You're absolutely right! PHP is blessed (or maybe cursed, depeding on your perspective) for that.

I believe Craft and Statamic share a root in ExpressionEngine, which I loved also. I've only used Craft a little bit, for me the biggest issue is that it is (or was when I last looked) built on Yii, which isn't my go-to framework in PHP.

This is in no way a showstopper.

I haven't used Kirby, but it looks like a completely stand-alone application so I'm going to miss being able to co-locate the rest of my application there with the full toolset of the framework behind, which for small sites I really appreciate about Laravel+Statamic having right out of the gate.

I've also not used Twill, but it looks to be similar to Statamic (as it's also a package). Not sure how this can be more open source than Statamic tho... if you mean free as in price, I'm all for paying for great products to make sure the teams behind them can keep on churning out great work. I'm sure AREA 17 will keep supporting Twill for a long time to come, but it doesn't look to be the focus of their business.

I'm also intrigued to know what you mean by "better at flat-file".

UX of the admin interfaces is kinda subjective and less of a concern from a dev perspective (though it's still an important consideration if you're trying to pick the right tool for a client or another team!)

> they call themselves Laravel based for marketing

Same goes for Twill :) nothing wrong with hanging onto the coattails of a popular piece of tech

AFAIK Statamic wasn't built on Laravel at all in the beginning. I believe Jack adopted it because it was clearly a great stack to build on top of. I think he made a great choice and I'm glad of it.

Statamic, Kirby, Craft are all commercial products and not free licensed (as in freedom). Twill is only one that's Apache License 2.0. I agree this is both blessing and curse and for products like this is much safer to get the commercial product that has safer future. But for example if you wanted to start small CRUD SAAS based around CMS it would be feasible to do only with Twill.

I don't think it's a good idea to have your product and your presentation website in one app so for me it's not a feature. They should really be separate concerns.

I haven't used Statamic 4 yet but last time i've used it they didn't seem to use much from the Laravel. It basically publishes routes to Laravel from their own system and that's it. It even recommended it's own templating language Antlers. It just feels they want to really ride the Laravel wagon while still being just separate system. Thats OK but Twill for example really depends on Laravel and feels more deeply integrated with it.

Craft is good simply because it leverages database powers well and it's super mature. Things like relations and search are a lot harder in flat-file systems. Twill does this OK. Flat-file systems generally have ways to use database but it's more work. I would pick Craft for sites where having DB is more advantageous than flat-file.

Kirby is kinda it's own thing. It's oldest and mature, simple, steady but modern. It tries to have as little abstraction as possible. Opposite philosophy to all Laravel magic. It's kinda edgy and zen because of that. The advantage of less code and dependencies - it's super fast and easy to read source code. Not that it would matter in a CMS. Kirby embraces flat-file as kind of nosql database. For example every page has unique identifier that is indexed an can be referenced anywhere. I don't know about CMS that does that out of the box. And Kirby admin interface is also pretty different because it has no preset ways. When you install it it's empty - you have to completely define it. This can be huge advantage or more work for developer depending on what you do. It's more like build your own CMS package than CMS.

Statamic has inspired lots of their features/implementation on Kirby and for years played catch up. Nowdays they are all very feature rich so it's more matter of taste (and price). Statamic has one really nice advantage and that's GUI blueprint builder. If you hate writing YAML to define admin area (which both Kirby and Statamic need) with Statamic you don't have to.