253 developers shared how they build, deploy, and learn with Craft CMS. Here's what we found.
The Craft CMS Community Survey 2026 was conducted via Tally.so from January 12 to February 3, 2026. The survey was distributed through the Craft CMS Discord, Twitter/X, Mastodon, and the CraftQuest newsletter. 253 developers responded.
As a self-selected community survey, results reflect the views of engaged community members and should not be generalized to all Craft CMS users. The margin of error is approximately ±6% at 95% confidence for the full sample. Response rates declined through the survey — 21% fewer respondents answered the final questions compared to the first — so sample sizes (noted as N=) vary by question.
Percentages for each question are calculated based on respondents who answered that question, not the total survey population. Multi-select questions show percentages of respondents who selected at least one option.
Download anonymized data (CSV)
To protect respondent privacy, the download excludes submission IDs, timestamps, and free-text responses. Rows are shuffled randomly.
92% of respondents are based in Europe or North America. The Craft CMS community surveyed is geographically concentrated, which shapes the perspectives reflected throughout this report.
92% of those who answered use AI tools for coding (N=187)
81% now use AI chatbots to solve problems, surpassing docs (68%) and search (60%)
A near-monopoly at 72% for local development
NPS of 40 based on 198 satisfaction ratings
Solo freelancers and small agencies dominate. The community skews heavily toward independent practitioners and boutique teams. This means priorities like simplicity, manageable hosting costs, and reliable plugin support reflect small-team needs rather than enterprise requirements.
DDEV has achieved remarkable dominance with 72% market share. This near-standardization simplifies onboarding for newcomers, reduces support burden for plugin developers, and means the ecosystem can optimize tooling around a single local dev workflow.
For full-site builds using a separate front-end application.
JS library used within Craft templates and modules.
Agency teams and freelancers inhabit different worlds. Budget ranges vary dramatically by work structure, suggesting the plugin ecosystem needs both affordable solo-friendly tools and enterprise-grade solutions to serve the full community.
How project budgets vary between freelancers, agency employees, and in-house teams.
NPS of 40 signals strong loyalty. For reference, the average NPS for SaaS/developer tools is around 30. Craft's score exceeds that benchmark, driven by the content authoring experience and developer flexibility. Based on 198 of 253 respondents who rated satisfaction.
Are newcomers as happy as veterans? A breakdown of promoters, passives, and detractors by years using Craft.
AI adoption has reached critical mass. 92% of Craft developers who answered now use AI tools for coding (N=187). This shift is reshaping everything from solo developer productivity to how agencies scope projects and how learning resources need to be structured.
How AI tool usage varies across different professional roles in the Craft community.
Video courses and hands-on learning lead the way. But time is the biggest barrier — most developers spend fewer than 3 hours per week on learning. This makes concise, project-based content the sweet spot for reaching this audience effectively.
AI chatbots have surpassed search engines and official documentation as the #1 problem-solving resource.
What the community is saying. These themes — extracted from open-ended responses — reveal the gap between what developers need and what the ecosystem currently provides. The most frequently mentioned topics signal where investment would have the highest impact.
“multi-site can feel a little cumbersome ”
“Extending Craft with custom modules”
“Performance without relying on blitz ”
“Client retention. It hasn't been major, but we've had a few clients whose site we built 3-5 years ago either come to us to replatform to something else, or have just hired another agency to replatform it to something else. It's always been WordPress or Webflow.”
“A lot of the important parts of a business CMS are still premium third-party offerings: Navigation, SEO, etc.”
“I have almost no clients of my own anymore, and I have a harder time recommending Craft because there are lighter, less complicated options on the small end and faster + more modern ones on the larger end. I build more with Laravel and when it comes to Craft I’ve mostly been helping people maintain ...”
Anonymized responses from survey participants
“best practices for async/reactive things. not over the top examples, but simple things everybody can follow.”
“I’d like a better, more efficient way to calculate and display reading time on news articles, as well as a sophisticated way to order articles by most popular during a time frame. ”
“Examples on working with user submitted data and events.”
“Market share vs WordPress, speed of development vs Wordpress for lower-budget clients”
“Wordpress and Sanity seem like major threats”
“Long-term viability - I nominate this as my primary concern as I've convinced many clients to opt for Craft CMS over other platforms they preferred. I did the same thing previously with Adobe Business Catalyst and when they retired the platform it was on me to resolve the situation (hence how I foun...”
Anonymized responses from survey participants
A note on transparency: As the organization conducting this survey, we also asked about CraftQuest to better understand how we can serve the community. We share these results openly.