If you need something complex and bespoke, build it yourself with something like Rails/Elixir/Whatever - your choice will depend mostly on your preference of to

If you need something complex and bespoke, build it yourself with something like Rails/Elixir/Whatever - your choice will depend mostly on your preference of tools/language/community as they are all quite flexible if you know them well. Rails is suitable if you're greenfielding a complex new site (as would be Go or Elixir), Laravel probably if you like PHP (haven't used it), definitely not Drupal, Typo3, Wordpress etc if you are thinking of extending them in any significant way. Meteor doesn't strike me as particularly suitable for a CMS. Django might be worth looking at as it has built-in admin which is more CMS-like than others? Since you mention building a CMS, my 2 cents on that: If you need something very simple which is a good fit for a particular CMS and/or are on a very limited budget, just use a prebuilt CMS product and adjust some templates, otherwise you're reinventing a lot for not much gain. Doesn't sound like you want this option. If you are producing a bespoke site consider writing most of what you need from scratch rather than trying to use modules/plugins etc. because the capability to use modules/plugins tends to invert authority in an app, and require you to do the things the framework way or not at all. Every bit of code you import from elsewhere comes with a significant cost in maintenance, security and complexity. So don't choose a framework in the hope you can just plug things other people have written together and make it all work. Avoid CMS products which try to allow the end user to customise records (custom fields, nodes etc), install hundreds of badly written modules, and do a limited form of programming by manipulating records or templates in the database (I'm thinking of things like Drupal and to a lesser extent Wordpress). If you try to use them for something complex it will usually lead to an unmaintainable morass of poorly understood code.