Like said - there isn't an answer to rule them all.
CMSs I know and like:
The open source, flat-first, Laravel + Git powered CMS designed for building beautiful, easy to manage websites.
statamic.com
Rapidly create a custom admin console that is intuitive, powerful and flexible. Twill is an open source CMS toolkit for Laravel, crafted by AREA 17.
twill.io
Strapi is the next-gen headless CMS, open-source, javascript, enabling content-rich experiences to be created, managed and exposed to any digital device.
strapi.io
But also more generic ones like:
nova.laravel.com
Store & retrieve your static content in plain text files - spatie/sheets
github.com
This package aims to provide the most common and flexible CMS features to your Laravel project. - Astrotomic/stancy
github.com
And like you can see -
all of them are Laravel based. So my field of decision is pretty limited, why? Because I nearly never use CMSs and if so only for a small part of the whole application. So I need a solid and flexible base framework I can work with for my app and add the CMS on top.
There are a lot of questions to decide for a CMS:
- do you need authentication/authorization
- how many different entities do you have to manage
- do you want a pre-defined template/theme engine or a headless one
- do you need flexibility in adding your own code or a pre-defined plugin system
- what kind of content do you have to manage (short/long texts, single/multiple fields per entity, images, videos, files, ...)
- which kind of editor do you like (WYSIWYG, markdown, HTML, inline, ...)
- do you want a centralized backend or a local one
- how often do you change content
- who has to manage content
And several more - these are only the first I can imagine.
And depending on all this you will get to a list of CMSs that match your criteria and some of them do some things better and the others do other things better. I can highly recommend a decision-matrix to get to a good result. 😉