Are you looking for an open source .Net CMS for your site? When we say open source it means you can get full access to the source code without having to pay a cent. Here is a list of available popular open source .Net CMS you can choose from. See which one you like.
1. DNNSoftware
Known as a DotNetNuke (DNN) in the past. This is one of the oldest .NET CMS available since 2003. It provides the world's largest .Net CMS ecosystem with more than 1 million community members and supported by thousands of developers.
DNNSoftware has its own store extension marketplace where you can register and download a free or paid commercial third-party extension. The CMS supports multiple languages and site portals. Very easy to develop an extension module and the presentation to edit the content is simple and straight forward. One of the drawbacks is the CMS still use the old web form technology.
2. Umbraco
Another great open source CMS is Umbraco. It has a fantastic developer community around with free of couple hundred free extensions. If you are a developer, this could be one of your great options to start with. There is a cloud version, where you can easily host and install your site in minutes. If you are lazy to host the site yourself and prefer the Umbraco company to take care of your site. You can try their service of free 14 days trial. The price is starting from the lowest fee of $30/month.
3. Orchard Core
Orchard Core is another great candidate of free open source .Net framework. It uses the latest technology of .Net Core which means you can use docker images for your site application. The Orchard Core consists of two different targets. The first one is the framework. It is used for building modular, multi-tenant applications on ASP.Net Core apps. While the second is the CMS system built on top of the Orchard Core Framework. The CMS itself is easily be customized to suit your needs.
You can use it as a Full CMS where it uses a theme and templates to render your site content with very little customization. Or you can use as a Decouple CMS which means you create your own templates with Razor Pages and MVC Actions to access your site content. The last alternative will be called Headless CMS which means it only manages the content and you create your own separate application to display the content either using GraphQL or Rest APIs.
4. Mr CMS
Launched since 2013, Mr CMS is another great open source ASP.Net. It is built using ASP.Net MVC C#. It can be used to build any types of web applications such as e-commerce, blogging and many more. Editing content is a breeze to do, either you can do it via inline editing or through the admin interface. The CMS gives you full control over the page layout, widgets, and controls.
It has a built in form builder which means you can easy and quickly build HTML forms to collect data. With SEO feature, you can have a friendly URL, set the SEO meta tags and generate site sitemap. One of another great feature is this CMS is Azure Cloud ready.
5. Kaliko CMS
Kaliko is a powerful and flexible CMS built in ASP.Net MVC technology. You can opt in to use WebForms if you prefer. For the database engine preference, you can choose the standard SQL Server or SQLite option. The library of this CMS is released under LGPL license.
6. Cofoundry CMS
This CMS has a pretty similar concept with Orchard Core. So you can have full integrated CMS, decoupled or headless CMS. It is designed for developers only and focused on code first development. You can easily install, customize and extend the CMS. Managing content is quite easy via inline content editing. The CMS has built-in roles and permissions as well at the API level to configure what access can be given to users.
7. Piranha CMS
The Piranha CMS is released under MIT License and designed, developed and used exclusively for developers only. So if you are not a developer, this could be not a good option for you to use. It is built using the latest .Net Core technology. It is lightweight and unobstructive CMS. One of the advantages of Piranha CMS is it can be installed and run under multiple platforms such as Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.
