Choosing a CMS for a small charity.
Most small Irish charities we meet have the same shape: one part-time staff member who is also the comms team, a board that cares about money, and a website built five years ago by a friend of a friend who has since moved to Australia.
When we're invited in, the question is rarely "which CMS is best?" It's "which CMS will still be here, on a €20-a-month budget, when the next volunteer takes over?". Different question, different answer.
The honest list
Here's what we look at, ranked by how often we actually pick them.
1. WordPress (managed)
The default. Everybody's heard of it; finding a successor when you leave is easy. Hosted on something like Krystal or WP Engine, with a clean theme and one or two well-chosen plugins, it's still a fine answer.
What goes wrong: plugin sprawl. Every well-meaning volunteer adds one more plugin. Three years later the site is slow, the dashboard is full of update notices, and nobody remembers which plugin actually does what.
Pick it when: you have a real human who'll review plugins twice a year. Skip it when: nobody owns the maintenance.
2. Ghost
Lovely for charities that mostly publish articles — campaigns, news, member stories. Editor is a delight, the front-end is fast, and the hosted plan starts at about €11/month. We've moved several news-heavy non-profit sites onto it and the staff suddenly start writing more, which is the whole point.
Pick it when: the site is mostly content. Skip it when: you also need a shop, a complex donation flow, or many static pages.
3. Webflow
Beautiful designer-built sites, in-browser editing, a CMS that non-developers genuinely use. Costs more (€20–€40/month). We use it when the brief is "we need this to look amazing and the staff need to maintain it without us".
Where we pause: lock-in. You don't own the hosting, and exporting a Webflow site is awkward. Make sure the charity is comfortable with that trade.
4. cmsworkbench (our own)
Built because we got tired of explaining to charity boards that "the website" was actually six different services bolted together. With cmsworkbench a non-profit gets pages, news, a contact form, donations, analytics and an audit log behind one login. Hosting is a flat €5–€10 a month on AWS, regardless of traffic.
This isn't a marketing pitch — it solves a specific problem (low-budget multi-feature sites that need to last) and isn't right for everything. If a charity needs a deep blog with comments, Ghost is better; if they need a complex member portal, custom is better. Horses for courses.
5. Plain HTML
Yes, really. For the smallest charities — a parish committee, a community choir, a local food-bank — we still sometimes deliver a hand-coded static site. Updates happen by email; we change the words, push, done. Costs about €4 a month to host and we've had sites in this category run for seven years without an issue.
How we actually decide
Three questions, in this order:
- Who is going to update this when our contract ends? If the answer is "nobody really", lean simpler.
- What is the longest single thing on the site? News? Pick a content-first CMS. A page list? Pick a builder. A shop? Pick a shop.
- What is the actual annual budget? Not the launch budget. The forever budget. Match the tool to that, not to the launch hype.
The right CMS is the one you'll still be happy with on a wet Wednesday in November 2029.
If you'd like a half-hour conversation about what fits your charity — no pitch, just a chat — drop us a note. We've helped enough small organisations through this decision to have an honest opinion.