Grav VS Kirby

Perhaps "polish" or "a sleek, modern UI" would have been slightly better wording on my part in regards to the look, but otherwise I'm quite happy that I settled on Grav and also the idea of versioning everything in Git, alongside a CI/CD pipeline, instead of one long lived instance on the server.

Grav is pretty cool: https://getgrav.org/

But there is a content management system that makes it easier and simpler. And this is especially true for frontend developers. It's Grav CMS.

Good point on the timing, but I really hope Wordpress users aren't migrating to Drupal en masse.

Drupal would be a very poor fit for most Wordpress-y sites (simple marketing pages, basic ecommerce, etc.). It's overkill and way too complicated and requires endless maintenance (see my rant in a sibling thread).

There are a lot of better, lighter options for people who liked the ease-of-use of Wordpress.

Wix/Squarespace are better choices for hosted/proprietary solutions, or in the FOSS/self-hosted world, there's https://ghost.org/, https://strapi.io/, https://getgrav.org/, or older PHP ones like TYPO3, Joomla, or CraftCMS.

There are also a lot of commercial headless CMSes (https://cms-comparison.io/#/card) that are good fits for devs who want to code a frontend (in a framework/language of their choice) for non-dev clients. (Disclaimer: I work for a headless CMS, but this is my own opinion). Wordpress can do headless too with the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, but that was previously bought by WPEngine and now caught in the crossfire between them and Matt :( https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/

Not mentioned in OP: https://getgrav.org/

I used it for a project once and both me and the client were happy.

It's Grav CMS.

I gave October a pretty serious look about five or six years ago. I like the fact that you can code in the interface, which can feel more friendly than competing platforms. But I thought the community hadn’t reached a level of scale that I thought was enough that I could trust it.

Also, I know that you have said you’re willing to pay and you’re not necessarily looking for FOSS, but I will point out there was some licensing drama with October a few years ago that led to a full-on fork: https://wintercms.com/blog/post/we-have-forked-october-cms

You may also find Kirby a good fit: https://getkirby.com

I have been using kirby (https://getkirby.com/) for all my (mostly non-dynamic) websites with great success the last few years. It's super stable, flexible, under active development and has a great ecosystem.

Can't recommend it enough.

If you have mostly static web sites with little work to update, you could try out the flat-file KirbyCMS: https://getkirby.com/ - it is a CMS I tried myself and liked quite much.

I want to point out that it is not an open-source project like Wordpress, but a one-time licence fee you have to pay once you go live with your project.

There is a great community around KirbyCMS who are building plugins for it, for example the SEO tool you want, in this case it is free / "pay what you want" pricing model, so it should be quite affordable: https://plugins.getkirby.com/tobimori/seo

After a few years building on WO I switched to https://getkirby.com/ and never looked back.

Not sure if this is what you’re after but give https://getkirby.com/ a try

Personally think https://getkirby.com is the entry to beat but I guess it’s just because I’m used to it and it works incredibly well for my use case.

Check out KirbyCMS. A PHP based files-only CMS. Can also be used as headless CMS. Works on most shared hosts and doesn't need a database. You'll have to do some basic PHP for the templates, though.