Drip
Two-month digests that keep circling the same theme: get your data out of Drip and into your own stack.
Comparison · Mkt Auto
Craft CMS vs Lytics
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Craft CMS and Lytics — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Craft CMS vs Lytics: at a glance
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.
What is Lytics?
Lytics retires the legacy audience builder, ships zero-copy Salesforce Data Cloud sync, and pushes integrations weekly.
Lytics is a CDP shipping at a steady weekly cadence. Recent work cuts across three vectors: a forced migration off the legacy audience builder (sunset May 4, 2026) toward a redesigned builder with geolocation rules; heavy expansion of cloud-warehouse and ad-platform integrations (Salesforce Data Cloud, The Trade Desk, Microsoft UET, Pushly, Algolia, GCS); and admin-side governance — naming conventions, metric threshold alerts, easier OAuth recovery.
Craft CMS vs Lytics: editorial side-by-side
Craft CMS
6.3MKT AUTO
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.
Lytics
7.5MKT AUTO
Lytics retires the legacy audience builder, ships zero-copy Salesforce Data Cloud sync, and pushes integrations weekly.
◆ Current state
Lytics is a CDP shipping at a steady weekly cadence. Recent work cuts across three vectors: a forced migration off the legacy audience builder (sunset May 4, 2026) toward a redesigned builder with geolocation rules; heavy expansion of cloud-warehouse and ad-platform integrations (Salesforce Data Cloud, The Trade Desk, Microsoft UET, Pushly, Algolia, GCS); and admin-side governance — naming conventions, metric threshold alerts, easier OAuth recovery.
◆ Where it's heading
Two arcs are visible. First, the integration catalog is being deepened toward server-side conversion APIs and zero-copy data movement — Salesforce Data Cloud's bidirectional sync with zero-copy bulk via GCS is the architecturally interesting move and likely a template for what's next. Second, the platform itself is being made more legible to large operators: naming conventions, threshold alerts, and reconnect-in-place auth all target customers running Lytics at scale rather than acquiring net-new ones.
◆ Prediction
Expect the next quarter to bring more zero-copy/streaming export jobs patterned after the Salesforce Data Cloud blueprint (Snowflake or Databricks are the obvious next targets), plus additional governance features — likely per-team audience permissions or audit-log enhancements — as the natural follow-on to naming conventions.
Alternatives to Craft CMS and Lytics
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 Craft CMS or Lytics.
Formidable Forms
The forms plugin just opened its data to AI agents through an MCP adapter.
Pimcore
A security-hardening train: nine advisories across six patch releases, no feature work in sight.
n8n
Three release lines running in parallel, all of them shipping nothing but fixes this week
OpnForm
OpnForm is turning its V2 platform into an automation surface, one integration at a time.
Zoho Social
Zoho Social opens its management surface to AI assistants via MCP.
See all Craft CMS alternatives → · See all Lytics alternatives →
Recent activity from Craft CMS and Lytics
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 6d agoCraft CMSAlpha 16 fixes double-required migrations and a widget gap
- 6d agoCraft CMS5.10.13.2 fixes a SQL error on empty Categories fields
- 7d agoCraft CMS5.10.13.1 restores rendering of sanitized SVGs
- 7d agoCraft CMSCraft 6 swaps its image pipeline to intervention/image and libvips
- 20d agoCraft CMSCraft 6 alpha 14 breaks plugin providers and lifecycle hooks ⚡
- 26d agoCraft CMSCraft 6 moves queues and DI onto Laravel's container
- 3mo agoLyticsAudience builder redesign — legacy builder sunsetting May 4, 2026 ⚡
- 3mo agoLyticsThe Trade Desk — server-side Conversion API export
- 3mo agoLyticsSalesforce Data Cloud — bidirectional integration with imports, streaming exports, and zero-copy bulk ⚡
- 3mo agoLyticsGoogle Cloud Storage — export raw activity data to a GCS bucket
- 3mo agoLyticsPushly — sync audiences and capture subscriber IDs
- 4mo agoLyticsAudience Naming Conventions — admin-defined name templates
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Craft CMS and Lytics?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Lytics is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 7.5 vs 6.3), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 1. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is Craft CMS better than Lytics?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Lytics is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 7.5 vs 6.3), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 1. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Mkt Auto products to evaluate alongside.
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.
What are the best alternatives to Lytics?
Top Lytics alternatives in Mkt Auto are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Lytics alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/lytics for the full list with editorial commentary on each.