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The 14th Annual CMS Critic Awards Article

<hr /> <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Battle_After_Another">One Battle After Another</a> is already garnering buzz as an Oscar contender. But there’s another battle brewing for the top spots in the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/cms-critic-awards">14th Annual CMS Critic Awards</a> – and you get to nominate the contenders!As usual, we’re not the Academy. During this contest, we put you in the judge’s seat, so you can tell us what CMS and related tools really blew your mind in 2025.Keep scrolling for more background and the house rules, but here's how it works in a nutshell: Make your nominations at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/nominate">www.cmscritic.com/nominate.</a> We take the top five contenders across a range of categories, open that up to general voting, and announce the victors in late February.DiCaprio might steal the show on screen, but he doesn’t hold a candle to agentic workflows. Content is the real star of this action flick, and the CMS Critic Awards are an opportunity for you to sing the praises of the platforms that power your digital experiences.<h3 id="celebrating-the-content-community">Celebrating the content community</h3>If you’re not familiar, the CMS Critic Awards are an institution in the content management and digital experience industries. It unites rabid fans across the globe to rally around the tools they love – no small feat in today’s fleeting technology landscape. With well-established enterprise vendors and a plethora of open source platforms, CMS enjoys some of the most loyal user communities in the tech pantheon. That’s why we’ve had such incredible participation over the past 13 years, making ours one of the longest-running awards programs in our industry (you can check out<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/cms-critic-awards"> all the previous winners here</a>).While CMS is our North Star, we also make space for the expanded ecosystem of products. Over the last decade, we've seen the rapid rise of digital experience technologies, from pure-play to fully integrated. To that end, we include categories for e-commerce, digital asset management, and even product information management. If it's a system that manages content, we want to celebrate it.In a world where using technology can feel like fighting one battle after another, the CMS Critic Awards is proof that loyalty still lives – and people make all the difference.<h3 id="2025:-the-agents-cometh…">2025: The agents cometh…</h3>…and they’re still coming. Without a doubt, this was the year when AI shifted to an agentic gear, with nearly every CMS, DXP, and adjacent platform touting its advancements with agents (and in some cases, “super agents”). It was a rapid-fire news cycle infused with innovative announcements – and we covered some of the biggest shifts throughout the year.We traversed the world in 2025, from San Francisco to Hamburg, connecting with communities and following the rattle and hum of the content world. With hundreds of articles published over the last 12 months, there’s too much to cover – but here are a few highlights:<ul><li>Platforms made big moves this year, from <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/">Contentstack’s acquisition of Lytics</a> to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/seasons-of-love-sitecore-symposium-2025-sings-putting-ai-and-marketers-in-the-spotlight">Sitecore’s launch of its new Sitecore AI.</a> We attended both conferences, reporting from the ground with exclusive interviews. </li><li>At every event – from <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/joy-to-the-content-world-storyblok-brings-ai-innovation-and-human-connection-to-joyconf-2025">Storyblok’s inaugural JoyConf</a> to the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/the-deep-dish-on-composable-6-tasty-takeaways-from-the-mach-alliances-2025-conference">MACH Alliance’s “The Composable Conference” </a>– agentic AI was a constant undercurrent, manifesting in a wide range of applications, use cases, features, and partnerships. </li><li>Analyst grids were rife with change as enterprise vendors like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/optimizely-opal-fuels-marketers-with-powerful-ai-agents-via-googles-gemini-enterprise">Optimizely made headlines</a> with AI advancements and GEO-ready CMS capabilities. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/rush-to-geo-adobe-to-acquire-semrush-for-19b-to-enhance-ai-search">Adobe’s acquisition of SEO darling Semrush</a> was big news, Progress shook things up with its new <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/progress-powers-its-vision-for-generative-cms-with-agentic-rag-and-a-legacy-of-innovation">Progress Agentic RAG offering</a>, and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/fight-the-cognitive-overload-brightspot-lights-the-way-to-productivity-with-its-evolutionary-cms-release">Brightspot launched</a> a game-changing release of its CMS.</li><li>Meanwhile, headless CMS players continued to drive innovation, from <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/the-headless-holodeck-joel-varty-of-agility-cms-on-warp-speed-demos-ai-and-the-next-generation-of-cms">Agility</a> to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/agentic-cms-why-kontentais-vision-for-the-future-of-content-management-is-inspiring">Kontent.ai</a> to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/hygraph-studio-sets-sail-with-increased-content-velocity-and-new-asset-management-capabilities">Hygraph</a>, leveraging their native composability to accelerate new AI and agentic capabilities and a host of dynamite enhancements.</li><li>Open source was also a big part of the conversation. In the wake of last year’s <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/wp-engine-wins-an-injunction-against-automattic-is-the-wordpress-scorched-earth-campaign-over">“WordPress Debacle,”</a> we broke the news about the new <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/alls-fair-in-love-and-war-new-fair-package-manager-aims-to-bring-peace-to-the-wordpress-ecosystem">FAIR Package introduced at Alt Ctrl Org,</a> helping to shape a healing path forward. During our coverage of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/sowing-the-seeds-of-love-umbracos-codegarden-2025-celebrates-20-years-of-community-and-innovation">Umbraco’s Codegarden event,</a> we saw notable traction in areas like orchestration, MCP, and more. And we were honored to help judge <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://t3con.typo3.com/awards">the TYPO3 Awards,</a> which featured some inspiring and ambitious entries.    </li><li>Along with our coverage of pure play DAM platforms like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/cloudinary">Cloudinary</a>, customer data was on our radar. From <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/hightouch-launches-high-performance-agents-to-help-marketers-move-10x-faster">Hightouch</a> to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/treasure-data-brings-ai-marketing-cloud-and-super-agent-capabilities-to-aws-marketplace">Treasure Data</a>, we saw incredible use cases for AI and evolving roadmaps for agents at scale. More to come on that in 2026. </li><li>We featured lots of great research on a range of topics, from <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/agentic-panic-new-study-finds-ai-agents-in-production-face-infrastructure-and-reliability-challenges">agent system performance</a> to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/put-on-a-happy-cms-face-storybloks-facial-coding-experiment-reveals-how-ai-is-sparking-joy">facial coding experiments.</a> We also tracked some innovative new tools in areas like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/one-ux-to-rule-them-all-auxia-powers-customer-journeys-with-ai-agents-in-new-unified-experience">customer journey orchestration</a> while continuing to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/the-complete-wordpress-accessibility-checklist-for-2026">shine a light on accessibility</a> and more exotic topics like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/what-i-mean-to-say-a-practitioner-perspective-on-ai-semantics-and-content-evolution">semantics and content evolution.</a>  </li></ul>Much like last year, traditional category lines are blurring, and new monikers are entering the lexicon. Platforms now offer a wide range of tools and capabilities, particularly in the case of DXPs. But we're focusing on clear, well-established lanes – and as always, if you feel a single vendor can live in more than one category, it’s your choice to nominate it. <h3 id="be-kind-–-your-mother-might-be-watching">Be kind – your mother might be watching</h3>The CMS Critic Awards are intended to be fun and friendly. But they do, at times, get a little intense. Every year, we receive thousands of ballots. Users come together like wolfpacks, championing the platforms they love. We also intercept a number of, shall we say, “passionate” pleas, demanding to know why certain platforms were in a specific category, or why their tool wasn’t in the running. As always, we try to operate in a space of respect and integrity. Obviously, if a platform isn’t truly open source, it won’t be considered for “Best Open Source CMS.” But now more than ever, we're blurring the proverbial lines – and let’s face it, the analysts are also compounding the problem. So, our editorial team endeavors to stay out of the nominating process. As a reminder, we only take the top five in each category by nomination count, so anything below that won’t be featured in the final voting in February.To the victors go the spoils! Winners receive official badging, shout-outs on social media, and one month of upgraded status in our highly-trafficked <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products">Product Directory.</a> <h3 id="how-to-make-your-nominations-">How to make your nominations </h3>The good news is that it’s easy – and fun. Here’s how you can participate:<ul><li>Visit <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://www.cmscritic.com/nominate">www.cmscritic.com/nominate</a></li><li>Fill out the required fields and enter the names of your nominees in each category. You don't have to include a nomination for every category – only complete the fields that you care about, and your ballot will be counted. Remember that you can nominate the same vendor in multiple categories.</li><li>Once completed, click the “Submit” button at the bottom of the form. </li><li>You can only nominate once, and companies or brands that offer incentives of any kind will be disqualified.</li><li>Spread the word! Remember to share and encourage others to participate, especially across your social channels.</li><li>Nominations close on January 25, 2026, so get out there and rally your communities! Once we tabulate the results, we’ll announce the top five for general voting in early February via email and social. </li></ul>We might call this a battle, but it’s really a lovefest for CMS – and you call the shots. So make your nominations today! <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:31.44%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/08/cms-kickoff-2026-logo.png" alt="" /><h4 id="cms-kickoff-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">CMS Kickoff 2026</a></h4>January 13-14, 2026 – St. Petersburg, FLMeet industry leaders at our fourth annual CMS Kickoff – the industry's premier global CMS event. Similar to a traditional kickoff, we reflect on recent trends and share stories from the frontlines. Additionally, we will delve into the current happenings and shed light on the future. Prepare for an unparalleled in-person CMS conference experience that will equip you to move things forward. This is an exclusive event – space is limited, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff26">so secure your tickets today.</a> <img style="width:30.13%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/12/image-1765546475634.png" /><h4 id="umbraco-codegarden-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://codegarden.umbraco.com/">Umbraco Codegarden 2026</a></h4>June 10–11, 2026 – Copenhagen, DKJoin us in Copenhagen (or online) for the biggest Umbraco conference in the world – two full days of learning, genuine conversations, and the kind of inspiration that brings business leaders, developers, and digital creators together. Codegarden 2026 is packed with both business and tech content, from deep-dive workshops and advanced sessions to real-world case studies and strategy talks. You’ll leave with ideas, strategies, and knowledge you can put into practice immediately. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://codegarden.umbraco.com/">Book your tickets today.</a>

The ‘Battle Royale’ Begins: Nominations are OPEN for the 14th Annual CMS Critic Awards!

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The ‘Battle Royale’ Begins: Nominations are OPEN for the 14th Annual CMS Critic Awards!