See what WinterCMS offers as a free, open-source Laravel-based CMS forked from October CMS, including features, pricing, and pros and cons.
WinterCMS is a free, open-source content management system built on the Laravel PHP framework. It was created in March 2021 when a group of core maintainers forked the codebase of October CMS after a breakdown in communication with October's founders.
Following the fork, October CMS's founders made their original product a paid, proprietary platform, while the WinterCMS team committed to keeping their fork free, open source, and governed by the community rather than a single commercial owner.
The project is stewarded by Frostbyte Foundation Inc and built by a team of specialist and agency developers, aiming to serve as a stable, self-hosted alternative for teams that want a Laravel-based CMS without licensing fees.
WinterCMS focuses on four core strengths: speed through performance-oriented system design, simplicity by letting developers build with standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, stability through backwards-compatible updates, and security through full source code transparency.
A plugin and theme architecture, supported by a marketplace, lets developers extend the platform with additional functionality such as e-commerce, forms, and blogging without building everything from scratch.
Being built on Laravel gives WinterCMS access to Laravel's broader tooling, conventions, and developer ecosystem, making it a natural fit for PHP developers already comfortable with that framework.
WinterCMS is completely free and open source, released under the MIT license, with no cost to download, install, modify, or redistribute the core software.
There is no official managed hosting or SaaS tier from the WinterCMS project itself, so users are responsible for hosting the platform on their own servers or through a third-party hosting provider.
Some plugins and themes distributed through the marketplace may carry their own individual prices set by their developers, though the core CMS and its official features remain free.
WinterCMS is a free, open-source content management system built on the Laravel PHP framework.
Yes, WinterCMS is free and open source under the MIT license, with no licensing fees.
WinterCMS began as a fork of October CMS created in March 2021 after October's founders moved the original project to a paid, proprietary model.
WinterCMS is built on the Laravel PHP framework.
Yes, WinterCMS offers a plugin and theme marketplace for extending core functionality.
WinterCMS is maintained by a community team under the stewardship of Frostbyte Foundation Inc.
Because WinterCMS was forked from October CMS's codebase, migration paths exist, though users should review current documentation for compatibility details.