There's no single best CMS for not-for-profits, which is an unsatisfying answer to what feels like a reasonable question. What there is: a small number of platforms that suit clearly different situations, and a handful of questions that point you to the right one faster than any feature comparison ever will.
Webcoda holds partnerships across several of these platforms, so what follows is a comparison, not a pitch. Where a section claims a platform does something, there's a link to the project.
Key Takeaways
- Choose on who maintains the site, what it integrates with, and your three-year cost, not on a feature list.
- Umbraco is the open-source option worth shortlisting: MIT-licensed, no licence fee, and what the St Vincent de Paul members hub and the Tresillian site run on.
- HubSpot CMS suits organisations whose supporter communications already run on HubSpot. Metropolitan Memorial Parks publishes a "45% Reduction in time-to content through improved navigation" after their build.
- Xperience by Kentico suits larger not-for-profits with multiple sites, formal approval workflow or member functionality.
- Already on WordPress or Drupal? Don't move without a real reason. When there is one, a structured migration protects content and SEO value.
Start With Four Questions
Who maintains this site day to day? If it's a communications coordinator with no technical backup, editor experience matters most.
What does it connect to? Your donor database, CRM, payment platform, events system or email tool. Integration effort is often the biggest hidden cost.
What's the three-year cost, all in? Licences, hosting, support, and the upgrade you'll need in year two or three. Free licences aren't free to maintain.
How much will change? An organisation running frequent campaigns needs staff who can build landing pages unaided. A service-information site doesn't.
Umbraco
The open-source option worth taking seriously. Umbraco is MIT-licensed and built on .NET, so there's no licence fee, and hosting runs from self-managed to Umbraco's own cloud. Its appeal for not-for-profits is that the content model gets shaped around how your organisation describes its work, rather than forcing content into a template built for a different sector.
If the question is whether it stretches to member functionality, here's the evidence. Webcoda built the St Vincent de Paul members and volunteers hub on Umbraco, holding member details in a custom CRM with an integrated user database for login authentication, so members see news and events matched to their profile and can download resources, guides and templates. Tresillian is Umbraco too, with Google Maps finding a parent's nearest centre, plus events and ecommerce.
If budget is what's driving the decision, JMC Academy moved onto Umbraco from a costly CMS and made significant savings. It does need a competent partner to set up well: a poorly modelled Umbraco site is as rigid as any other CMS done badly.
HubSpot CMS
Best understood as a CRM with a website attached rather than a CMS with marketing bolted on. If supporter communications and reporting already run through HubSpot, building the site there removes an entire integration.
Webcoda built Metropolitan Memorial Parks on HubSpot Content Hub: navigation designed on cognitive-psychology principles, built-in SEO tooling, personalisation, analytics, marketing automation covering event registrations, CRM integration, and security and compliance for sensitive family information. The published results are a "45% Reduction in time-to content through improved navigation" and a "30% Decrease in administrative tasks". Those figures belong to that project, and they're the only outcome numbers we publish.
It's a subscription, and costs scale with contacts and tier. HubSpot offers discounted pricing for eligible non-profit organisations, so check directly.
Xperience by Kentico
A commercial .NET platform for larger organisations, with built-in workflow, multi-site and multi-language support, and membership functionality. For a peak body, a federated charity running sites for several entities, or one with formal approval requirements, that replaces a lot of custom development. Webcoda is a Gold partner for it, though our published not-for-profit projects sit on Umbraco and HubSpot, so ask directly.
Headless Options
Headless platforms such as Kontent.ai separate content from presentation, so the same content can feed a website, an app and a partner channel at once. That's right when you genuinely publish to several destinations, not when it merely sounds modern. The trade-off is more front-end work, and editors lose visual preview unless someone builds it back.
If You're Already on WordPress or Drupal
Plenty of Australian not-for-profits run WordPress, and often it's doing the job. Being told it "isn't enterprise" is not, on its own, a reason to spend money. Two neutral facts: WordPress is GPL-licensed where Umbraco is MIT, and Drupal 7 reached end of life on 5 January 2025. Webcoda doesn't build on either, so take this as disclosure. What we do is structured migrations from WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore and legacy platforms onto Umbraco, preserving content, SEO value and editorial workflows.
Matching Platform to Situation
A small not-for-profit with one part-time editor is usually best served by a well-modelled Umbraco build, which keeps licence cost at zero without giving up structure. A not-for-profit already running supporter communications on HubSpot should look hard at HubSpot CMS. Member logins and content personalised by profile are proven on Umbraco, with the St Vincent de Paul hub as the working example.
Where Webcoda Fits
Webcoda is a Sydney-based digital agency, building websites since 2005, and a Certified B Corporation. That isn't a CMS feature, though if you're picking a supplier partly on whether their values line up with yours, it's a signal with an audit behind it. We're an Umbraco Gold Partner and a Gold Contributing Partner for 2025, a Gold partner for Xperience by Kentico, and a HubSpot Solutions Partner. See our not-for-profit services and platforms and services.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. The right choice depends on who maintains the site, what it integrates with, and your three-year budget. Any recommendation made without those three answers is really just a guess dressed up as advice.
Yes. The St Vincent de Paul members and volunteers hub does exactly that on Umbraco: member details in a custom CRM with an integrated user database for login authentication, news and events shown by member profile, and downloadable resources, guides and templates. The work is in the integration and the content modelling rather than the licence.
Several do, though eligibility and terms vary and change over time. Ask the vendor directly with your registration details rather than relying on a summary you found online, and factor hosting and support into the comparison as well as the licence.
Not without a real reason. Real reasons look like plugin-driven fragility and repeated security incidents, an editing experience your team quietly avoids, structural limits on how you need to organise content, or a platform past end of life, as Drupal 7 has been since 5 January 2025. "It isn't enterprise" doesn't qualify, and plenty of not-for-profits are served perfectly well by what they already have. When there is a reason, ask for a structured migration that preserves content, SEO value and editorial workflows, rather than a rebuild that quietly drops half of it. That's the work Webcoda does moving sites from WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore and legacy platforms onto Umbraco.
Ask for a project on your shortlisted platform, in a comparable sector, and ask what it integrated with. For reference, Webcoda's published not-for-profit work includes Tresillian and St Vincent de Paul on Umbraco, and Metropolitan Memorial Parks on HubSpot Content Hub. If an agency can't point you at something specific, treat the silence as data.
Yes, but it costs real money each time, and nobody enjoys doing it twice. The way to make future moves cheaper is a clean content model, with content stored as structured fields rather than pages of formatted HTML.
Talk to Webcoda
Webcoda is a Sydney-based, B Corp certified digital agency that has been building websites and enterprise web applications since 2005, for organisations including Sony, BridgeClimb, the Australian Federal Government and NSW Health. We are an Umbraco Gold Partner, a Gold partner for Xperience by Kentico and a HubSpot Solutions Partner, so platform advice comes without a single-vendor agenda.
Get in touch to talk through your project, or browse our full range of services and platforms.
