Top 10 CMS in Softaculous
Install in 1 Click on AsiaGB

There is no debating it — WordPress is the king of CMS. It powers over 43% of all websites on the internet, meaning at least 4 out of every 10 sites you visit run WordPress. Its dominance comes from striking the perfect balance between ease of use and raw capability — better than any other CMS on this list.

WordPress has over 60,000 plugins in its official directory covering everything from e-commerce (WooCommerce) to booking systems, forums, membership sites, and far more. Thousands of free and premium themes mean you never need to write CSS to get a professional-looking site.

For beginners, the Block Editor (Gutenberg) offers drag-and-drop content building, and page builders like Elementor or Divi extend this even further for pixel-perfect layouts.

Joomla is the world's second most popular CMS. While its market share is smaller than WordPress, it has a clear advantage in managing complex user groups and access permissions — making it the preferred choice for corporate intranets, government portals, and community sites with multiple user roles.

Joomla's Access Control List (ACL) system is significantly more granular than WordPress's. You can define precisely which content each user group can see, which is ideal for sites with intranet features, membership tiers, or content that varies based on login status.

Joomla's extension system is divided into Components, Modules, Plugins, and Templates — more complex than WordPress but more flexible. Many large Thai government and university sites still run on Joomla today.

Drupal is the most powerful CMS in this category, powering sites like NASA, The Economist, the Australian government, and top universities worldwide. It prioritizes flexibility and unlimited customization — but that power comes with significant complexity.

Drupal's standout features include a highly granular taxonomy system, fully custom content types, the powerful Views module for querying and displaying data, and excellent built-in caching for high-traffic sites.

Drupal is not beginner-friendly. Installing modules and themes typically requires Composer and Drush via the command line. A development team with solid PHP and web development knowledge is essentially a requirement.

OpenCart is a highly popular e-commerce CMS among SMEs because it's far easier to set up than Magento, yet more feature-rich than WooCommerce as a dedicated storefront. OpenCart was designed for e-commerce from the ground up — not bolted on as a plugin.

OpenCart ships with a complete commerce toolkit: product and category management, coupons, shipping rules, payment gateways, product reviews, sales reporting, affiliate systems, and built-in multi-currency and multi-store support. Its extension marketplace has thousands of add-ons, including Thai payment integrations for Omise, 2C2P, and PromptPay.

OpenCart handles catalogs of thousands of products without issue, backed by a solid caching system and advanced search filters.

PrestaShop is OpenCart's main rival in the mid-tier e-commerce space. It offers a more feature-rich experience and a cleaner admin UI, and is especially popular in Europe. Thai language support is available via language packs.

PrestaShop excels at managing complex product variants — for example, items with multiple layers of attributes (colour × size × material) — along with highly flexible discount rules, customer group pricing, and a built-in analytics dashboard that beats OpenCart's out of the box.

PrestaShop's marketplace has over 4,000 modules and 2,000 themes. Most are paid, but quality is generally high. The platform is available as a free Community Edition, with a PrestaShop-hosted edition also available for those who prefer managed infrastructure.

Magento (available via Softaculous as the community fork OpenMage) is the enterprise-grade e-commerce platform used by major global brands. It delivers the most comprehensive feature set of any e-commerce CMS in Softaculous.

Magento is renowned for handling extremely high traffic when properly configured, supporting catalogs of millions of products, complex pricing rules, full B2B features, and native multi-website support. However, it requires significantly more server resources — a minimum of 2–4 GB RAM is recommended.

Softaculous installs the open-source Magento Community Edition (OpenMage), which suits stores that need enterprise-level capability without the enterprise price tag.

Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) is the world's number one Learning Management System (LMS), used widely by schools, universities, and organizations that need online training. It serves over 240 million users globally.

Moodle ships with a complete course toolkit: quizzes, assignments, forums, video content, SCORM support, a gradebook, and automatic certificate generation. It supports both asynchronous learning (self-paced) and live classes via BigBlueButton or Zoom plugins.

Moodle's plugin marketplace has over 1,800 entries covering every conceivable teaching format. It includes built-in Thai language support and plugins for Thai-style certificate generation.

phpBB is the most popular forum software of all time, used to build community message boards and discussion sites. Before social media took hold, phpBB was the backbone of online communities worldwide — and it remains popular today, especially for communities that want more control and privacy than a Facebook Group.

phpBB includes a full forum feature set: multi-level categories and subforums, private messaging, a reputation system, advanced search, member groups, ban and moderation tools, and granular email notifications. An extensive extension (Mod) library makes it highly customizable.

phpBB is remarkably lightweight and efficient. Even with tens of thousands of members and millions of posts, it runs comfortably on shared hosting.

Grav is a modern flat-file CMS that requires no database at all. Everything is stored as plain Markdown files on the server, making backups trivial (just copy the folder), enabling instant Git version control, and delivering excellent performance since there's no database to query.

Grav uses the Twig templating engine and YAML configuration, making it immediately appealing to developers familiar with modern web stacks. Its active plugin and theme marketplace can power everything from simple blogs to documentation sites or even e-commerce through the Snipcart plugin.

Grav's primary selling point is its exceptional developer experience. For non-technical users unfamiliar with Markdown or the command line, the learning curve is considerably steeper than WordPress.

October CMS is a modern CMS built on the Laravel framework — currently the most popular PHP framework in the world. Developers already familiar with Laravel can jump into October CMS immediately, backed by excellent documentation.

October CMS features a highly flexible architecture with clearly separated pages, partials, layouts, and content blocks. Its well-designed plugin system, backend builder for creating custom admin panels, and Twig templating make it a developer favourite for custom-built sites.

While its Plugin Marketplace is visibly smaller than WordPress's, the average quality of October CMS plugins is higher — its community skews toward experienced developers, resulting in better overall code quality.