Craft CMS: A Business Owner's Guide

What Craft CMS actually is

Craft CMS is a content management system: the software behind your website that lets your team publish and edit content without a developer. It’s made by a company called Pixel & Tonic, and it has been around since 2013.

Two things make it different from what you may be used to.

It’s commercial software, not free software. You buy a license. That means there’s a company with revenue whose job is to keep it secure and supported, and a published support timeline you can plan around. It also means a line item on your budget.

It’s built around your content, not around templates. Most systems make you fit your content into their idea of a page. Craft works the other way: a developer defines the exact fields your business needs — product specs, downloadable spec sheets, distributor locations, whatever the case is — and your team fills them in. Editors get a form that makes sense for your business instead of a general-purpose page builder they can accidentally break.

Who Craft CMS is a good fit for

Craft tends to be the right answer when:

• Your site has real content structure — a product catalog, a resource library, case studies, locations — rather than a dozen static pages
• Non-technical people on your team need to publish without a developer in the loop
• The site is a business asset that needs to still be maintainable in five years
• You’d rather have fewer moving parts than the biggest possible plugin ecosystem

It’s usually the wrong answer when you want the absolute cheapest possible build, or you need one specific plugin that only exists for another platform.

A few Craft sites we run, to make that concrete:

• University of Maryland giving site. Thousands of gifts a year across several thousand funds. The giving team launches campaigns, adds funds, and features funds for a college or giving day without a developer.
• OSS Health. An orthopedic practice where patients choose a doctor, book an appointment, or check in for urgent care. Each doctor’s page shows their latest patient feedback automatically.
• MCF Corp. A manufacturing application built as its own Craft site, used by operators on the floor and feeding Power BI, beside the company’s marketing site.

What Craft CMS costs to own

Three separate things, and people conflate them constantly.

The license. A one-time fee per site, plus an annual renewal that keeps you receiving updates. At Craft’s current published prices, Team is $279 and Pro is $399 per site, each including the first year of updates, then $99 a year after that. Solo, for single-user sites, is free. Commercial plugins are licensed the same way, usually with their own smaller renewals. If you let a renewal lapse, your site keeps running; you just stop getting updates until you renew.

The build. Whatever you pay an agency or developer to design and build the site. This is by far the largest number and it has nothing to do with Craft specifically.

Ongoing maintenance. Hosting, security patches, framework and plugin updates, backups, monitoring, and someone available when something breaks. This is the line most people underestimate, and it’s the one that determines whether your site is still an asset in three years or a liability nobody wants to touch.

That third number is worth its own guide — what Craft CMS maintenance actually costs breaks down what should be included at each level.

Which version you should be on

This matters more than anything else in this guide, because it’s where sites become dangerous.

Craft retires major versions on a published schedule: each one gets at least two years of active support, then roughly one more year of critical security fixes only, then end of life — no updates of any kind, including security patches.

Craft 4 reached end of life on April 30, 2026. Craft 3 lost support before that. Craft 5 is the current supported version, and Craft 6 is in alpha, with a release targeted for Q4 2026.

So there are really only two acceptable answers to “what version are we on”: Craft 5, or “we have an upgrade scheduled.” Anything else means you’re running software that nobody is fixing anymore. The full version and end-of-life timeline has the dates, plus how to check which version you’re actually running.

Craft CMS versus WordPress

We’ve maintained plenty of both, so here’s the honest comparison rather than the sales pitch.

WordPress wins on ecosystem size, the cheapest possible developer market, and the sheer number of off-the-shelf plugins for niche needs.

Craft wins on the editing experience for your team, having far fewer third-party dependencies to break or get exploited, and a documented upgrade path between versions.

The real difference shows up in year three. A typical WordPress business site accumulates twenty to forty plugins from a dozen different authors, each on its own release schedule, any one of which can break the site or open a hole. Craft ships the fundamentals in core, so there’s dramatically less surface area. That’s less exciting than a feature comparison, and it’s the thing that actually determines your maintenance experience.

Neither platform is why sites fail. Sites fail from neglect — and neglect is cheaper to hide on WordPress.

Signs your Craft site is not being looked after

You don’t need technical knowledge to spot most of these:

• Nobody can tell you what version of Craft you’re running, or the answer is vague
• Backups are “running” but nobody has ever restored one to prove it works
• Every small content change comes back as an estimate
• You’ve been told an upgrade will be a “full rebuild” without an audit having been done
• You don’t know who holds your Craft license, domain registrar login, or hosting account
• Emails to your developer routinely go days without a reply

Three or more of those and you’re not being maintained, you’re being invoiced. There’s a fuller checklist in how to take over a Craft CMS website from another team, which is worth reading even if you’re handing the job to somebody else.

Questions to ask before you hire anyone

If you’re choosing a Craft CMS agency, these four questions sort the field fast:

1. How many Craft sites have you shipped, and can I speak to two of those clients? Anyone can list Craft as a service. Shipped sites and reachable references are different.
2. Who maintains the site after launch, and what does that cost per month? If they can’t answer this cleanly, they build and leave — and you’ll be having this conversation again in eighteen months.
3. What version will you build on, and what happens when the next one ships? You want to hear that upgrades are part of ongoing care, not a surprise project.
4. If I leave, what do I take with me? The correct answer is: your code, your license, your domain, your database, your accounts. All of it, in your name.

An agency that answers those four without flinching is telling you they intend to still be around when it matters.

Where to go from here

If your site is healthy and you just want someone reliable watching it, look at maintenance and support plans.

If you’re on Craft 4 or earlier, start with upgrade services — that’s the clock that’s already running.

And if you’re changing developers, that’s the most common call we get. Finding a new Craft CMS developer is exactly that conversation.