Star count isn't a perfect measure of anything. It mostly tells you how many developers stumbled across a repo and liked what they saw enough to bookmark it. It doesn't measure production usage, revenue, or how good the actual editing experience is for a content team. But it's still one of the most honest, hard-to-fake signals of developer mindshare in the open source CMS world, and it tells a genuinely different story than market share charts do.
A quick note before diving in: this list only works for CMS platforms that live primarily as a public, open source GitHub repository. That rules out a few names you'd expect to see near the top. WordPress core is developed through Subversion rather than as a standalone GitHub-native project, so its mirror repo doesn't reflect real community engagement the way a project like Strapi's does. Shopify, Contentful, Sanity, Storyblok, and most enterprise SaaS platforms are closed source, so there's no public repo to count stars on at all. What you'll find below instead is the open source, self-hostable side of the CMS world, ranked purely by how many people starred the actual code.
One more thing worth flagging before the list: a few of these projects are extremely new, and star counts for young repos change fast. One entry here, EmDash, launched in April 2026 and has already climbed past projects that took years to get where they are, so treat any ranking involving very recent launches as a snapshot rather than something settled.
Here are 21 real, current examples, ordered from most starred to least, with the count and what each project actually does.
1. Hugo - 88.8k stars
Hugo sits at the very top, and it's worth pausing on why it's here at all. It's technically a static site generator rather than a CMS in the traditional sense, no admin panel, no database, just markdown files and templates compiled into a fast static site. But it's tagged and used as CMS infrastructure constantly, especially for documentation sites and blogs, and its star count dwarfs everything else on this list by a wide margin.
2. Strapi - 72.6k stars
The most starred true headless CMS on GitHub, and it's not particularly close. Strapi is 100% JavaScript and TypeScript, fully open source under MIT license, and gives developers a complete admin panel generated automatically from their content model. It's become the default answer whenever someone asks for a self-hosted, developer-first CMS with both REST and GraphQL support out of the box.
3. Ghost - 54.3k stars
Ghost's star count reflects just how beloved it is among developers who write for a living. It's a lean, fast, JavaScript-based platform built specifically for publishing, newsletters, and memberships, and its GitHub presence has been strong for years thanks to a clean codebase and a genuinely passionate contributor community.
4. Payload - 43.4k stars
Payload's growth over the past couple of years has been the standout story in this list. It's a fullstack, TypeScript-native framework built tightly around Next.js, giving developers an admin panel and backend instantly from their own schema. Its star trajectory reflects how quickly it's become the go-to pick for developer-led teams building custom applications rather than simple content sites.
5. Halo - 39.2k stars
Halo is a Java-based, open source website and blog builder that's enormously popular in the Chinese developer community, covering everything from personal blogs to small business sites and online stores. Its star count is a reminder that a huge amount of open source CMS activity happens outside the English-language corner of GitHub that most Western roundups default to.
6. Directus - 36.4k stars
Directus takes an unusual approach, wrapping any existing SQL database in an instant REST and GraphQL API plus a visual admin studio, rather than owning the schema itself. Its star count has climbed steadily as more teams look for a way to add a CMS-like layer on top of data they already have, without a full migration.
7. Wagtail - 20.4k stars
Wagtail is the leading Python CMS, built on Django and known for being genuinely pleasant to extend for developers who already live in that ecosystem. It crossed the 20,000 star mark as a notable community milestone, and it remains the most starred Python option by a wide margin.
8. Decap CMS - 19.2k stars
Formerly Netlify CMS, Decap is a free, git-based CMS for static sites, content gets committed straight to a repository as markdown, with no separate database or backend required. Its star count reflects years as the default choice for Jamstack teams, even as newer alternatives have started to chip away at its lead.
9. Zola - 17.2k stars
Another static site generator that gets used as CMS infrastructure, Zola is written in Rust and ships as a single binary with everything built in, no plugins to install, no dependency tree to manage. Its appeal is speed and simplicity, and its star count reflects a loyal following among developers who want one tool that just works.
10. Grav - 15.6k stars
Grav is a flat file CMS, meaning there's no database at all, content lives in files powered by PHP, Markdown, Twig, and Symfony underneath. It's marketed as fast and easy, and its star count has held up well over the years as a lightweight alternative for developers who find WordPress too heavy for smaller projects.
11. TinaCMS - 13.6k stars
TinaCMS combines git-based content storage with genuinely good in-context visual editing, a combination a lot of git-based tools promise and few pull off well. Its star count puts it ahead of most other visual, git-native CMS options, and it's become a common pairing with Next.js sites that still want a real editing experience for non-technical writers.
12. October CMS - 11.1k stars
Built on the Laravel PHP framework, October CMS gives developers a self-hosted content platform with a clean, modern admin interface. Its star count reflects a solid, consistent following among PHP developers who want something more current feeling than WordPress but still comfortable within the Laravel ecosystem.
13. EmDash - around 11k stars
The newest and fastest-climbing entry on this entire list. EmDash is a full-stack TypeScript CMS built as an Astro integration, released by Cloudflare in April 2026 and explicitly framed as a spiritual successor to WordPress. Its two standout ideas are a database-first schema, so non-developers can create and edit content collections through the admin UI while developers still get generated TypeScript types, and sandboxed plugins that run in isolated Cloudflare Worker environments with explicit, declared permissions, a direct answer to the fact that the vast majority of WordPress security issues come from plugins with unrestricted access to everything. It's MIT licensed, runs on Cloudflare or plain Node.js with SQLite, and it went from zero to roughly 11,000 stars in about three months, a pace nothing else on this list has matched.
14. django CMS - 10.5k stars
The other major Python option alongside Wagtail, django CMS is built directly on top of Django and marketed as easy to use for developers already comfortable with that framework. Its star count has stayed remarkably steady for years, a sign of a mature, dependable project rather than a fast-growing new one.
15. KeystoneJS - 9.9k stars
KeystoneJS describes itself as a superpowered headless CMS for Node.js, built with GraphQL and React, where your schema defined in code becomes both your API and your admin UI automatically. It's popular with developers who want a code-first framework rather than a pre-built product with a fixed set of features.
16. Builder.io - 8.7k stars
Builder.io's core open source library brings visual development to React, Vue, Svelte, Qwik, and several other frameworks, letting marketers drag and drop while developers get clean, framework-native output. Its star count reflects strong adoption among teams who want visual page building without sacrificing code quality.
17. Webiny - 8k stars
Webiny is a self-hosted, serverless CMS platform built to run on AWS infrastructure, with multi-tenancy, lifecycle hooks, and a GraphQL API baked in alongside AI-assisted development tooling. Its star count reflects a smaller but committed following among teams who want open source flexibility without paying for infrastructure they're not using.
18. Umbraco-CMS - 5.2k stars
Umbraco is the leading open source .NET CMS, used by more than 500,000 websites according to the project itself, and its friendly, flexible admin interface has kept it a favorite in the Microsoft development world for close to two decades. Its star count is lower than its real-world usage might suggest, largely because much of its community activity happens on its own forums and Discord rather than GitHub.
19. Outstatic - 3.1k stars
Outstatic is a lightweight, git-based CMS built specifically for Next.js projects, storing markdown and MDX content directly in a GitHub repository with a clean dashboard on top. Its star count has grown steadily as more Next.js developers look for something simpler than a full headless platform for personal sites and small projects.
20. Sveltia CMS - 2.5k stars
Built as a modern, from-scratch successor to the aging Decap CMS, Sveltia CMS ships as a small, framework-agnostic, single-page app with first-class internationalization support and a noticeably more polished editing experience. Its star count is smaller simply because it's newer, but it's grown quickly among teams migrating off Decap.
21. Keystatic - around 2k stars
Built by the team behind KeystoneJS, Keystatic takes a git-native approach, storing content as markdown, YAML, or JSON directly in your repository with a TypeScript config file defining the schema. It's newer and smaller than most others on this list, but it's a clean, actively developed option for teams that want a code-first, database-free CMS paired with Astro or Next.js.
What the star counts actually tell you
A few things jump out once you line these up. Developer tools that double as CMS infrastructure, Hugo and Zola in particular, rack up huge star counts because they get bookmarked by an enormous crowd of developers who use them for reasons well beyond content management. Among CMSs in the traditional sense, Strapi's lead is not close, and it's been the default open source headless answer for long enough that its position looks durable. Payload's climb into fourth place in a relatively short time is one of the most interesting trends on this list, and it lines up with everything else pointing toward TypeScript-native, code-first tools being where a lot of developer energy is currently going. EmDash pushes that same trend even further and even faster: a project backed by a major infrastructure company, built on the same TypeScript-and-edge-native philosophy as Payload, that reached roughly 11,000 stars in about three months rather than years. Worth watching whether that pace holds once the initial launch attention fades. And further down the list, git-based CMSs (Decap, TinaCMS, Outstatic, Sveltia, Keystatic) make up a genuinely crowded category, more evidence that plenty of developers want their content living next to their code rather than in a separate system entirely.
Worth remembering as a closing thought: a high star count means a project caught developer attention, not that it's the right pick for your specific project. Halo has more stars than Wagtail, but that says more about the size of its home community than about which one fits your stack better. Treat this list as a map of where developer enthusiasm currently sits, not a ranking of quality.
