A powerful & robust open source CMS framework that ticks all boxes for your enterprise customers
Choosing a CMS is one of the highest-stakes decisions an agency makes. It is not one website. It is the platform you will quote against, build on, train your team around and support for years. Get it right and every project compounds your capability (and profits). Get it wrong and you inherit licence costs, upgrade pain and a technology that eats up your developer resource.
django CMS was built for exactly this decision. It is open source, so there are no licence fees, no per-seat pricing and no contracts to negotiate. It is built on Django, the Python web framework trusted by some of the world's largest organisations, so the foundation your agency stands on is proven, secure and actively maintained. And it is supported by the django CMS Association, a non-profit whose only job is the long-term health of the platform. No vendor roadmap surprises. No acquisition risk.
Agencies running on django CMS use it as more than a content management system. They build their own reusable platform on top of it: a component library, a set of integrations and a delivery process they can apply to every client project. That is the difference between selling websites and selling a capability your competitors can't easily copy. And as your clients start asking what AI search means for their website, you'll be answering from a platform that serves content as structured data machines can actually read.
Features
Every project you deliver on django CMS adds to a library you own. Plugins, templates and integrations built for one client can be packaged and reused on the next, so your margin improves with every build and your quotes get sharper while your competitors start from scratch each time.
django CMS is a Django package, which means anything you can build in Python you can put inside the CMS. Booking systems, client portals, data dashboards, AI assistants trained on the client's own content: build them as Django apps, and let editors place them on any page. Your client's CMS and their AI tooling live in the same stack. You stop pitching templates and start pitching products.
Your clients edit their content in the frontend, on the actual page, with drag and drop and copy and paste that works across pages. Full version history means nothing is ever lost. And because the editorial interface can be tailored to each client, you hand over exactly the controls their team needs and nothing they don't. Editors become self-sufficient, support tickets stop arriving, and the handover makes you look good.
Features
A small, stable core that does content management properly, and nothing else. Everything beyond it is an app or plugin you choose to add. Solve complex problems with small, composable building blocks rather than fighting a monolith.
Designed for containerised environments using Docker. Deployment, scaling and environment consistency stay straightforward whether you run one project or infrastructure across forty clients.
django CMS inherits the security model, ORM, admin and ecosystem of one of the world's most trusted web frameworks. Your developers already know it, or can learn it from the best documentation in open source. It's also the stack AI coding assistants know best, so builds that used to take weeks take days.
Development is in the open on GitHub, guided by the django CMS Association and a global contributor community. Real-world needs set the direction, and support is a Discord message away.
A security-first architecture inherited from Django, with regular releases, LTS versions and a responsible disclosure process. Functionality is built as Django apps you own, not assembled from third-party plugins you patch, so there's no abandoned plugin quietly becoming next month's vulnerability. The track record speaks for itself: organisations from NASA to L'Oréal run on it.
Composable and enterprise-grade: a step up from mid-market platforms in capability and governance, without the licence costs, implementation timescales and lock-in of full DXP suites. Hover over any platform for a quick read on its strengths and trade-offs
Case Studies
Compound Partners is a UK digital consultancy specialising in audience-centric user experience and content architecture for professional services firms. Fifteen years ago, a developer's recommendation pointed us at django CMS. Today, our entire business is built on it.
Case Studies
Migrating from a 20 years old in-house Content Management System with almost 100k web pages to django CMS
django CMS Association: The driving force behind django CMS
django CMS is free and open-source, available under an open-source license. As such, there are no license fees.
The django CMS Association, a non-profit organization run by volunteers, with paid fellows, serves as its guardian, ensuring django CMS' continued sustainability and growth.
Meet the teamIf you would like to talk it through with one of our agency members, fill in the form below and we'll put you in touch. No sales team, because there isn't one. You'll be talking to an agency that has already made this decision.
