Devani is a free, open-source CMS for people who want a fast website without assembling a plugin stack. It's MIT-licensed, self-hosted, and deliberately small.
The design in one paragraph
Devani has no database. Your entire site — pages, blog posts, products, settings — lives as plain files on your server. Pages are server-rendered as clean HTML by PHP, which makes them fast to serve, trivial to back up, and safe by construction: there is no SQL to inject because there is no SQL.
What's built in
- Visual editor — edit pages in place; what you see is what visitors get.
- Pages & blog — one editor for both, with drafts and scheduling.
- SEO — per-page meta, Open Graph/Twitter cards, canonical, JSON-LD schema, an auto-maintained sitemap, and a 301 redirect manager.
- A full store — products with variants, live inventory, discount codes, a cart, and Stripe checkout.
- Forms — on-page forms with submissions to your inbox or a webhook.
- Snapshots — every change is recoverable; see Snapshots & rollback.
- AI editing — connect Claude or ChatGPT via MCP and edit your site by chatting.
What's pre-wired
Some jobs are best done by a specialist service, so Devani ships natively connected to a few: Tonta (media storage + global CDN — required, auto-provisioned during setup), AltText (automatic alt text), Pinpic (AI image generation and interactive images), Sivvy (admin IP allowlist + uptime monitoring), and Sendl (hosted forms). Each has a free tier; you can disconnect the optional ones any time.
What Devani isn't
- Not a plugin platform. There's no marketplace and no plugin API to babysit. If a capability matters to most sites, it gets built in.
- Not a static-site generator. Pages are rendered by PHP per request (and cache beautifully at any CDN) — you don't run builds.
- Not a warehouse-scale commerce platform. The store covers catalogs, digital goods, donations, and subscriptions extremely well; thousand-SKU multi-warehouse operations want a dedicated platform.
Requirements
A server with PHP and a web server — that's it. No Node, no build step, no database server. The one-command installer takes a bare Ubuntu box to a live site in about ten minutes.