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CrafterCMS
Empower Creative Content Management
4.6
(18)
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CrafterCMS Reviews & Product Details

CrafterCMS Overview
What is CrafterCMS?

CrafterCMS is an open-source content management system designed specifically for digital experience development. It serves as a modern and flexible platform for creating and managing websites, mobile apps, and other digital experiences. With features like drag-and-drop content management, a built-in component library, and an easy-to-use authoring interface, CrafterCMS makes it simple for developers and non-technical users to build engaging experiences.

Company Crafter Software Corporation
Year founded 2013
Company size 11-50 employees
Headquarters Reston, VA, United States
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CrafterCMS Categories on Findstack
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What CrafterCMS is best for?
How does CrafterCMS compare to HubSpot CMS Hub?
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CrafterCMS Product Details
Capabilities
API
CLI
OSS
Segment
Small Business
Mid Market
Enterprise
Deployment Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based, On-Premise Linux, On-Premise Windows
Support 24/7 (Live rep), Chat, Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, Phone Support
Training Documentation
Languages English
CrafterCMS Features
API Access
Asset Management
Collaboration Tools
Content Analytics
Content Archiving
Content Migration
Content Personalization
Content Preview
Content Scheduling
Customer Support
Customizable Templates
Drag and Drop Interface
E-Commerce Integration
Form Builder
GDPR Compliance
Inline Editing
Media Library
Mobile Editing
Multilingual Support
Plugins and Extensions
Responsive Design
SEO Management
Search Functionality
Social Media Integration
Tagging and Categorization
Template Management
User Roles and Permissions
Version Control
WYSIWYG Editor
Workflow Management
CrafterCMS Media
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CrafterCMS Screenshots
Disclaimer
Our research is curated from diverse authoritative sources and meant to offer general advice. We don’t guarantee that our suggestions will work best for each use-case, so consider your unique needs when choosing products and services. Feel free to share your feedback.
Last updated: December 14, 2024
CrafterCMS Logo
18 CrafterCMS Reviews
4.6 out of 5
Small Business (50 or fewer emp.)
Jun 20, 2023
 Source
Overall Rating:
5.0
AS
Alex S.
Partner
Share
"Awesome Multi-Channel Digital Experience Platform"
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

CrafterCMS is exceptionally versatile. It enables us to serve any content to any type of digital experience and integrate with any external system we need to.

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

We have not encountered any negatives or things that don't work well for us.

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

We're using CrafterCMS as a content and integration hub for our digital experiences. CrafterCMS makes integrating our timing, scoring and media with our web, mobile apps and digital signage simple and easy.

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)
May 25, 2021
 Source
Overall Rating:
5.0
Jorge d. avatar
Jorge D.
Tech Lead / Assistant Manager
Share
"CrafterCMS is an incredible headless platform easy to adapt to multiple business use cases"
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

- Git Based platform <3 - Very friendly and active service support, development, and growing community - The platform is based on modern and reliable technologies

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

- Lack of deep testing in the development branch (from one version to another, some pieces might be missing in the development branch) - Documentation could be better, but they are doing a great job improving this point and providing CrafterCMS Courses through Crafter Academy

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

- We were able to successfully create and integrate into CrafterCMS our own React-based plugin using CrafterCMS APIs and a modern stack (using 4.0 dev branch) to leverage Git based file management - We were able to start a migration from NAS-based file management to a whole git-based file management flow in an easy way for stakeholders, thanks to CrafterCMS - We were able to adapt CrafterCMS backend and frontend to our needs very quickly, thanks to the documentation, support, and readability of the code

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)
Apr 29, 2020
 Source
Overall Rating:
5.0
Carsten P. avatar
Carsten P.
Ceo
Share
"Crafter’s highlights for us as a WebEnd agency"
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

We love the idea of the Git-based repository. The fact that code, content and configuration is in one place makes it very easy to synchronise dev, authoring and production systems. We can push our features forward from dev to production and pull production content back to work with real data on the development system. Testing features couldn’t be any easier than just switching branches. And while we deploy new features to production authors can work without interruption.

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

The market penetration of CrafterCMS isn't on the level it has to be.

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

It’s great to be able to use APIs for everything. We can in fact render markup, serve content and even use APIs for DevOps automation and processes. It makes Crafter highly flexible and gives us the possibility to manage, integrate and deliver content anywhere at any time. Furthermore, it gives us the freedom to work with any front end framework on top of Crafter’s headless content server. And finally we are pretty overwhelmed by Crafters responsive support. We use Slack to get in touch with them but there is a growing community in Google Groups and Stack Overflow as well.

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)
Mar 24, 2020
 Source
Overall Rating:
5.0
Eric S. avatar
Eric S.
Director, Information Technology
Share
"Global enterprise solution"
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

For many global footprint solutions I used the Crafter solution to power Marriott digital experiences. We found the software to be flexible enough to meet all of our customer touch points (mobile, desktop, kiosk, email, web, video) and the leadership team willing to jump in and develop solutions in partnership with us.

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

They are a small company that delivers on big solutions. At times it was hard to get leadership on board to use a smaller company even through they demonstrated (repeatedly) their solution and people were up for it.

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

I used the solution in many ways and to solve many problems. Probably the biggest benefit to me was the ease of which we could create digital experiences that were integrated with existing platforms (e.g. measurement, email, IAM). Speed to market was another huge benefit for us. We used a combination of SaaS and fully managed solutions with Crafter. Products we built were for users in the hundreds of thousands.

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)
Mar 18, 2020
 Source
Overall Rating:
5.0
chandrasekar R. avatar
Chandrasekar R.
Senior Application Developer
Share
"Crafter CMS - My Exp with the tool"
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

Easy to create templates, add/manage content and retrieve data as json/xml using rest calls.

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

bit difficult to modify the core package if incase we need to write custom methods to the core package.

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

We have automated the site content to get data from Crafter. Thus saving us time from Production move.

Small Business (50 or fewer emp.)
Mar 17, 2020
 Source
Overall Rating:
5.0
SA
Syed A.
Founder
Share
"After an extensive search we settled on Crafter CMS"
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

Mainly it's architecture, developer friendliness and tech stack.

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

So resource intensity if you have a basic setup and a common use case was not provided out of the box but this was easily worked around.

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

We needed a multi-purpose CMS for blogs, content sections, content fragments, augmenting products with headless delivery.

Mid Market (51-1000 emp.)
Jan 26, 2023
 Source
Overall Rating:
4.5
TD
Terry D.
Web Team Coordinator
Share
"Easy To Configure"
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

I like the way content types can be created with ease, and how various pieces of content can be embedded in any content type. The ability to create multi-lingual content is very helpful as well.

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

We're still using version 3.1.27, yet to upgrade to 4.x, but I find that earlier versions don't have the ability to edit content on mobile devices. The only way to access the context menus from the sidebar is with a right-click.

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

Crafter allows us to integrate content from various external sources for video-on-demand, live streams and resources from AWS S3 buckets. It offers a better way to manage all of our content, components, pages, and scripts in one place.

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)
Jun 08, 2020
 Source
Overall Rating:
4.5
Anoop R. avatar
Anoop R.
Digital Software Engineer
Share
"Java Engineer setting up headless Crafter CMS for a large organisation"
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

There are many features that I like in Crafter CMS. Some of the noteworthy ones are:- 1) Content authors and developers can work on the same version of "truth" and this enables rapid feedback from authors to devs. 2) Git based versioning allows easy branching out and merging back for new features. 3) Self contained installer bundles (tomcat, elasticsearch, webapp jars etc) provide an easy way to create prototypes. 4) REST API to configure and monitor the engine and studio services 5) JVM based architecture means backend features can be developed and debugged from IDEA (or any other capable Java IDE)

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

There are a couple of things that I believe could be improved for an even better user experience. They are:- 1) There are far too many externalised configuration properties and they are scattered over a large number xml files. It would be great if some of these can be internalised (some sensible defaults with ability to override if necessary) and the external ones made more intuitive. 2) The documentation, though extensive, is not very user friendly. It has a "reference manual" kind-of layout which helps someone who knows crafter very well but needs more details on how to do something (for example:- they know that an issue is in the studio and also know which api to call, but needs more information regarding the payload, or request headers etc). For someone completely new to Crafter, the documentation navigation is not very conducive to an "exploratory" style of learning the product.

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

The biggest benefit is the ease with which new API endpoints can be added to the site for search, categorisation, filtering etc. It also takes care of indexing and caching of content so that queries are executed quickly. It has given us a rapid yet fully managed way of publishing content out into the world. The audit log is also super helpful in finding the responsible authors so that any issues with content can be easily rectified.

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)
Jul 30, 2020
 Source
Overall Rating:
4.0
JV
Joan V.
Founder
Share
"The best experience and software to improve the company."
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

Its tools allow for better organization and content management for our WEB portal. Likewise, an optimal development for your brand is achieved since it will allow the employee to create content more easily. The structure stage system allows you to freely edit the designs you want since it is possible to use C + or java languages in order to offer the best ease of creating and improving, very efficient and I like it.

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

I have no complaints, although on some occasions we have been forced to consult with CMS experts since our virtual platform was outdated, which can be frustrating waiting for some help is a negative point for the system, however the tools comply, needs optimization.

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

We achieved growth on our WEB page and clients are very happy, they enjoy being able to observe our content since it is very organized and attractive. In addition, it supports us more and more to find data that our clients are fascinated by in order to create attractive entries and generate more traffic, they are definitely useful tools.

Mid Market (51-1000 emp.)
Oct 31, 2020
 Source
Overall Rating:
5.0
AG
Verified Reviewer
Founder
Share
"Modern multi-tenant CMS software with outstanding customer support"
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

Crafter CMS offers several unique advantages for our company. For example, - Content Management, Crafter CMS offers easy-to-use WYSIWYG features that allow the content author to preview desktop and mobile content before publishing. - Content Distribution, Crafter CMS supports modern headless-cms capability, which allows the developer to build API(s) to distribute content through multi-tenant architecture. - Content Discovery, Crafter CMS provides GraphQL out of the box, which allows the developer to build advanced queries on top of a massive pool of content. - Content Version Control, we have complex needs to support CI/CD (Continue Integration and Deployment) for our multi-tier architecture between Content Authors and Developers. Crafter CMS offers version control, which allowed us to build automation and improves the overall code quality and time-to-market on content publishing. - Crafter Customer Support, Good software cannot be GREAT without superb customer support. The Crafter product team went beyond our needs as a software vendor. The core team members in Crafter software company had a long innovation history in the CMS industry. They experienced different paradigm shifts and created CMS solutions for different industries. They are passionate about CMS technologies and open to working with their customer to resolve challenges.

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

Crafter offers several advanced features with limited documentation support. It would be great to see an archive of how-to videos and examples so the Crafter community can take advantage of all the Crafter offerings.

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

We manage a global brand across 25 locales with 50 Million unique visitors (YTD 2020). The CMS system we used to manage and publish content cannot scale with the business grows. We need a modern CMS that provides security, scalability, and easy-to-use features so we can manage and distribute content across multiple web properties. Crafter CMS offers several benefits from a software development perspective. Crafter CMS has built-in API support that allows the developer to integrate internally sourced content onto Crafter in an automated fashion. Crafter CMS is AWS friendly and is extremely flexible to monitor, Lamdba functions, and integrations with other AWS features. Crafter CMS supports version control. We have complex needs to support CI/CD (Continue Integration and Deployment) for our multi-tier architecture between Content Authors and Developers. Crafter CMS offers version control, which allowed us to build automation and improves the overall code quality and time-to-market on content publishing. <We are in the process of CMS migration and more to come>

Mid Market (51-1000 emp.)
Aug 06, 2020
 Source
Overall Rating:
5.0
AG
Verified Reviewer
Founder
Share
"Great, tailor-able platform!"
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

The ease of use and ability to tailor the platform to suit our needs. We are just at the beginning and our customers are delighted with what we've built. I can't wait to unlock the potential!

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

It does run a little slow over here in Australia. It was also disappointing there was no automated way to upload our content.

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

We have very complex needs to present a large volume of education and technical materials to our market. Crafter has made the usability so easy that each department in the business can own their own content, without having marketing or IT have to upload or manage everything.

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)
Mar 29, 2020
 Source
Overall Rating:
5.0
AG
Verified Reviewer
Founder
Share
"A Easy to Use Growing CMS which gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of dev and ops"
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

Open Source. DevOps Friendly. Easy for authors. Create sites in a matter of minutes.

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

Since it's growing CMS framework it need sometimes to mature it's documentation.

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

Personalized Department Sites. Personal sites. Easy to integrate with any other platform since it has an amazing API's (mobile apps).

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)
Mar 17, 2020
 Source
Overall Rating:
5.0
AG
Verified Reviewer
Founder
Share
"well designed flexible architecture"
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

Crafter CMS has well architected modular design, which gives us great flexibility during our adoption. We chose headless approach to use contents as service. The flexible architecture make the integration with Crafter CMS easy to do. The preview feature give content authors the ability to view contents as how they will render in the final web site no matter what type of rendering engine you choose. Good product is only half of the story. We are particularly impressed by the superb support we get. You truly feel you can count on them as your partner. They listen to your need and work with you every step on the way to find the optimal solution.

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

not easy to integrate 3rd party UI controlls in the authoring tool.

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

Web Content Management so that web site can be updated without release.

Small Business (50 or fewer emp.)
Mar 17, 2020
 Source
Overall Rating:
5.0
AG
Verified Reviewer
Founder
Share
"Crafter CMS is my first and only choice"
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

I love how seamless the system is across all platforms and how it engages prospects and clients. I like how the developers take the time to explain the process behind the delivery.

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

To be honest, there isn’t anything I would change. They are the best CMS I’ve worked with to date.

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

I am seeing my prospects grow. I was having trouble engaging my clients, but I’ve seen an increase in brand awareness thanks to Crafter.

Mid Market (51-1000 emp.)
Feb 01, 2023
 Source
Overall Rating:
3.5
AG
Verified Reviewer
Founder
Share
"The author experience is good. The developer experience can use some work."
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

The authoring experience is pretty good. I like that Crafter puts a lot of thought into content management and makes developers and authors focus on how that content is managed within the system. I have seen other CMS systems where the CMS turns into a swamp of content.

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

While I like that Crafter handles everything via Git repositories, sometimes the underlying Crafter repository seeps its way into my developer's processes -- the Crafter repository is a leaky abstraction. The code forward/content back model proposed by Crafter is good in theory. But dealing with DEV/STAGE/PROD release cycles can get messy very fast because the content is getting created at all three levels, DEV/STAGE for testing and PROD for the real content. Then if you have to change the configuration files in one of the upstream environments (STAGE or PROD) -- a hotfix config change -- that makes merging your code from DEV messy. I would like to see more effort put into improving this developer experience. I don't like the fact that groovy is the only programming choice for most things in Crafter. We should also have the option to use Typescript/Javascript throughout.

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

Crafter allows our content creators to create and publish changes outside our normal product release cycles. Once the developers have enabled the in-content editing, there are now large parts of the application developers don't even concern themselves with. This allows our developers to focus on our sites' more dynamic, data-oriented features without worrying about managing large blocks of static content. Our developers are also recommending new content areas that authors can manage, which means they are starting to understand the benefits of content modeling.

Small Business (50 or fewer emp.)
Jan 31, 2023
 Source
Overall Rating:
3.5
AG
Verified Reviewer
Founder
Share
"Does the job!"
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

Prompt customer service. Easy to send in tickets with issues. Can handle a large database without being slow. Love the new publishing options for the new system update.

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

System updates take months. And some fixes mysteriously can't be addressed until a system update patch comes through, which means I'm stuck with a bad UI for months. New Crafter update has some streamlined improvements, but doing away with scrolling menus makes using the sidebar soooo slow and clunky. Bring back scrolling for sifting through large databases! Clicking to "next 10" for a database with hundreds of entries is maddening.

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

Helped to turn a massive database of content into an easily manageable website.

Mid Market (51-1000 emp.)
Jan 26, 2023
 Source
Overall Rating:
3.5
AG
Verified Reviewer
Founder
Share
"Industrial strength and open standards-based"
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

I like that the delivery (website in our case) is separate from the authoring environment, which means we can deploy releases at any time without impacting the end user.

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

The version that we currently use requires an instance of Elastic that is outside of the Crafter environment and our internal security policy makes that difficult to maintain.

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are using CrafterCMS to store and maintain content related to a public website. The information served on the site is a combination of video-on-demand, live-streaming video and articles. A consolidated platform to maintain access to this content is beneficial.

Small Business (50 or fewer emp.)
Jan 26, 2023
 Source
Overall Rating:
3.5
AG
Verified Reviewer
Founder
Share
"Crafter CMS from Ops Perspective"
What do you like best about CrafterCMS?

Crafter CMS has a great support team that is very helpful during challenging times. Logging options are very flexible which helps to quickly diagnose problems. Updating content, deploying the changes across the cluster are very simple tasks. From a development & deployment perspective, Crafter is a dream.

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

My biggest dislike is the way Crafter syncs data between repos. I suppose Git is a better than the old option of Alfresco, but Git working across clusters has been prone to conflicts which are sometimes a mess to work through. There's got to be a better way.

What problems is CrafterCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?

Crafter continues to upgrade their products to be more user-friendly. That allows me to spend less time troubleshooting Crafter servers which is very helpful.