Is Silverstripe Still A Good CMS in 2026

A refresher

Back in 2024 we said yes. In 2026 we say yes, with conditions.

In late 2024 we wrote a fairly positive piece about why SilverStripe was still a solid CMS choice for marketing and communications teams. We stand by most of it. The CMS still does what it has always done well: secure, flexible, Kiwi-owned, trusted by banks and government.

But a lot has happened in two years. CMS 5.4 is now the current full-support release, CMS 6 has shipped and is iterating through 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4, and CMS 7.0 is on the roadmap for 2027. Search 2.0 has landed. And, most importantly for the wider industry, the AI story has gone from a curiosity to the single biggest competitive factor in modern CMS selection.

So this is the 2026 update. We will tell you where SilverStripe is still very strong, where their roadmap deserves credit, and where we think they are not moving fast enough. The AI section in particular is going to read more critically than the rest, because it should.

The strengths

Where SilverStripe still holds up in 2026

If your project is a serious, content-heavy, integration-heavy build for a New Zealand organisation that cares about security, sovereignty, and accessibility, SilverStripe is still on the shortlist. It earns that on four fronts.

We have built hundreds of SilverStripe sites over the years. The ones that still make us proud are the ones where SilverStripe's strengths actually mattered. Hamilton Zoo handles ticketing integrations cleanly. Lodge Real Estate pulls live property data from Vault and presents it through a content-managed front-end. NHR Group runs a complex multi-site structure. These are not sites you could have built well on Squarespace.

The roadmap

The 2026 roadmap is steady, predictable, and that's a feature

SilverStripe publishes its support timeline openly, and in an industry that increasingly hides version policy behind sales calls, that openness is worth calling out. If you are running a SilverStripe site today, you can plan years ahead with confidence.

Here is where the active versions sit at the time of writing.

A few things to read from this table. CMS 6.4 carries an extended support window, which signals SilverStripe treating it as a stable platform release that organisations can safely standardise on. CMS 7.0 is already in development. Versions ship roughly every six months. None of this is glamorous, but if you have ever had to argue for a CMS migration in a tier-one organisation, predictability like this is exactly what unblocks the procurement conversation.

Search 2.0

Silverstripe Search 2.0: useful, but useful for whom?

In April 2026, SilverStripe shipped Search 2.0, a fully managed search service for SilverStripe sites. It includes full-text and faceted search, real-time indexing, a self-service dashboard for curations and synonyms, te reo Māori support by default, and availability on the New Zealand Government Marketplace.

If you are already deep in the SilverStripe managed-service stack, hosted on Silverstripe Cloud, using their support tier and procuring through the Government Marketplace, this is a solid addition. The integration is tight, the te reo support is genuinely useful for the public-sector customer base, and the self-service dashboard takes a real ops headache off your team.

But step outside that context and the question gets harder. Elasticsearch already solves this problem, at any scale, and a long tail of competitors (Algolia, Typesense, Meilisearch, Algolia's open-source siblings) solve it with mature SDKs, broad community knowledge, and no platform lock-in. Why would SilverStripe build another search product to compete with tools that already work? And if you are an agency or client running SilverStripe on your own infrastructure, you have just been offered a search service whose main differentiator is that it is bundled with the rest of SilverStripe's commercial ecosystem.

That is not a knock on the engineering. It is a question about the strategy. Search 2.0 makes the most sense as another way to deepen the relationship between SilverStripe Ltd and its existing managed-service customers. It makes much less sense as a product for the wider open-source community, which is exactly the tension we want to talk about in the next section.

The critique

Now for the hard part: the AI roadmap is too small

In May 2026, SilverStripe published a post outlining their AI roadmap. It describes four AI-assisted modules currently in development. They are:

All four are useful. None of them are wrong. The author writing the post is genuine, the principle of keeping the human in the loop is the right principle. But step back and look at the shape of this roadmap, and it tells you something uncomfortable: SilverStripe is treating AI as a feature in the editor UI, not a platform capability.

Every module on that list lives inside the CMS interface, serves a content author, and replicates something the author could already do by pasting into ChatGPT. There is nothing for developers. There is nothing about how SilverStripe sites participate in the agentic web that is forming around us right now. There is no mention of MCP. No CLI integration story. No way for an AI assistant to read, write or operate on a SilverStripe site as a first-class consumer of its data model.

Compare what is happening elsewhere. HubSpot has shipped Breeze agents that can act on the CRM. WordPress has a vibrant ecosystem of plugins exposing AI hooks into the editor and the API layer. Storyblok, Sanity and Contentful all have public MCP servers, which means an AI assistant connected to those platforms can read content, propose changes, and submit edits as a structured agent. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google have all standardised on MCP as the protocol for this.

SilverStripe has none of that, publicly, in their roadmap. The risk is not that the four modules are bad. The risk is that while SilverStripe is building a slightly better blank-page experience for editors, the rest of the industry is building the rails for AI to operate websites end-to-end. Those are not the same problem, and the second one is the one that will define the next five years.

The bigger question

A consultancy with a CMS, or a CMS with a consultancy?

This is the awkward strategic question we want to put on the table, because we think the answer matters for the platform's future.

SilverStripe (the company) does two things. It maintains SilverStripe CMS (the open-source platform), and it sells consultancy, hosting, and managed services on top of that platform. Over the last few years, the centre of gravity has clearly shifted toward the second one. Silverstripe Cloud, Silverstripe Search, DPI Connect, managed services. These are good products. They are also commercial products from a private company, and they are the parts of the ecosystem getting the visible attention and investment.

The open-source CMS is still there. The BSD licence is still there. The community Slack and the addons library are still there. But the gravitational pull is toward the proprietary services around the open-source core.

For agencies and clients, that creates a fair question. If the most exciting new things (Search 2.0, managed hosting, AI modules) are increasingly commercial, where does that leave the platform's claim to be a truly open option? Are organisations choosing SilverStripe getting the long-term independence that open source is supposed to deliver, or are they slowly drifting into vendor lock-in via the managed-services layer above the CMS?

We are not saying SilverStripe is hiding the open-source platform. We are saying the open-source community feels under-resourced relative to the consultancy and cloud business, and that imbalance is going to limit how fast the platform can compete on AI, on developer experience, and on the broader agency ecosystem outside SilverStripe Ltd itself.

In the long term, we believe it is the work done by people outside of the

Our POV

What we'd love to see SilverStripe do next

If we were sitting in a room with the SilverStripe product team, this is what we would put on the whiteboard. None of these are unrealistic. All of them play to genuine strengths the platform already has.

Our take in one paragraph

Still a good CMS. Could be a great one.

SilverStripe in 2026 is still the right answer for a lot of New Zealand projects we are asked to scope. The security story is real. The roadmap is honest. The Kiwi, accessibility-first, te reo-supporting positioning is genuinely differentiated. Search 2.0 is exactly the kind of managed product the platform should be building more of.

Where we want SilverStripe to push harder is the AI layer, the open-source community, and the developer experience. The four AI editor modules in their public roadmap are fine, but they will not be what wins or loses CMS selection in 2027. An MCP server, a CLI built for agentic developers, and a properly resourced open-source community would. We hope to see that next.

In the meantime, if you are choosing a CMS in 2026 and the brief involves serious integrations, a public-sector audience, or sensitive data, give us a call. We will tell you when SilverStripe is the right answer, and we will tell you when it is not.