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octobercms/october
Self-hosted CMS platform based on the Laravel PHP Framework.
October CMS is a Laravel-based self-hosted CMS that competes in the WordPress/Craft CMS space. It targets PHP developers who want a structured plugin system and code-first content modeling without fighting a monolith. The backend UI is custom-built (not Filament or Nova) and has been maintained since 2014.
The plugin architecture is genuinely well thought out — plugins declare their own migrations, components, and permissions cleanly, so you can drop in functionality without touching core. The Twig-based templating keeps logic out of views without forcing you into a full SPA. Active maintenance (pushed yesterday) on a 12-year-old project is real, and the RainLab plugin suite covers most common needs (Users, Blog, Pages) without third-party risk. The backend UI has a consistent component system (inspector, popup, tree) that holds up across complex content types.
The licensing model is a trap: open source to get you in, then a paid license required after the first year to receive updates and access the marketplace. That's a recurring cost you don't discover until you're already committed. The frontend tooling is stuck in an older era — LESS, jQuery, custom JS controls — while competitors have moved to modern build pipelines; you'll be fighting this if you want anything beyond server-rendered pages. The marketplace ecosystem is much thinner than WordPress's and the paid-license gate makes community plugin distribution awkward. Documentation has gaps, particularly around the newer Tailor content modeling system introduced in v3, which is still sparsely covered compared to legacy component-based approach.