?

For this question, almost always. If the requirement is zero spend, VeloCMS is out: no free plan, and the trial takes a card. If you want to self-host or read the source, it's out, because there is no self-hosted edition. If you need a niche WordPress plugin, the integration list won't match WordPress's. If you want a typed schema in Git, or to build your own front end on a headless API, Sanity, Strapi or a static stack fits better. It starts to make sense when you've outgrown the free path and you're pricing the plugins, email tool and membership service you'd otherwise stitch together. Even then, price those alternatives before you decide.

FAQ

Is WordPress really free?
The software is, under the GPL. Hosting, a domain, backups and email aren't. WordPress.com also has a free hosted plan, with a subdomain, 1 GB of storage and no plugin installs (pricing).

Is there a free CMS with no ads and a custom domain?
Yes, but not as a hosted free tier from the website builders above. The route is self-hosted software or a static generator on a free host, plus a domain you buy yourself. Wix's free plan shows a banner ad and needs a plan upgrade before you can connect a domain, and WordPress.com's free plan shows ads and lists no custom domain.

Can I run a free CMS for a business?
Check each host's terms. GitHub Pages' limits page says Pages isn't for running an online business or e-commerce site, and Vercel's Hobby plan is restricted to non-commercial personal use. I only read the pricing and limits pages for Cloudflare Pages and Netlify, not their full terms, so check the commercial-use language yourself before relying on either.

What is the cheapest way to send a newsletter from a free stack?
A free email tier. Brevo advertises a free plan sending up to 300 emails a day, and Resend's free plan allows 3,000 emails a month with a 100-a-day cap. Either can be too tight as a list grows.

Does VeloCMS have a free plan?
No. It has a 14-day trial that takes a card at signup, with nothing charged before day 15, and paid plans from $9 a month (pricing).