WordPress is the default CMS of the industrial web, used by more manufacturers than all other platforms in our index combined. It can be as secure and polished as anything else when maintained, but it's the owner's job, and at scale our data shows most sites don't keep up.
Wix is the small shop's website builder, home to the industrial web's smallest sites. Built to be found, not admired, these are the bare-bones brochures of local fabrication and job shops.
Squarespace is the design-conscious end of the do-it-yourself site builder market. It serves almost exactly the same small manufacturers as Wix, but it draws the ones who care most about looking good.
Shopify is the one platform in our index where nearly every industrial site is an actual store rather than a brochure or a lead-gen page. It's where manufacturers and distributors sell direct, and where the product is something you can put in a cart.
Drupal is the enterprise open-source platform of the multinational manufacturer. It's self-hosted, but rarely neglected. Built by agencies and enterprise teams, Drupal runs some of the best-secured sites in our index.
Webflow empowers manufacturers to build custom, high-performance websites using a low-code platform and an intuitive visual builder, perfect for teams looking to streamline development without sacrificing design flexibility.
GoDaddy hosts the smallest sites in our index by a wide margin, a median of just seven pages, most of them brochures for local machine shops and metal fabricators. It comes bundled with the domain, which makes it the path of least resistance for small shops that need a simple presence.
HubSpot’s all-in-one platform seamlessly integrates marketing, sales, and customer management, making it ideal for manufacturers looking to align their digital presence with inbound strategies and customer engagement.
Duda is a website builder tailored for agencies and small businesses, offering rapid deployment and mobile-friendly designs, though its limited scalability may not meet the demands of larger manufacturing sites.
Joomla is a veteran open-source CMS well past its prime. It survives as an aging, self-hosted install base that few maintain and nobody new adopts, and its sites are among the least-tended of any real CMS in our index.
Adobe Experience Manager is the platform behind the largest, most global sites in our index, run by multinational manufacturers that publish in a dozen languages at once. It's also the heaviest and most expensive option here, so it's used by a slice of the biggest OEMs and almost no one else.
Sitecore is a heavy-duty enterprise system with no small deployments. Built around personalization and campaigns on the Microsoft stack, it doesn't power a single small brochure site in our index.
Magento is enterprise e-commerce for firms that run their own store rather than rent one. It draws the industrial web's sellers, distributors and parts suppliers above all, with the highest distributor share of any platform we track and almost no one who isn't selling a product.
Dreamweaver isn't really a CMS, it's Adobe's largely retired web design tool, and the sites still carrying its fingerprints are hand-coded relics. They're the oldest, most neglected, least secure corner of the industrial web.
Craft CMS is the flexible, content-first choice for manufacturers who want to build something specific. It's a developer favorite and almost always agency-built. Craft runs some of the best-maintained sites we track.
Weebly is a simple, drag-and-drop website builder ideal for small-scale projects, but its limited customization and functionality make it less suited for manufacturers requiring scalable or specialized digital solutions.
TYPO3 is a flexible and powerful open-source CMS widely adopted in Europe, particularly for enterprise-level projects, due to its scalability, multi-language support, and strong developer community in the region.
An open-source, .NET-based CMS, Umbraco is known for its flexibility and developer-friendly framework, making it a solid choice for manufacturers seeking customized, scalable solutions within Microsoft environments.
BigCommerce is hosted e-commerce built for bigger, more B2B-oriented catalogs. It sits between Shopify and Magento in our index, offering managed hosting like the former while drawing the distributors and parts sellers who run the kind of catalog the latter is known for.
Built on the .NET framework, DNN integrates seamlessly with Microsoft technologies, making it a solid choice for manufacturers relying on systems like MS Dynamics, while offering strong security and scalability for intranets and portals.
Kentico combines enterprise-level content management with digital marketing tools, offering manufacturers a versatile solution for creating and managing content across multiple channels.
Progress Sitefinity is another mid-market .NET digital experience platform. Its industrial base skews to machinery and industrial-equipment OEMs running large, multilingual catalog sites, with contract manufacturers almost entirely absent.
Optimizely is an enterprise digital-experience platform. Among industrial companies, it's almost entirely the tool of large OEMs and materials producers, not smaller shops or distributors.
Google Sites provides a simple, no-frills platform for creating basic websites, but its limited customization and functionality make it less suitable for manufacturers needing robust, scalable digital solutions.
Concrete CMS offers an easy-to-use, in-context editing experience, but its smaller ecosystem and limited scalability make it less optimal for larger, more complex manufacturing sites.
Sanity is a modern headless CMS and part of the small but tech-forward edge of the industrial web. It is API-first and developer-oriented, with content held in a structured backend and delivered to a custom front end that developers build.
MODX is a developer-oriented open-source PHP CMS. Flexible and template-free by design, built for teams that hand-construct a site's structure rather than work inside a fixed system. It never had WordPress's reach, but it holds a small, loyal following among the developers who choose it.
Contentful is the enterprise end of headless, a leading API-first content platform. It overwhelmingly draws large original equipment manufacturers running substantial multilingual sites on a modern composable stack.
An open-source .NET-based eCommerce platform, nopCommerce offers flexibility and scalability for manufacturers managing diverse product catalogs and requiring deep customization in a Microsoft environment.
Silverstripe is an open-source CMS that offers simplicity and developer control, making it well-suited for content-driven manufacturing websites with moderate complexity, though its smaller ecosystem may pose challenges for long-term projects.
IONOS is the drag-and-drop website builder bundled with IONOS hosting. It's a turnkey, DIY tool for small businesses standing up a first web presence, not a full-fledged CMS. It competes with GoDaddy and Wix on convenience, not capability.
Microsoft SharePoint excels as a platform for intranet portals, document management, and collaboration, but its focus on internal workflows makes it less suited for marketing or customer-facing websites.
Q4 isn't a general-purpose CMS at all, but a specialized investor-relations platform built for the IR and corporate-communications presence of publicly traded companies. It shows up in our index on manufacturers large enough to be public, which is a smaller, more corporate slice of the field than usual.
Titan CMS is a proprietary .NET platform from Northwoods, a Milwaukee digital agency. It's a regional, vendor-sold CMS aimed at mid-sized organizations, more common in Midwest government, healthcare, and manufacturing than on the open web.
SAP Commerce Cloud offers enterprise-grade eCommerce capabilities tightly integrated with SAP’s ERP solutions, making it ideal for manufacturers managing complex B2B sales processes and supply chain operations.
Liferay’s robust portal and collaboration features make it ideal for intranets and B2B applications, though its complexity and enterprise focus may be overkill for smaller, content-driven manufacturing sites.
Contao is a German open-source CMS, long established in Europe and rarely seen outside it. It sits in the same self-hosted, developer-installed category as TYPO3 – capable and standards-minded, with a footprint that tracks the German-speaking manufacturing world.
Formerly 3dcart, Shift4Shop is an ecommerce platform built for running an online store, not a content site. In the industrial space, it's a transactional tool first.
Odoo is the website and store module of an open-source ERP suite. It's not chosen as a CMS independently, but because a company already runs Odoo for operations and the site comes bundled with it. These websites are an extension of the business system, not standalone builds.
As a headless CMS, Kontent.ai excels in delivering content across multiple platforms and devices, making it a great choice for manufacturers looking to centralize content management in a flexible, API-driven architecture.
CIM Cloud is a B2B ecommerce platform built specifically for manufacturers and distributors, tying an online storefront to back-office ERP rather than serving as a general content system. It's a niche industrial commerce tool, not a mainstream CMS, which is why it turns up on only a handful of sites.
Prismic’s headless CMS enables effortless content delivery with its unique slice-based architecture, offering manufacturers an elegant, API-first solution for creating visually rich, multi-channel digital experiences.
Wagtail is an open-source CMS built on Django, a Python web framework, making it an excellent choice for developers already working in the Python ecosystem and seeking a flexible, content-focused solution.
DatoCMS is a headless CMS designed for managing and delivering content across multiple platforms, providing a modern approach to multi-channel digital content management.
ExpressionEngine offers a flexible, developer-friendly CMS with strong content management capabilities, but its smaller ecosystem and waning popularity make it a niche choice for modern industrial applications.
Dynamicweb combines CMS, eCommerce, and digital marketing tools into a single platform, making it a strong choice for manufacturers managing complex online sales and multi-channel content delivery.
