I’m not really answering your question here, but the best PHP CMS IMHO is Processwire, bar none, and I’ve used pretty much everything under the sun over the last 10+ years. Nothing else gets out the way and let’s you get on with the job in such an elegant way. I like their model as well, they essentially support their development through useful and elegant commercial plugins for things like caching, form builder, pro drafts, etc. The caching module is really worth every penny and then some.

It’s got a beautifully simple API and templating system that really lets you tackle and manage projects how you want to tackle them.

We’ve had production sites with thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of daily hits running off it for nearly a decade and had pretty much zero problems with it that I can remember. I’m confused why more people don’t use it. Sometimes I wonder if people like to make their lives difficult and use the latest shiny new thing just so they can use the latest shiny new thing.

We’ve even utilised it in non traditional ways as well, due to its flexibility - for instance we developed a few games (UE4 and Unity) for clients where we set up and managed various game properties for objects, enemy behaviour, etc. that games could then easily pull in dynamically as JSON allowing a quick and easy way for non developers to play with underlying game variables while play testing with no real programming experience. The simple tree hierarchy system, supplemented with things like repeaters, standard fields and in built selector functionality really makes it easy for anybody to get a handle on it in under ten minutes and feel at ease.

We’ve integrated it with horrendously bad client SSO systems with minimal effort as well, to speak of it’s somewhat fringe abilities.

The community is great as well, no politics and very active.

Disclosure: I’ve got no commercial interests in it, other than it’s made day to day life much easier and I’ll sing it’s praises at any opportunity.

Craft CMS has super flexible content modeling capabilities, GraphQL, i18n, a nice permissions system to put content behind a login, database migrations, multi-environment config, and can be extended since it's built atop Yii2 (an obscure but solid MVC framework). There are no themes, you bring your own markup. It has a CLI for common tasks.

You'd need to install several plugins to pull this off in WordPress, some of them paid (ACF Pro, etc.). And it's messy because the plugins weren't made to work together. Craft also supports Postgres in addition to MysQL/MariaDB, so that's another difference if you like or need PG.

It's more similar in scope to Drupal, but I find the developer and authoring experience much more elegant in Craft. Businesses are happy to pay $299. Both systems use Twig as their templating layer.

For reference, content management systems that target the mid-market and enterprise charge $XX,000 and up for licenses. See Sitecore or whatever Adobe is shilling these days.

There are hundreds of CMS options out there, lots of interesting approaches to choose from. Strapi and other headless JS-driven options are the current rage.

Source: I'm in the Craft pro network but have built 50+ WordPress sites as well. Prior to that I used ExpressionEngine, Textpattern, and Movable Type. Been around the block!

Disclosure: I'm a Winter CMS maintainer and former October CMS maintainer.

I wrote the "Features for Developers" page (https://wintercms.com/features/for-developers) on the Winter CMS site, which pretty much summarises my thoughts on the advantages of Winter CMS development.

I was using October CMS for years before I became a maintainer, and the thing that hooked me was the plugin architecture. It is incredibly simple to extend nearly every facet of the CMS to do what I want for my clients.

I've developed (and still do) develop WordPress sites, and I find trying to "extend" or customise some plugins to be like pulling teeth if they're not using the hook system correctly.

The fact it's built on, and supports most of the API of, Laravel is a bonus to me too.

I've dabbled a little in Drupal but don't have enough experience to give a good comparison in between those two.