Craft CMS

Brandon Kelly launched Craft CMS in 2013 after years of working on ExpressionEngine plugins at Pixel & Tonic. His frustration: WordPress and similar CMSs made too many assumptions about content structure, forcing sites into a blog-post mental model. Craft was built from the ground up to let developers and content teams define their own content architecture — any field type, any relationship, any structure. The tagline "Your content, your way" resonated immediately with agencies and developers building complex marketing sites and editorial platforms. Craft charged a commercial license ($299 per site in early days) and grew through developer word-of-mouth at a time when agencies were desperate for a WordPress alternative that didn't fight them. By 2017 Craft had thousands of paying sites. Craft 3 and 4 added a plugin marketplace, solo/team licenses, and hosted options. Today Pixel & Tonic generates an estimated $150k+/month from licenses and Craft Cloud. Craft remained entirely bootstrapped and is recognized as one of the most technically excellent CMSs ever built.