Ghost
Ghost is quietly turning its newsletter into a lifecycle marketing engine.
Comparison · Mkt Auto
Craft CMS vs MailBeez
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Craft CMS and MailBeez — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Craft CMS vs MailBeez: 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 MailBeez?
MailBeez hardens its big 'V5' rewrite with PHP 8.x compatibility and up-to-10x page-load gains.
MailBeez is a ZenCart email-marketing plugin midway through a major 'V5' platform modernization — redesigned navigation, a marketing calendar, and new flow, audience, and product-review tooling. The recent releases are the stabilization tail of that push: point releases hardening PHP 7.4-to-8.6 compatibility, ZenCart 2.2.2 support, and large page-load gains. That sweep has now reached the addon catalogue, with individual modules refactored for PHP 8 one at a time.
Craft CMS vs MailBeez: 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.
MailBeez
5.0MKT AUTO
MailBeez hardens its big 'V5' rewrite with PHP 8.x compatibility and up-to-10x page-load gains.
◆ Current state
MailBeez is a ZenCart email-marketing plugin midway through a major 'V5' platform modernization — redesigned navigation, a marketing calendar, and new flow, audience, and product-review tooling. The recent releases are the stabilization tail of that push: point releases hardening PHP 7.4-to-8.6 compatibility, ZenCart 2.2.2 support, and large page-load gains. That sweep has now reached the addon catalogue, with individual modules refactored for PHP 8 one at a time.
◆ Where it's heading
The throughline is the V5 rewrite moving from feature delivery into consolidation. After landing the redesigned UI and new marketing tooling in spring, the cadence shifted to compatibility and performance hardening — isolating Smarty loading, migrating PHP versions, and cutting page-load times. The August entry shows that work reaching the long tail of small integration addons, which is usually the last stage of such a migration.
◆ Prediction
Expect the addon-by-addon PHP 8 sweep to continue until the catalogue is covered, alongside V5 stabilization point releases. The entries give no signal on when remaining legacy flows finish migrating.
Alternatives to Craft CMS and MailBeez
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 MailBeez.
Pimcore
Pimcore is spending 2026 hardening its data layer, one allowlist at a time.
n8n
Two n8n release trains running in lockstep, both carrying only bug fixes this week.
OneSignal
OneSignal is arguing marketers should stop building journeys, and shipping agents to prove it
Buttondown
A near-daily fix stream, with flexible monthly RSS scheduling the only real addition.
Gumloop
Gumloop stops selling agent-building and starts shipping a finished agent
See all Craft CMS alternatives → · See all MailBeez alternatives →
Recent activity from Craft CMS and MailBeez
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 2d agoMailBeezPHP 8 refactor for invoice number and customer info addons
- 2d agoCraft CMSAlpha 16 fixes double-required migrations and a widget gap
- 3d agoCraft CMS5.10.13.2 fixes a SQL error on empty Categories fields
- 3d agoCraft CMS5.10.13.1 restores rendering of sanitized SVGs
- 3d agoCraft CMSCraft 6 swaps its image pipeline to intervention/image and libvips
- 16d agoCraft CMSCraft 6 alpha 14 breaks plugin providers and lifecycle hooks ⚡
- 22d agoCraft CMSCraft 6 moves queues and DI onto Laravel's container
- 29d agoMailBeezPHP refactoring for ECG-check integration (v4.5)
- 1mo agoMailBeezApp and newsletter loading-performance tweaks
- 1mo agoMailBeezPHP 8.6 compatibility and query performance
- 1mo agoMailBeezZenCart 2.2.2 compatibility
- 1mo agoMailBeezUp to 10x faster page loads; PHP 8.5 support
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Craft CMS and MailBeez?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Craft CMS is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 5.0), 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 Craft CMS better than MailBeez?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Craft CMS is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 5.0), 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 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 MailBeez?
Top MailBeez alternatives in Mkt Auto are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "MailBeez alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/mailbeez for the full list with editorial commentary on each.