Laravel is a popular open-source PHP framework for building scalable enterprise web applications. It is the favorite framework for many PHP developers.
The framework has a vast community of developers, and offers a rich tool set for building reactive scalable apps.
The framework is originally created years ago by Taylor Otwell, since then it has several contributors who keep it fresh, updated and improved with every new release.
Laravel was used to build many enterprises web apps, internal tools, and management solutions, and of course CMS solutions.
Although, there are dozens of PHP based content management systems (CMS), and some dominate the scene as WordPress, and Drupal, some beliefs it is time for new ones with modern technologies.
In this post, we list the best usable open source Laravel-based CMS solution.
1- WinterCMS
WinterCMS is a free open-source Laravel-based CMS that focuses on simplicity and speed. It features a clean interface and a marketplace full of extensions and themes. It is designed to be user-friendly as well as developer, and designer friendly.
You may notice the similarity between October CMS, and that's ok because it is a fork of October CMS that took another turn, by some original founders of October to create Winter CMS.
October CMS was the first popular enterprise-grade CMS that based on Laravel. Many believed it will take over the WordPress place, but it took some different turns later, resulting in the start of WinterCMS.
Since then, dozens of October CMS users migrated to WinterCMS, since October CMS moved to become a paid platform.
2- TypiCMS
TypiCMS is a rich open-source CMS that comes with dozens of features packed as customizable modules.
Unlike October CMS, it is new, and does not have strong community, yet it is easy to deploy, setup and deploy.
TypiCMS developers packed all of its features in modules such as posts, events, news, places, files, and configurations.
3- Lavalite
Lavalite is a free CMS framework that is based in Laravel. It features a responsive layout, and can be customized to work as a real estate, eCommerce, classified, job listing, or a yellow page website.
The developers also offers a minimal framework, and Laravel CRM & ERP framework, as a free open-source project for enterprise use.
Hamza Mousa
4- Twill
Twill is another open-source CMS toolkit for Laravel developers. It comes with a clean interface, advanced yet easy-to-use asset management, visual editor, rich dashboard, and wide search tool.
Twill features multi-languages support, advanced user/ group permission system, and a rich responsive reactive dashboard built with Vue.js.
The project has been active for years, and it is proven reliable in many enterprise projects.
Here is a list of all of its features.
Hamza Mousa
5- VaahCMS
VaahCMS is an open-source web web application development platform that shipped with a headless CMS system for building complex websites.
VaahCMS is built with Laravel 8, Vue, Vuex, Buefy and Bulma which follows Hierarchical Model View Controller (HMVC) structure for its Modules & Themes.
The project is released under the MIT License.
6- Decoy
Decoy is yet another PHP content management system that offers a flexible content editing, revision modules, strong asset management, and many more.
By default, Decoy supports video encoding which makes is suitable for publishing video content. Furthermore, it allows users to use remote file storage such as Amazon S3.
Decoy is also released under the MIT License.
7- Contentify CMS
Contentify CMS is designed for eSport and released as an open-source project. It features a responsive design, WYSIWYG editor, rich documentation, and files repository that supports video, photo files.
As a modular system, Contentify comes with 37 modules that extends the default features, as team manager, forums, user inboxes, matches management, score records, and a built-in Wiki engine.
8- Statamic CMS
Statamic 3 is the flat-first, Laravel + Git powered CMS designed for building beautiful, easy to manage websites.
Statamic has a fancy clean clutter-free interface, that pack dozens of useful features for content creators. It supports revisions, SEO parameters manager, forms, update manager, and a GraphQL support.
The CMS can be installed easily using Docker.
It is important to say it is not a pure CMS project, so be aware of its license.
Hamza Mousa
9- Juzaweb CMS
Juzaweb CMS is a Content Management System (CMS) developed based on Laravel Framework and web platform whose sole purpose is to make your development workflow simple again.
10- BoomCMS
BoomCMS is a simple user-friendly CMS that can be installed easily with Composer. It uses MySQL or MariaDB for the database.
BoomCMS has a fancy interface, with a straightforward editing tools. The BoomCMS editor supports video embedding from services like YouTube, Slideshare, and Vimeo.
Unlike many other CMS, BoomCMS allows you to organize your media files into albums, search them by file name, attached posts, or metadata, and even comes with a photo editor.
11- Aloia CMS
Aloia CMS is a flat-file CMS based on Laravel for developers to start creating their own custom CMS solution for their requirements.
The project is released as an open-source under the MIT license. It gains some attraction from Laravel developers and many started to use it in their freelance projects.
Here is a summary of its features and how can you install it.
12- FusionCMS
FusionCMS v6 is a modern, intuitive, and flexible content management system (CMS) built on the Laravel framework developed in Seattle, WA by efelle creative, est 2005 and one of the nation's most successful website design & development agencies.
Modular at heart, FusionCMS provides the necessary launching platform to build out any type of web or mobile application. It's intuitive and easy for content editors to use on a daily basis, while still maintaining the power and flexibility for developers and designers to dig into the heart of the platform to build and design whatever comes to mind.
13- Bookstack
Bookstack is more than just a simple CMS, it is a collaborative book writing and publishing engine based on the Laravel framework.
It comes with many useful features that eases team collaboration, book creation, multiple editing mode and a developer-ready API system.
Here you can review its features and how can you use it.
Hamza Mousa
14- Reference Book Wiki App
Reference Book is a mix of CMS and a Wiki engine for teams to collaborate on writing projects. It can be used to create a blog, FAQ website, how-to guides, and documentation.
The project is in an early stage and can be used for teams as an internal tool, it may not be a good idea to use in big projects.
15- Laravel Blog
Laravel Blog is a simple open-source CMS and blog that allows anyone to create a quick blog quickly. Of course not on WordPress or Ghost level, but yet, it is fast, reliable, and cool.
Yet, it is not recommended for large complex projects.
Final thought
Laravel is a leading PHP framework that is preferred by many enterprise and PHP developers for writing modern apps. While writing a CMS solution from the scratch will take time, it is a good idea to choose a stable, powerful open source solution and build over it.
Here we listed the best we can find, which can save a tremendous amount of time and resources.
If you know of any other open-source Laravel-based CMS solution that we did not mention here, let us know.