Statamic as a Flat File CMS
Learn why Statamic is the best Flat File CMS for most people. Bring fully dynamic websites and applications to life with nothing but YAML Front-Loaded Markdown files and HTML. Enjoy a beautiful, modern control panel anyone can use.
Here's how some folks in the Web Community feel about Statamic.
Overall, Statamic feels like a CMS of the future, whereas WordPress feels like a CMS of 10 years ago.
I’m sold & can’t wait to use it for my other sites.
Paul Jarvis Founder, Fathom Analytics
Statamic is some of the best software I've used (and I use it every day).
Now it's really hard to use these other WordPress sites I have...
Justin Jackson
Founder, Transistor.fm
Installing Statamic was super easy. This flat-file thing has a fun factor to it.
Leslie Comacho
Businesss Coach
Wondering if Statamic is the best flat file CMS for your project?
Statamic is easy to learn, fast, flexible, and wildly extendable, with the power of Laravel under the hood — the world’s best PHP framework.
On top of that, Statamic's control panel is clean and intuitive. With more than 40 fieldtypes to structure and manage your content, built in asset management, forms, permissions, nav builders, and more — there’s almost nothing you can’t do right out of the box.
And best of all, you’re not limited to static sites like other platforms. You can run a fully dynamic, highly performant website without a database.
Think of Statamic as a Flat File CMS Framework.
Statamic is built as a Composer Package you can install into any Laravel project, or simply run standalone in a new skeleton app. Use as much or as little of it as you want.
Statamic has many interconnected but distinct pieces. There’s the control panel, the front-end data cascade that hydrates your views based on URLs, the Antlers Template Engine with all of its Tags and Modifiers, Content API and GraphQL, Content Queries (similar to Eloquent models), Static Site Generator, Form manager, Users, Roles & Permissions, and more.
Each of these pieces can be used on its own if you wish, or you can just go all-in and let Statamic run the show. It’s up to you.
Content production made stupid simple.
Statamic's sweet spot is with content. The editing experience is intuitive and highly configurable. With over 40 fieldtypes you can assemble Blueprints to manage your content in the most logical and structured way to fit your HTML.
It's up to you whether you use a "block based" editor like Bard, granular Text and Markdown fields to break up the structure, or anything in between.
Use Statamic to build and manage anything, like…
- Long, media-rich articles
- Landing pages
- Blog posts and press releases
- Events
- Real estate listings
- Pricing tables
- And much, much more.
Statamic won the CMS Critic’s Choice Award for Flat File CMS the last 3 years in a row
CMS Critic praised the flexibility of Statamic's headless Content REST API, the block-based content editor (the Bard fieldtype), and its data layer that gives you the ability to store content anywhere (including a database, if you choose).
Statamic also allows you to view content history, restore prior versions, see what your page looks like before publishing with Live Preview, and collaborate in real-time via multi-user editing.
Lastly, CMS Critic celebrated Statamic’s excellent support system, documentation, and "tenacious" community. Statamic delivers a lot of control for building bespoke digital experiences. There are no plugins required, and it boasts excellent security to boot. Thanks CMS Critic! ❤️
Statamic scales better than every other CMS.
Start your site in flat-file mode. Enable caching and watch it fly, handling requests beautifully. Enable static caching or go full static with our static site generator if-and-when that heavy traffic arrives.
Have hundreds of thousands of entries, assets, or users? Switch to a database driver and move that data out of the filesystem without having to modify a single template or blueprint.
Need to take it to the next level? Follow Spiegel's lead and use a custom hybrid driver, storing your records in a file system for persistence and portability while pushing the content to a cloud data provider (like ElasticSearch or Firebase) to run your site from.
Your site can smoothly scale from a mom-and-pop site to a world-class media publishing organization without ever having to rewrite or rebuild anything.
Designed and built by industry veterans
Statamic was created by Jack McDade, a designer, speaker, and long-time figure in the Laravel community. Over the years he has collaborated with Taylor Otwell of Laravel, Adam Wathan of TailwindCSS, Caleb Porzio of Alpine.js, and Justin Jackson of Transistor.fm, working on design and user experiences for their respective communities.
Jason Varga, Jesse Leite, Joshua Blum, and Duncan McClean round out the core dev team — both seasoned Laravel developers having contributed to Laravel core and released open source packages and tools of all sorts.
And then there's the community. Statamic is consistently recognized as one of the most highly collaborative CMS projects on GitHub.
Statamic Core is a Free and Open Source Flat File CMS.
Our repo is open and you can see everything we're working on, submit PRs, collaborate and discuss issues, and provide feedback on new ideas and feature requests.
If and when you need the extra features — like user permissions & roles, automatic git commits, the Content API, and GraphQL — you can upgrade to Statamic Pro. That money goes directly to fund continued development and direct support. When you open a support request, the same team that built the CMS answers your questions.
It's hard to beat that.
“Jack and his team are incredible, and you get to benefit both from the entire Laravel ecosystem, which is really, really good.”
— John O’Nolan, Founder of Ghost