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statamic/cms
The core Laravel CMS Composer package
Statamic is a Laravel-based CMS that stores content in flat files (YAML/Markdown) by default, with optional database support. It targets developers building marketing sites and small-to-medium web apps who want a proper CMS without the WordPress baggage. The control panel is Vue-based and genuinely polished.
The flat-file-first approach means your content lives in Git alongside your code, which makes deployments, rollbacks, and multi-environment workflows actually work instead of requiring database dumps. The Antlers templating language is purpose-built for content — querying and filtering collections in templates is concise in a way Blade never quite manages. The fieldtype system is extensive and the control panel UI is well-built; Bard (the rich text editor) handles structured content better than most CMS editors. It ships with REST API and GraphQL out of the box, static site generation support, and a built-in search abstraction — that's a lot of production-ready surface area for a single package.
The free Solo tier is capped at one user, so any real team project immediately requires a Pro license ($259/year per project). The flat-file model that makes simple sites elegant becomes a genuine performance problem at scale — thousands of entries means thousands of file reads, and the Stache (the in-memory index) can be slow to warm on large sites. The Antlers templating language is a custom DSL that you have to learn and debug in isolation; it doesn't benefit from the broader PHP/Blade ecosystem and stack traces are often unhelpful. The PHPStan baseline file exists, which means there are known type errors the team hasn't gotten to yet — not a dealbreaker but worth knowing before you ship something type-sensitive.