Doesn't seem to be open source: https://github.com/craftcms/cms/blob/develop/LICENSE.md

It doesn't have to be open source to be successful.

I understand that open source things can increase reach of the product, but that's at the expense of proper software support.

Let's accept some proprietary software in our lives. Sometimes these have demostrated technical superiority.

> I understand that open source things can increase reach of the product, but that's at the expense of proper software support.

Lots of open source projects offer premium support.

> Let's accept some proprietary software in our lives. Sometimes these have demostrated technical superiority.

Sure, but let's not pretend proprietary vendors know more than open-source projects and contributors. Also, if your product is ultimately the content itself, it's an enormous risk to hand that over to third parties that want to take control of it. You are explicitly coupling yourself to the success of the proprietary software vendor.

I believe the source is available on github and the team accepts pull requests. Single user license is free.

We're currently having painful performance issues with Craft at work. It takes 300ms+ just for an empty craft installation to return an empty page. Saving entries to the database programatically is slow too, one of our sites has a nightly sync process, only needs to touch a few thousand entities, with a normal database schema that workload is doable in seconds, with Craft it takes hours.

Did you figure it out? Something's clearly wrong with your hosting or database.

Their support is super responsive on discord and via email.

And yes Craft’s schema is pretty complicated.

I run Craft CMS for Tedium (https://tedium.co). I could push it further but one way I use it is by creating a custom view that “spits” out a completed email template with all of my desired layout considerations and quirks already considered. I could push it further and run the newsletter through Craft itself, though I’ve chosen to pay someone to manage the sending of the email.

(And while not particularly “Crafty,” I use a paid plugin, Doxter, to manage my CMS code in Markdown, with the use of shortcodes.)

The performance issues mentioned by others are realistic, but if you put it behind CloudFlare, they’re totally reasonable. While Ghost is a much more popular use case for newsletter publishers like myself, I prefer the customization capabilities of Craft to forge a CMS experience I’m comfortable with.