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CrafterCMS Reviews & Product Details

CrafterCMS is the AI-native, Java-based headless CMS built for modern enterprise digital experiences such as global websites, e-commerce experiences, employee intranets, customer portals, mobile apps, OTT video apps, conversational AI experiences, and more. It replaces the limitations of traditional, monolithic content management with a developer-first, API-driven architecture designed for speed, scale, and long-term platform evolution. Built on Java and Spring, CrafterCMS integrates natively with modern AI technologies—including Spring AI, OpenSearch vector database, and CrafterQ AI agents—to power intelligent, governed, and brand-safe content experiences. Its true headless design delivers clean APIs for React, Next.js, Vue, Angular, mobile apps, and conversational AI interfaces, without locking teams into proprietary front-end stacks. CrafterCMS treats content as code. With a Git-based content repository, XML content models, Groovy scripting, and FreeMarker templating, it enables modern DevContentOps workflows and makes content, configuration, and UI artifacts fully accessible to AI coding tools such as Github Copilot, Cursor and Claude Code. Developers gain full control and extensibility, while content teams benefit from visual authoring, omnichannel delivery, and AI-assisted productivity without sacrificing governance or accuracy. Enterprises can deploy CrafterCMS to match their operational and security requirements, with options including self-hosted/self-managed with enterprise support, fully managed private SaaS, and community-supported open source. Learn more at craftercms.com.

Product Website

Seller

CrafterCMS

Discussions

CrafterCMS Community

Overview by

Mike Vertal (CrafterCMS CEO)

Pricing

Pricing provided by CrafterCMS.

CrafterCMS Community

Free

View More Pricing Information

CrafterCMS Integrations

(17)

Verified by CrafterCMS

CrafterCMS Media

CrafterCMS Demo - CrafterCMS Site Preview

This is a CrafterCMS site preview of what content author/editor users would see as they were looking at the backend of a page.

CrafterCMS enables users to segment users using components. Based on the component chosen and the user attribute, the preview for all channels will immediately respond with content for a user with the attributes selected.

CrafterCMS Demo - CrafterCMS Sidebar Dashboard

An example of a CrafterCMS dashboard highlighting the workflow and the actions the user can take.

CrafterCMS Demo - CrafterCMS Workflow Request Publish

Based on author permissions there can be differing restrictions and requests that will need to be made before an author can request to have items go live.

CrafterCMS Demo - CrafterCMS Preview Screen Sizes

Preview how your content will look at any screen size or platform.

CrafterCMS Demo - CrafterCMS Preview Page Components

Easy-to-use drag and drop features for authors to edit and customize pages.

Official Downloads

(5)

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[CASE STUDY w/ AWS Elemental] Marriott: Streaming Enterprise Video in the Hybrid Cloud

[CASE STUDY] Penn Mutual: CrafterCMS Enables Modern Digital Experiences for Life Insurance Leader

[WHITE PAPER] The World of Headless CMS: Everything You Need to Know About Headless Content Management

CrafterCMS Reviews (18)

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Terry D.

Web Team Coordinator

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

1/26/2023

"Easy To Configure"

4.5/5

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Response from Mike Vertal of CrafterCMS

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Thank you for the review Terry! Please let us know when you're ready to upgrade to 4.x, much improved UX for CrafterCMS users including sidebar access from mobile devices.

Alex S.

Partner

Sports

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

6/20/2023

"Awesome Multi-Channel Digital Experience Platform"

5/5

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CrafterCMS?

We have not encountered any negatives or things that don't work well for us. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Higher Education

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

2/1/2023

"The author experience is good. The developer experience can use some work."

3.5/5

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Response from Mike Vertal of CrafterCMS

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Thanks for the feedback! We do put a lot of thought into management of content and the authoring UX, especially as content size grows, so we're glad you're seeing the benefits.

We're working on both more documentation and more tooling for the Code Forward/Content Back processes to better help with the setup and management of it, especially when use case complexity increases. I think it's fair to say that managing content across environments is a real business need and is technically challenging (even more so when you are working with a traditional CMS built around a database). Our Git-based content repo makes many processes and tasks easier and more efficient. Git branching also makes larger site updates, site redesigns, and segregation of highly secure content easy. But there's more we can do to make things easier and more efficient. We'll keep working on it!

In all cases, it's important to use a branching strategy and flow that keeps environment-specific content in that environment.

It's also worth noting that CrafterCMS has a Javascript SDK which you can find here: https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=craftercms

You can use our native Javascript bindings on the content delivery system for any site/app development (e.g., using Nodejs, Nextjs, Nuxtjs). Our authoring UI, Crafter Studio, is also Typescript/React-based so any authoring UI development is also Javascript. The only type of development where Groovy is the "only" programming language option is server-side programming within Crafter Studio.

Verified User in Entertainment

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

3/19/2020

"Does the job!"

3.5/5

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Response from Russ Danner of CrafterCMS

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Thank you for the review!

Here are a couple of tips on CrafterCMS v4's Studio user interface:

Based on your comment, you may not have noticed the new filtering feature within the sidebar. This is handy when navigating a large volume of content. Take a look at this documentation:

https://docs.craftercms.org/en/4.0/content-authors/content-authors-pages.html#adding-a-page

In the figure, you will see a little magnifying glass. Click this to search for your content rather than paging through a ton of other content to find it.

Another cool feature in CrafterCMS v4 Studio UI is that it's totally configurable, and there are alternatives for the various widgets. If you don't like how the current widgets work, there's a good chance they can be replaced with a different widget or reconfigured to function in a way that is better for you. For more information, check out this link or feel free to reach out to me, and I'll help:

https://docs.craftercms.org/en/4.0/site-administrators/studio-configuration.html

Verified User in Online Media

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

1/26/2023

"Industrial strength and open standards-based"

3.5/5

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Response from Mike Vertal of CrafterCMS

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Thanks for the review! Our truly decoupled architecture (separate authoring and delivery systems) has many advantages, including the ability to deploy new releases without impacting end users as you have indicated. Also note, CrafterCMS has always supported an out-of-the box installation of Elasticsearch. Please contact our customer success team if you would like help switching to the built-in Elasticsearch service.

Verified User in Information Technology and Services

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

1/26/2023

"Crafter CMS from Ops Perspective"

3.5/5

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Jorge d.

Tech Lead / Assistant Manager

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

5/25/2021

"CrafterCMS is an incredible headless platform easy to adapt to multiple business use cases"

5/5

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 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering CrafterCMS:

If you want to have access to the latest features of CrafterCMS, wait until v4.0 is released as it has a lot of new amazing features. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Marketing and Advertising

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

10/31/2020

"Modern multi-tenant CMS software with outstanding customer support"

5/5

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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> Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Anoop R.

Digital Software Engineer

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

6/8/2020

"Java Engineer setting up headless Crafter CMS for a large organisation"

4.5/5

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) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Joan V.

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

7/30/2020

"The best experience and software to improve the company."

4/5

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering CrafterCMS:

You will be able to build or rebuild your website effectively since the tools are perfect to do it quickly, achieving the best results. For this reason and for the success achieved thanks to the help of Crafter CMS I have no doubts that we will continue to work together. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.