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Comparison · Mkt Auto

Airship vs Craft CMS

A side-by-side editorial comparison of Airship and Craft CMS — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.

Airship vs Craft CMS: at a glance

FeatureAirshipCraft CMS
SectorMkt AutoMkt Auto
Velocity score0.06.3
Sparks · 30d01
Top themesai agents, scenes, accessibility, audience analyticscms, laravel, breaking-changes, plugin-api
Last editorial update4d ago5d ago
WebsiteVisit →Visit →

What is Airship?

Airship's agents graduate from writing the message to auditing it.

Airship has spent this cycle putting AI agents into each authoring surface in turn: a conversational Scene Assistant that builds multi-screen native experiences, then a Campaigns AI Agent that turns a brief into coordinated cross-channel drafts against one shared plan. The newest additions change the job rather than the surface — an accessibility agent that audits a Scene for missing alt text, weak contrast, small type and absent headings and offers fixes in place, and AI Recommendations that reads engagement data and returns prioritised suggestions, shipped alongside the rename of Behavioral Targeting to Audience Pulse. Scenes also gained conditional branching, centralised brand guidelines and saved custom views.

Read the full Airship trajectory →

What is Craft CMS?

Craft 6 is being rebuilt on Laravel, and the alphas are breaking plugins to get there.

Craft runs two trains at once: a 6.0.0 alpha series rearchitecting the CMS, and 5.10.x patches that are single-bug fixes shipped within hours of each other. The alphas carry the work — queue jobs and dependency resolution moved onto Laravel's service container, control-panel serialization switched to Illuminate helpers, the imagine image library replaced with intervention/image, and a first-party control-panel component library added. Alpha 14 shipped with an explicit breaking-changes notice for plugin authors.

Read the full Craft CMS trajectory →

Airship vs Craft CMS: editorial side-by-side

Airship logo
Airship
MKT AUTO
0.0

Airship's agents graduate from writing the message to auditing it.

◆ Current state

Airship has spent this cycle putting AI agents into each authoring surface in turn: a conversational Scene Assistant that builds multi-screen native experiences, then a Campaigns AI Agent that turns a brief into coordinated cross-channel drafts against one shared plan. The newest additions change the job rather than the surface — an accessibility agent that audits a Scene for missing alt text, weak contrast, small type and absent headings and offers fixes in place, and AI Recommendations that reads engagement data and returns prioritised suggestions, shipped alongside the rename of Behavioral Targeting to Audience Pulse. Scenes also gained conditional branching, centralised brand guidelines and saved custom views.

◆ Where it's heading

Two things are consolidating. Scenes is becoming the product's centre of gravity: the assistant builds them, branching makes them reactive, brand guidelines constrain them and the accessibility agent checks them. And the agents themselves are widening from generation into review and advice, which is a harder capability to copy than another content generator. The Audience Pulse rename points the analytics side away from individual targeting and toward aggregate engagement, which is the privacy position Airship states directly in the release.

◆ Prediction

The audit-and-fix pattern is the reusable piece, so the next likely move is applying it beyond accessibility — brand-guideline conformance is the obvious candidate, given the guidelines are now centralised and machine-readable. Timing is unclear from these entries, several of which arrived undated.

C
Craft CMS
MKT AUTO
6.3

Craft 6 is being rebuilt on Laravel, and the alphas are breaking plugins to get there.

◆ Current state

Craft runs two trains at once: a 6.0.0 alpha series rearchitecting the CMS, and 5.10.x patches that are single-bug fixes shipped within hours of each other. The alphas carry the work — queue jobs and dependency resolution moved onto Laravel's service container, control-panel serialization switched to Illuminate helpers, the imagine image library replaced with intervention/image, and a first-party control-panel component library added. Alpha 14 shipped with an explicit breaking-changes notice for plugin authors.

◆ Where it's heading

The direction is a Laravel-native Craft: Artisan command discovery, container-resolved queue jobs, Illuminate helpers, and plugins that no longer register through composer extra fields or automatic trait lifecycle hooks. The image pipeline swap brings libvips and formats like HEIC, JPEG XL and TIFF along with it. Meanwhile 5.10 receives nothing but same-day bug fixes, which is what a maintenance branch looks like once the team's attention has moved.

◆ Prediction

Expect further alphas to keep narrowing the plugin API surface ahead of a beta, with the 5.10 line continuing at one or two same-day patch releases a week.

Alternatives to Airship and Craft CMS

Other Mkt Auto products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Airship or Craft CMS.

See all Airship alternatives → · See all Craft CMS alternatives →

Recent activity from Airship and Craft CMS

Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.

  1. 6d agoCraft CMSAlpha 16 fixes double-required migrations and a widget gap
  2. 6d agoCraft CMS5.10.13.2 fixes a SQL error on empty Categories fields
  3. 7d agoCraft CMS5.10.13.1 restores rendering of sanitized SVGs
  4. 7d agoCraft CMSCraft 6 swaps its image pipeline to intervention/image and libvips
  5. 20d agoCraft CMSCraft 6 alpha 14 breaks plugin providers and lifecycle hooks
  6. 26d agoCraft CMSCraft 6 moves queues and DI onto Laravel's container
  7. 4mo agoAirshipCampaigns AI Agent
  8. 4mo agoAirshipCleared for launch: Campaigns AI Agent
  9. 4mo agoAirshipDuplicate Campaigns AI Agent blurb
  10. 6mo agoAirshipCleared for Launch: Conversational AI Scene Assistant
  11. 6mo agoAirshipConversational AI Scene Assistant
  12. 6mo agoAirshipDuplicate Scene Assistant blurb

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Airship and Craft CMS?

They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Craft CMS is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 0.0), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.

Is Airship better than Craft CMS?

Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Craft CMS is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 0.0), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Mkt Auto products to evaluate alongside.

What are the best alternatives to Airship?

Top Airship alternatives in Mkt Auto are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Airship alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/airship for the full list with editorial commentary on each.

What are the best alternatives to Craft CMS?

Top Craft CMS alternatives in Mkt Auto are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Craft CMS alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/craft-cms for the full list with editorial commentary on each.