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Best Website Platforms for Higher Education in 2025

Discover which CMS or DXP will transform your institution's online presence, boost recruitment, and create exceptional student experiences – without breaking the bank.

Mei Koon 27 Feb 2025

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In 2025, higher education institutions face unprecedented challenges – from enrollment declines and rising costs, to cybersecurity concerns and AI disruption. Your institution's website experience can be your most powerful tool to adapt and respond. The choice of Content Management System (CMS) or Digital Experience Platform (DXP) can propel you ahead of competitors or hold you back decades.

Your site must do more than look good. The best website platforms for higher education must offer more than just content management or site search.

The best website platform for universities and colleges must offer a suite of capabilities that cover the entire digital experience. It should drive recruitment, support student mental health and success, boost alumni engagement and streamline staff operations, while prioritizing safe AI adoption.

Our comprehensive comparison of the best CMS and DXP solutions will help marketing and IT leaders select platforms that transform digital challenges into strategic advantages.

You’ll find it all here…

Comparing Content Management and Digital Experience Platforms for Universities and Colleges

It can get confusing, so we’ll start by clarifying the main differences between each platform category below. Then, we’ll compare the pros and cons of each vendor within each category.

Traditional CMS Platforms

Legacy content management systems were designed for content-heavy sites and work well when you need to manage static catalogs, faculty pages, research publications. But in the same vein…they are JUST content management systems. If you need to personalize student experiences, integrate with your wider tech ecosystem, or deliver content across multiple channels and run conversion experiments, you'll quickly hit their limits. Many are also playing catch-up on incorporating AI into their platforms in a seamless way.

Headless CMS

Headless platforms separate the "body" of a content management system (the backend) from the "head" (the frontend). This means you can push the same content to any digital channel, without a built-in frontend. Developers love them for their flexibility. It works well if you have strong specialized development skills to implement, secure and maintain operations. Marketing teams have less control over the front-end designs. They tend to rely on developers for content changes and deployment, which can slow down implementation and increase costs over time due to technical dependency.

Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs)

DXPs evolved out of the need to do more than just manage website content. They're designed to help you personalize student experiences, do testing and conversion experiments, incorporate AI tools, integrate with multiple systems (like your student portal or learning management system), and securely manage everything from one platform.

DXPs are more comprehensive and powerful, allowing you to scale and address more sophisticated use cases. More traditional DXPs are more rigid and promote using everything within their suite. Modern DXPs are composable - meaning you have more flexibility to use what you need from the platform and play well with other third-party tools without heavy code. And some DXPs are much easier to use than others, which impacts adoption. More on that later!

Let’s now compare the details of specific vendors you might want to consider.

Traditional CMS Platforms

Drupal

Drupal is known for:

  • Strong core security (though that strength is dependent on vigilant maintenance of modules and integrations)
  • Flexibility - you can build whatever you need with the right tech support and a large dev team behind you, whether that's a course catalog or a complex research portal
  • Huge community of university developers sharing solutions, making it easier to solve higher education-specific challenges
  • Modules specifically built for education, from student portals to faculty directories

The challenges with Drupal:

  • Get ready for a learning curve - it's not exactly plug-and-play, and your content teams will need significant training before they can use it effectively
  • You'll need dedicated developers to get the most from it as it requires a lot of custom code - even simple changes often need technical support, and security definitely will
  • Can get resource-heavy if you add too many modules, which is easy to do when you're managing multiple university departments
  • Implementation and ongoing costs can stack up quickly, from initial development to regular maintenance and updates

Best fit for: Large universities who need a highly customizable platform and have the big, dedicated IT teams to support it.

WordPress

WordPress is known for:

  • Being user-friendly for content creators to get up and running with a website - perfect for faculty members who need to manage their own content with minimal changes
  • Offering tons of plugins to extend functionality, from event calendars to faculty directory listings
  • Being cost-effective to get started, requiring minimal upfront investment in development or infrastructure
  • Being widely adopted, making it easy to find and recruit people who already know how to use it

The challenges with WordPress:

  • Security needs constant attention and expertise, particularly risky when you're handling sensitive student and institutional data
  • Too many plugins can slow things down and make it difficult to manage and scale your website - a real problem when you're running multiple department sites or need to respond to new innovations or changes
  • It's not built for complex enterprise needs like managing multiple domains or integrating with student information systems
  • It can get messy with multiple departments using it; leading to hidden costs with different site instances, inconsistent branding and scattered content governance

Best fit for: Smaller institutions that need a quick, cost-effective solution to get started and have a development team for ongoing maintenance. Typically don’t have personalization, complex integration requirements, security or scalability needs.

Cascade CMS (from Hannon Hill)

Cascade CMS is known for:

  • Having built-in marketing tools that help smaller universities manage their digital presence without additional software
  • Being user-friendly for content creators, with an interface that faculty and staff can quickly learn to use
  • Working well for smaller teams who need to manage multiple basic pages without technical complexity
  • Being simple to get started with, requiring minimal training and technical setup

The challenges with Cascade CMS:

  • You're somewhat limited in what you can customize - you'll have no advanced personalization, restricted template options, and basic integration capabilities with university systems
  • Might feel restrictive if you're a larger institution trying to manage multiple schools or complex and dynamic digital experiences
  • Currently don’t have any in-built AI tools to support content creation or governance
  • Once you're in, you're committed - their proprietary system means switching platforms later is difficult and costly, and you'll need to rebuild rather than migrate your content and templates

Best fit for: Smaller university teams who want built-in marketing tools, only basic personalization and no sophisticated customizations.

TerminalFour

TerminalFour is known for:

  • Its focus on the higher education industry, with features built specifically for universities and colleges
  • Built-in tools for personalization that help deliver targeted content to student audiences based on visitor behavior
  • Making managing multiple sites much easier, ideal for universities with different schools and departments
  • Good for keeping brand consistency across your institution's digital presence, from main sites to department page

The challenges with TerminalFour:

  • Can't handle the content demands of larger, complex institutions - the media library struggles with large files and basic features like bulk uploads aren't available
  • Lacks modern content creation and layout capabilities, leaving you with dated-looking pages that are hard to update
  • Requires technical support for basic site structure changes, slowing down your marketing team's ability to make updates
  • Core features like workflows and search haven't kept pace with modern platform standards, making it harder to manage content effectively

Best fit for: Universities managing multiple sites who need to maintain consistent branding and engagement across their digital presence.

Headless CMS Platforms

Contentful

Contentful is known for:

  • Flexible content modeling that lets you structure your university content exactly how you need it
  • API-first approach lets you deliver content to any platform or application without rebuilding it - from your main website to student portals to digital signage
  • Clean, modern interface for developers that makes it easier to build custom applications
  • Great for multi-channel content delivery, pushing the same content to websites, apps, and digital displays across campus

The challenges with Contentful:

  • You'll need to build your own front end - there's no ready-to-use website templates or themes for universities
  • Non-technical users might find it tricky, making it harder for faculty and marketing teams to manage content independently
  • Costs can climb as you scale, especially as you add more content types and users across departments
  • Less out-of-the-box functionality means you'll need to build many standard university website features from scratch

Best fit for: Developer-centric university teams that need to push content to multiple platforms and have significant technical resources to support content updates for Marketing teams.

Contentstack

Contentstack is known for:

  • Flexible content modeling to enable institutions to structure different content types (course catalogs, faculty profiles and publications) as required
  • Multi-channel delivery of the same content across campus sites, portals and apps
  • Visual editing tools to help non-technical staff view changes before publishing
  • Multi-cloud availability lets institutions choose their preferred infrastructure
  • Automation capabilities streamline management of large academic data sets and workflows

The challenges with Contentstack:

  • Not higher education focused - institutions need developer support as there are no ready-made templates for university websites
  • Needs strong technical expertise, requiring a strong development team to build and maintain your digital presence as the learning curve for faculty and marketing teams is high
  • Some users report publishing delays with significant wait times (up to hours) for content go to live
  • Scaling costs increase with content types and more users - significantly impacting total ownership costs, particularly for large institutions with many departments

Best fit for: Large universities with extensive and skilled IT and development teams who want complete control, and are prepared for ongoing support and maintenance loads.

Sanity

Sanity is known for:

  • Real-time collaboration features that let multiple team members work on content simultaneously across departments
  • Customizable content studio that you can adapt to different university content workflows
  • Strong API capabilities for delivering content to multiple university platforms and applications
  • Modern development experience that makes it attractive for building cutting-edge university digital experiences

The challenges with Sanity:

  • Unique query language to learn (GROQ) - adding another technical hurdle for your development team
  • Pricing can get steep for larger projects, especially when scaling across multiple university departments
  • Might need to build a lot from scratch since it doesn't come with university-specific features built-in
  • Less higher-ed specific features, meaning you'll need to create custom solutions for common university needs

Best fit for: Forward-thinking institutions with strong technical teams who want a modern, flexible solution, and are prepared to manage complexity.

Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs)

Squiz

Squiz is known for:

  • Enterprise-grade DXP capabilities with in-built AI features - gen-AI content creation, content management, personalization, optimization, site search, chatbots and agents, integrations, forms, digital asset management and security
  • Easy, no-code page building and AI tools - anyone can create content, build pages, personalize and run tests in minutes - no developer reliance or weeks for training
  • Powerful AI-driven search and conversational capabilities generate hyper-personalized answers from any content source - delivered as a curated page with an AI answer summary, results links, recommended content and chat interface
  • Being composable, meaning it plays nicely with your existing systems - from student portals to learning management systems and research repositories
  • Predictable pricing based on transparent usage metrics, meaning your budget relates to adoption and results, rather than user seats or maintenance
  • Strong track record in higher education for over 25 years

The challenges with Squiz:

  • Misconception that you’ll need technical expertise to use it - unlike other DXPs, it's built for marketers to easily adopt and move at speed, while developers/IT still gain advanced customization, integration and security features
  • While Squiz offers plenty of out-of-the-box integrations for common university systems, they don't have as many pre-built connectors as some enterprise competitors (but that's by design - their iPaaS approach means you can connect to any system you need)
  • It’s a newer player in some regions compared to the legacy players, though it serves the top 25% of higher education institutions globally and is Gartner-ranked for 14 years running

Best fit for: Universities and institutions that need enterprise-grade capabilities with built in governance and security, but demand ease-of-use and integrated AI tools so marketing and content teams can move fast, without developer reliance.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)

Adobe Experience Manager is known for:

  • Powerful personalization capabilities that can tailor content for every type of university audience
  • Marketing tools that integrate across your entire digital presence
  • Analytics that tell you everything about your users, from prospective student behavior to alumni engagement
  • Solid Adobe ecosystem integration for universities already invested in Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud

The Challenges with Adobe Experience Manager:

  • Get ready for a big investment - we're talking serious enterprise-level pricing that can strain university budgets
  • Implementation is complex and costly - expect a lengthy setup process involving multiple teams and external partners
  • Your team will need significant training before they can start using the platform and continue to maximize the features effectively - this can impact ROI over time
  • Might be overkill unless you need all the bells and whistles - many universities end up paying for features they never get to use

Best fit for: Large universities with significant budgets and ongoing partner resources, who need enterprise-level personalization and are already heavily invested in the Adobe ecosystem.

Sitecore

Sitecore is known for:

  • Solid personalization and automation capabilities that can scale across multiple university departments and campuses
  • Handles multi-site management well, ideal for universities with multiple schools and research centers
  • Strong marketing features that help you manage sophisticated student recruitment campaigns
  • Built for large-scale operations, supporting complex university digital ecosystems

The challenges with Sitecore:

  • One of the pricier options out there - expect enterprise-level licensing costs that can strain educational budgets and spring hidden costs for hosting
  • Complex architecture needs specialized skills, so you'll need a significant development team or ongoing partner resources for most updates and customization
  • Can be too heavy-duty to be sustainable and effective - you might end up with more platform than your university actually requires
  • Reliance on technical support for the day-to-day can delay builds, content updates and personalization deliverables and optimization

Best fit for: Universities focused on delivering highly personalized digital experiences at scale, and have the development resources and budget to support it.

Making the Right Choice for Your Higher Education Institution

So, which platform is right for you? It all depends on where you're starting from and where you need to go.

For Large Universities and Colleges

If you're a large university juggling multiple systems, many departments, with serious integration and security needs, you're probably looking at either:

  • Drupal if you have a large development team to manage most of your ongoing needs
  • Squiz if you want enterprise-grade IT governance and customization, but need Marketing and Content teams to have ease-of-use, speed and agility to adapt
  • AEM or Sitecore if budget isn't a constraint, you have extensive development resources, and you need the full enterprise stack for very complex use cases

For Small Institutions

Working with tight resources with more basic needs? Consider:

  • WordPress if you need something simple and cost-effective, and have ongoing development resources
  • Cascade CMS if you want built-in marketing tools for simple use cases
  • TerminalFour if you're focused on specific higher-ed features

For the Developer-Centric Teams

Got strong technical capabilities and want more flexibility? Look at:

  • Any of the headless options (Contentful, Strapi, Sanity)
  • Drupal if you prefer a traditional CMS
  • Squiz if you need both technical flexibility and parallel marketing autonomy

For Marketing-Focused Teams

Need to move fast and create great experiences, without heavy IT support or costs?

  • Squiz for enterprise capabilities and speed without technical dependency, so experimentation and optimization happens rapidly
  • AEM if you're already using Adobe products, have the budget and highly skilled marketers to maximize ROI

Are you ready to decide?

Evaluating your options can take time, and there’s always a cost consideration. We’d like to help remove cost and migration headaches from the equation and give you access to Squiz DXP quickly. So much so, that we’ll migrate you for FREE.

To book a DXP consultation, click here.

If you’re still unsure and want to go out to market. Use this handy RFP template to help you find the right platform for you.