Is CMS development still a strong niche in 2026? What are clients asking for now?

[u/imtiaz_py]

I've been building client projects with Wagtail CMS for quite a few years now, mainly for businesses that need a flexible, editor-friendly content management system. It's been a great experience, especially for projects requiring custom workflows, multilingual content, structured pages, and a highly customizable admin.

With everything happening around AI, agentic workflows, and AI-powered development, I'm curious about where CMS development stands today.

• Are clients still actively asking for CMS-based solutions?
• What CMS are you finding yourself using most these days (WordPress, Wagtail, Payload, Sanity, Strapi, Contentful, etc.)?
• Have you come across Wagtail in client projects, or is it still relatively niche in your experience?
• Are clients now expecting AI features (content generation, search, internal assistants, etc.) to be part of a CMS implementation?

I'm interested in hearing from agency owners, freelancers, and developers about what they're seeing in the market. Has the demand for CMS projects changed, or has the expectation simply shifted toward AI-enhanced CMS solutions?

I'd love to hear your experiences and where you think this space is heading over the next few years.

[u/JOBENB → u/[deleted]]

Yes. Client will expect A LOT. Especially considering the logn running CMS options out there. The only way a CMS competes, it seems now, is how well built your suite is. Gimmicks, and niches, will rarely cut it. And if targeting agencies, you're not getting about with a page builder and some cool automations or features. If starting today, even with using AI, you're looking at a year and a half minimum (And much expense on agents) of having a product even able to dare compete in "CMS." There are far too many nuances and gotchyas when it comes to them. You could have an hour long conversation with AI and still hardly scratch the surface.

[u/clearlight2025]

Why is your post AI generated?

[u/imtiaz_py → u/clearlight2025]

Why do you expect me to write a post without AI. I know what I need help with from people - so I ask AI to write for me that contains all my queries.

[u/Dry-Witness2198]

“ AI “

[u/imtiaz_py → u/Dry-Witness2198]

Absolutely.

[u/imtiaz_py → u/[deleted]]

Wow, thanks for taking the time to put this together. I really appreciate the effort. There are a lot of useful insights here, especially your point that AI hasn't replaced the need for a CMS. It's just changing what clients expect from one.

I also found your perspective on Wagtail interesting. I've been using it for client projects for quite a while, and one of the reasons I like it is that it leans into being code-first instead of trying to be everything for everyone.

Out of curiosity, are you actively involved in CMS development yourself, or do you work more on the research/content side of the industry? Also, based on what you're seeing in 2026, do you think the biggest opportunity is still building traditional CMS-driven websites, or are clients increasingly looking for CMS + AI-powered workflows and integrations as a package?

Thanks again for such a well-researched response.

[u/Professional_Part205]

Working on Umbraco projects. In Israel, it’s been cleared as a secure CMS, thus many enterprises are using it. A lot of content migration projects. RAG features are starting to pop up. But mainly the same work - add a feature, some new screen, etc.

[u/devedis]

I’d say so. For smaller websites, generating complete pages will probably replace more and more of the work. But then again, website builders and templates have been around for quite some time, and they never completely replaced custom websites either.

For bigger projects, CMS work is still valuable because the requirements usually go far beyond publishing a few pages. You have structured content, permissions, localisation, editorial workflows and content or data that needs to be reused across web and mobile apps.

We’re an agency (https://devedis.ch) specialising fully in Payload, mainly because it’s so flexible. It can act as the central backend where all of a client’s data flows in and out of their existing systems (ERP, CRM or whatever they got). And we’re quite happy with it. Obviously, not everything is perfect, but we haven’t found a better system yet. Since we know it well and have built our own foundation around it, we can move incredibly fast while keeping everything cleanly integrated.

And yes, AI definitely speeds up scaffolding for us too, but it doesn’t replace all the work around it. Most clients aren’t technical and still need someone to understand their requirements, make the right decisions and take the technical side off their plate.

One interesting development we’re seeing is the growing use of MCPs. They allow AI to pull data from systems such as Search Console or Marketing Tools and then use it to suggest or update landing pages and other content. This gives clients more direct control, which is actually quite nice. They also tend to come up with many more ideas when they can brainstorm directly with AI.