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

One Battle After Another is already garnering buzz as an Oscar contender. 

But there’s another battle brewing for the top spots in the 14th Annual CMS Critic Awards – 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 www.cmscritic.com/nominate. 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.

Celebrating the content community

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 all the previous winners here).

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.

2025: The agents cometh…

…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:

• Platforms made big moves this year, from Contentstack’s acquisition of Lytics to Sitecore’s launch of its new Sitecore AI. We attended both conferences, reporting from the ground with exclusive interviews. 
• At every event – from Storyblok’s inaugural JoyConf to the MACH Alliance’s “The Composable Conference” – agentic AI was a constant undercurrent, manifesting in a wide range of applications, use cases, features, and partnerships. 
• Analyst grids were rife with change as enterprise vendors like Optimizely made headlines with AI advancements and GEO-ready CMS capabilities. Adobe’s acquisition of SEO darling Semrush was big news, Progress shook things up with its new Progress Agentic RAG offering, and Brightspot launched a game-changing release of its CMS.
• Meanwhile, headless CMS players continued to drive innovation, from Agility to Kontent.ai to Hygraph, leveraging their native composability to accelerate new AI and agentic capabilities and a host of dynamite enhancements.
• Open source was also a big part of the conversation. In the wake of last year’s “WordPress Debacle,” we broke the news about the new FAIR Package introduced at Alt Ctrl Org, helping to shape a healing path forward. During our coverage of Umbraco’s Codegarden event, we saw notable traction in areas like orchestration, MCP, and more. And we were honored to help judge the TYPO3 Awards, which featured some inspiring and ambitious entries.    
• Along with our coverage of pure play DAM platforms like Cloudinary, customer data was on our radar. From Hightouch to Treasure Data, we saw incredible use cases for AI and evolving roadmaps for agents at scale. More to come on that in 2026. 
• We featured lots of great research on a range of topics, from agent system performance to facial coding experiments. We also tracked some innovative new tools in areas like customer journey orchestration while continuing to shine a light on accessibility and more exotic topics like semantics and content evolution.  

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. 

Be kind – your mother might be watching

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 Product Directory. 

How to make your nominations 

The good news is that it’s easy – and fun. Here’s how you can participate:

• Visit www.cmscritic.com/nominate
• 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.
• Once completed, click the “Submit” button at the bottom of the form. 
• You can only nominate once, and companies or brands that offer incentives of any kind will be disqualified.
• Spread the word! Remember to share and encourage others to participate, especially across your social channels.
• 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. 

We might call this a battle, but it’s really a lovefest for CMS – and you call the shots. So make your nominations today!

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