Craft CMS vs Statamic for publishers: database or flat files?

The short version

Pick Craft CMS if you want a database-backed system with a clean-slate content model and a developer or agency who writes Twig. Craft separates users by edition: Solo is one admin, Team is up to five users, and Pro has no cap. A desk of eight or more needs Pro, and the documentation describes drafts and revisions as part of the content system.

Pick Statamic if your developers already work in Laravel and want pages, collections and settings stored as files that can live in Git. Its free Core edition has one super admin, and revisions and role-based access sit in the paid Pro edition. It is a package you install into a Laravel application, not a standalone product.

The two are close cousins in business terms: source-available, per-site or per-project licences, and a yearly update fee after the first year. The deciding question is the stack. Craft is built on Yii 2 and uses a database. Statamic is a Laravel package with files by default. Our profiles cover Craft CMS and Statamic in full, and both rest on vendor documentation rather than our own install.

At a glance

Editorial workflow

Craft treats everything as an element. Entries, assets, categories, tags, users and more share one model, with custom fields attached through field layouts. Drafts are nondestructive changes forked from the canonical version. Saving applies a draft and Craft copies the previous canonical version into a revision. Permissions cover control-panel access and editing within particular sections, and permissions granted by several groups add together.

Statamic describes Revisions as its publishing workflow feature, with published, unpublished, working copy and revision states, and states that it is a Pro feature. Access control is also marked Pro: permissions are collected into roles, and roles are assigned to users or groups. Super admin accounts can do everything.

The practical difference is where the paywall falls. In Craft, the edition mainly caps the number of users: Solo one admin, Team five users and one group. In Statamic, Core has one super admin, and the pricing page says Pro adds multi-user capabilities. Either way, a multi-editor desk should budget for the paid edition.

Statamic also documents a Git integration that is switched on in the environment file. That fits a workflow where content changes are committed and deployed like code. We did not confirm an equivalent in Craft.

Search, structured data and feeds

Neither vendor’s documentation pages that we opened describe built-in sitemaps, feeds or structured data, so we claim none. Both leave SEO output largely to templates and developers.

For Craft, the plugin store lists an SEO plugin by Ether Creative (MIT licence, version 5.0.0, compatible with Craft 3, 4 and 5) that provides an SEO field type, a sitemap manager and a redirect manager. For Statamic, the documentation has a redirect tag that sends a visitor to another URL when rendered. That is template logic, not a redirect manager, and we have not verified an add-on equivalent.

For a news publisher, ask any bidder how they will deliver a news sitemap, article structured data and redirects. Follow Google’s documentation, and use the feature checklist as a starting list.

Hosting, performance and security

Craft 5 requires PHP 8.2 or later and Composer 2.0+, with MySQL 8.0.17+, MariaDB 10.4.6+ or PostgreSQL 13+, and at least 256 MB of PHP memory (512 MB recommended). Craft Cloud is the vendor’s hosted option, and the pricing page says Team and Pro licences are free on it.

Statamic requires PHP 8.3 or above and Composer, plus the BCMath, Ctype, Exif, JSON, Mbstring, OpenSSL, PDO, Tokenizer and XML extensions and GD or ImageMagick. The documentation lists no hosted option in the pages we read. Because content is files by default, you can start without a database server.

On speed, Statamic documents two static caching strategies. An application driver serves pre-rendered data from Laravel’s cache but still runs a full Statamic instance. A file driver writes static HTML that the web server delivers without running PHP. We did not find a Craft equivalent in the pages we opened, and we have no benchmark for either. Compare the operational load in our self-hosted guide.

Cost of ownership

On 2026-10-10 Craft’s pricing page listed Solo as free, Team at $279 per project, Pro at $399 per project and Enterprise by quote. Statamic’s listed Core as free, Pro at US$349 per site and Enterprise by quote. Both include one year of updates and charge $99 a year after that. Craft’s page shows dollar amounts without naming the currency.

Non-profits receive 15% off Team and Pro licences on Craft, excluding renewal fees. Statamic gives non-profits and educational institutions 20% off. Statamic Pro can be trialled free during development.

Licence terms are the same shape: a licensed copy may be actively installed in no more than one production environment at a time. A publisher running three sites buys three licences with either. The licence is the smallest line; hosting and developer time are the real cost. See the cost guide and licensing guide.

Migrating between them

We did not find an official Craft-to-Statamic or Statamic-to-Craft migration tool in the documentation we opened. The two store content very differently, in a database for Craft and in files by default for Statamic, so a move means a developer-written importer.

Statamic’s REST and GraphQL APIs are read-only and disabled by default, and Craft provides a GraphQL API. Check what each exposes for your content types before assuming you can script an export, and plan a redirect map for every URL that changes.

Which should you choose?

• Laravel team, small publication, content reviewed in Git: Statamic.
• Developer or agency fluent in Twig, with several content types: Craft.
• Desk with many editors and group permissions: Craft Pro or Statamic Pro; compare the user rules in each.
• Several separate sites from one install: Craft, according to its documentation. Statamic says multi-site is not for separate multi-tenant sites.
• Mostly anonymous readers and a wish for static HTML delivery: Statamic’s file-driver static cache.
• No developer on the team: neither. See the CMS directory.

If subscriptions and newsletters are the core of the business, read Ghost vs Craft CMS. For file-based options without a licence fee, see Kirby vs Grav. The comparison hub lists the rest, and the demo page explains how to try a system.