DonkeyCMS
A self-hosted blog for any website that isn't WordPress, existing or new. It keeps your site's own design and is ready for SEO and AI search. Free plan, no time limit.
A startup from Romania, founded by Bugra Bodur.
A self-hosted blog for any website that isn't WordPress, existing or new. It keeps your site's own design and is ready for SEO and AI search. Free plan, no time limit.
A startup from Romania, founded by Bugra Bodur.
This page is designed to help you find out whether DonkeyCMS is good and if it is the right choice for you.
DonkeyCMS is a lightweight, self-hosted blog system for websites that are not built on WordPress. It installs into a subfolder of your site and takes on your own header, footer and design, so the blog looks like part of your website instead of a separate product.
It works with a website you already have and with one you are about to build: hand-coded HTML, sites made with Tailwind, Bootstrap, Bulma, Foundation or UIkit, HTML templates, pages built in Pinegrow or Bootstrap Studio, a Webflow export moved to your own hosting, or a site written with an AI tool. Design the site any way you like and add the blog when you are ready.
It runs on standard PHP and MySQL hosting and installs in a few minutes. There are no plugins to maintain and no theme to build.
Free plan
Paid plans add
Pricing
Listed in
Fits your existing site
Installs into a subfolder of a custom-coded website and uses your own header, footer and design
SEO and AI ready
Structured data, sitemap, RSS feed and social share tags on every plan, plus a check that search engines and AI tools can read your blog
Editor
Rich text or Markdown, scheduled publishing, categories, tags and per-post SEO and FAQ fields
WordPress import
Bring posts, images, categories and tags over from a WordPress export file
Backups and updates
Full backups with cloud destinations, and one-click updates from the admin
Team and roles
Team accounts with custom roles and permissions, and review before publishing
Privacy-friendly analytics
Built-in visit statistics without cookies or third-party scripts
Requirements
PHP 8.1 or newer and MySQL, on standard shared hosting
It adds a blog to a website you already built, instead of asking you to rebuild the site around a CMS. DonkeyCMS installs into a subfolder of a custom-coded HTML site and takes on that site's own header, footer and design, so visitors never feel they left your website. There is no theme to convert and no plugin collection to maintain.
Choose it if you have a custom-coded website and only want a good blog on it. WordPress would mean converting your design into a theme and keeping plugins updated. Static site generators and headless CMSs need a developer for every change. DonkeyCMS sits in between: it installs in minutes on ordinary PHP hosting, anyone on the team can write and publish from a clean admin, and the SEO groundwork (structured data, sitemap, RSS, share tags) is built in on every plan, including the free one.
Freelance web designers, small agencies and small businesses whose websites are custom-coded rather than built on WordPress, and who want to add a blog without changing how the site is built. Agencies can run it across many client sites and white-label it.
I'm a designer, not a programmer. The websites I make for my own projects and for clients are custom HTML sites, not WordPress ones, and I wanted the perfect blog system to plug into them. It had to be as strong as WordPress for SEO, but without the weight: very light, fast, and good-looking out of the box. Nothing I found did all of that inside a site that was already built, so I decided to have it made, at first just to use for my own clients. Version 1.0 was released in October 2026.
PHP and MySQL, so it runs on standard shared hosting. The post editor is built on Tiptap. The admin and the blog use plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with no front-end framework, which keeps pages small and fast.
We have collected here some useful links to help you find out if DonkeyCMS is good.
Check the traffic stats of DonkeyCMS on SimilarWeb. The key metrics to look for are: monthly visits, average visit duration, pages per visit, and traffic by country. Moreoever, check the traffic sources. For example "Direct" traffic is a good sign.
Check the "Domain Rating" of DonkeyCMS on Ahrefs. The domain rating is a measure of the strength of a website's backlink profile on a scale from 0 to 100. It shows the strength of DonkeyCMS's backlink profile compared to the other websites. In most cases a domain rating of 60+ is considered good and 70+ is considered very good.
Check the "Domain Authority" of DonkeyCMS on MOZ. A website's domain authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). It is based on a 100-point logarithmic scale, with higher scores corresponding to a greater likelihood of ranking. This is another useful metric to check if a website is good.
The latest comments about DonkeyCMS on Reddit. This can help you find out how popualr the product is and what people think about it.
Do you know an article comparing DonkeyCMS to other products?
Suggest a link to a post with product alternatives.
Is DonkeyCMS good? This is an informative page that will help you find out. Moreover, you can review and discuss DonkeyCMS here. The primary details have been verified within the last quarter. So they could be considered up to date. If you think we are missing something, please use the means on this page to comment or suggest changes. All reviews and comments are highly encouranged and appreciated as they help everyone in the community to make an informed choice. Please always be kind and objective when evaluating a product and sharing your opinion.
