Statamic

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 805 words

The first thing everyone asks about Statamic is whether it is really free, so: the core is MIT-licensed and on GitHub with 4,883 stars, a free edition covers a single-user site, and Pro, which you need for multiple control panel users and a few other features, is a paid per-site licence (about $275 a year at last check). That split is the whole decision for most readers. A developer building a personal or single-owner site gets a polished CMS for free; an agency or a team wanting editors in the control panel is paying, though still far less than a headless SaaS such as Contentful.

It is a Laravel app first, and that decides who should run it

Statamic installs as a Composer package inside a standard Laravel application, and everything you know about hosting Laravel applies: PHP-FPM or a Docker image built from the official PHP base, nginx or Apache with the usual public/ document root, a queue worker if you turn on features that need one, and php please in place of php artisan for the CMS commands. There is no one-line installer for someone who has never run Composer. The "best suited to developers" caveat in the summary is accurate, and it is also the reason Laravel developers love it: you can drop a controller, a middleware, or an Eloquent model next to your content and it all works in one codebase.

Resource-wise it is modest. 512 MB of RAM is enough for a site with a few thousand entries, and because the default storage is files, there is no database to size or back up.

Flat files make content a git repository, which changes the workflow

Entries live under content/collections/blog/2026-09-13.my-post.md as Markdown with YAML front matter; blueprints, navigation, globals, and taxonomies are YAML too. Commit the content/ directory and your CMS content has history, branches, and pull requests. The Pro edition's Git Automation feature commits changes from the control panel automatically, so a non-technical editor writing in the browser produces commits without knowing what a commit is. Deploys become git pull and a cache clear.

The costs of that model are real. Files scale to tens of thousands of entries before the in-memory index (the Stache) gets slow, and if you need more, Statamic's Eloquent driver moves collections into a database while keeping the same control panel. Two servers cannot share a flat-file content directory without a sync layer, so multi-server setups either go database-backed or push everything through git.

Static caching turns it into a near-static site

Turn on full static caching and Statamic writes finished HTML into public/static/ and configures nginx or Apache to serve those files directly without touching PHP. Response times drop to whatever your web server can push, and a small VPS serves a great deal of traffic. Forms and anything user-specific fall back to PHP on demand. Half-measure caching (per-URL, served through PHP) is the safer default when you have logged-in areas. This is the part of Statamic that keeps me from reaching for a static site generator such as Hugo on client work: editors get a real control panel and the public gets static-file speed.

Where it sits against the rest of the CMS shelf

WordPress has the ecosystem and the hosting market; pick it when the client will hire from that pool or needs a plugin Statamic lacks. Grav is the other flat-file PHP CMS, easier to install and free for everything, with a smaller and less consistent addon ecosystem and no Laravel underneath. Kirby is Statamic's closest rival in spirit: flat-file, developer-oriented, paid per site, but framework-free. If your team writes Laravel, Statamic wins that comparison outright; if it does not, Kirby's independence is the advantage.

The Antlers template language is pleasant and Blade is fully supported alongside it, so you never have to learn Antlers if Blade is already in your fingers. Addons install via Composer from a marketplace that is smaller than WordPress's by orders of magnitude but higher in average quality.

What I'd do

Laravel developer with a personal site or a one-owner client project: Statamic on the free tier, content in git, full static caching, deployed like any Laravel app. Agency with editors: budget the Pro licence per site and treat Git Automation as the reason to pay it. Anyone who does not write PHP and wants a flat-file CMS: Grav, or a static generator with a hosted editor. The CMS category has the wider list, but for a Laravel shop Statamic is the one I would stop searching at.