Sifting Through the Statamic

Does your CMS give you the freedom to design a web experience tailored to your goals or do you have to shoehorn your design to make it fit? Is your content easy to manage and easy to update, or do you constantly have to fight the platform or contact your development team to make updates?

With over a decade of experience engineering and adapting content management systems, Zaengle’s expert team of web developers has chosen to work with just two platforms: Craft CMS and Statamic. As one of the first Statamic Verified Partners, we’ll explain how you can create beautiful, easy-to-use websites that save you money, are highly secure, and provide the best experience for you and your users.

Unlike Wordpress or other blog-centric platforms, Statamic is designed to produce rich content experiences that are scalable, secure, and incredibly easy to manage.

Statamic’s core features are designed for what most sites require, without the need to install a suite of plugins (though there’s a robust marketplace if you need some extra juice).

Trusted by companies like Der Spiegel, Disney, Asana, and OpenTable, Statamic is scalable, secure, and feature-rich. Statamic also has the added benefit of being a flat file CMS, making it hyper-fast allowing for version-controlled, database-free development.

Benefits of Statamic:

• Highly flexible
• Based on open-source technology
• Stable and secure (Laravel is also considered the most secure and well-maintained PHP framework on the market)
• Flat file based, which allows for full version control of your website
• Includes best-in-class editorial workflows stress tested by some of the largest content organizations in the world
• Deployed across hundreds of websites, features an established partner network, and has been rigorously tested over 7 years
• Database free - which makes it fast, removes potential headaches, and the need for DB Admins

Your website deserves a content management system that’s engineered for your website, instead of one that you just “have to make work.” Our clients love using Statamic, both for the incredibly easy content authoring experience and the knowledge that the platform is built on Laravel, one of the most stable and secure PHP frameworks in existence.

Additionally, Statamic gives your team the ability to fully control every piece of your website’s content, and because of its flat file structure, it’s super easy to audit any changes and set up automated back-ups. You can also run Statamic as a headless CMS, bringing your frontend of choice combined with Statamic’s control panel for content management.

Gone are the days where you have to “give up control” because of CMS limitations, something that Wordpress and other platforms simply cannot live up to.

Why Statamic is the Right Choice:

• If you don’t need a database and prefer a flat file system (and if you need a database, Statamic can easily introduce one).
• If you like to see design changes and updates to your site without pushing the “live” button, Statamic offers Live Preview functionality.
• If you’re sick of Wordpress and security vulnerabilities (especially with plugins), Statamic is highly secure and easy to back-up.
• If you want a platform that covers most website needs with core features, and if you need more options, there’s a robust marketplace of 3rd-party plugins available.
• If you’re looking for a headless CMS so you can roll with the frontend of your choice and use the Statamic control panel for content.
• If you want to replace a giant, impersonal content product with a dedicated, nimble team that can custom tailor a CMS to fit your specific needs.

If you don’t support open-source technology.

Statamic is built on open-source technology. If you’re a Microsoft-only company that requires ASP or .NET technologies (for example), Statamic is not a good fit for you. If your organization can support open-source platforms (and especially if your organization is familiar with PHP), we believe Statamic is a fantastic content management solution.

If you want enterprise-level software.

Statamic is not enterprise software like Salesforce. Statamic is powerful and feature-rich, but if your organization requires enterprise-level support you may need to turn elsewhere.

If you want a one click, plug-and-play system.

Statamic is incredibly easy to set up, but it does require some development expertise. And while Statamic features a thriving plugin community, almost all of them require a bit of coding to fully utilize. Deploying Statamic for your organization is best done using a certified Statamic partner like Zaengle.

If you want a free platform.

Unlike free platforms such as Wordpress, Statamic is a paid framework. That said, Statamic is far from cost-prohibitive. The core features of Statamic handle everything most sites need without additional plugins or subscriptions. Sure, it may cost more than other platforms, but in our experience “free” is often the most expensive of all. Not to mention, there is value in choosing a profitable product that consistently reinvests to improve the platform, harden security, and release new features.

Hosting: $20+/mo depending on traffic

Starting License: $259 one-time fee ($59/yr for updates after first year)

Plugins (commonly used):

• SEOPro: $49
• Redirect: $35

Zaengle is one of the original Statamic Partners and it’s our CMS of choice for many of the content-driven websites we work on. In fact, it’s hard not to find a use case for Statamic, from small marketing sites to enterprise-level custom software.