A Statamic alternative that guarantees the outcome without a developer

Why people go looking

Statamic is a genuinely good developer CMS, and in a developer's hands it can produce excellent, accessible sites. The operative words are "can" and "developer's hands." The accessibility outcome belongs to whoever built the site, and it drifts the day they leave.

What Windrow does differently

Windrow will not publish a page that fails a real WCAG 2.2 AA check. Not a warning you can dismiss: a gate. That covers alt text, labels, heading order, and contrast, and the things most tools never test, like whether the page reflows at 320 pixels and whether the focus indicator is visible on every background.

The rest of the stack keeps the same promise to your readers: share links with no third-party scripts, built-in newsletters with confirmed opt-in and no open tracking, and built-in analytics with no cookies and no fingerprinting. Do Not Track is honored for real.

And the standard equipment says the same thing: a skip link on every page, data tables that cannot publish without captions, audio that cannot publish without a transcript, plain-language summaries, your organization's own writing style suggested as authors type, and courses that never track a learner.

Where Statamic still wins

For a Laravel developer who wants full control, flat files, and a beautiful authoring layer, Statamic is a joy. We say that without hedging; we run it ourselves elsewhere.

Who should switch, and who should stay

Have a developer who owns the outcome? Statamic will treat you well. Want the outcome guaranteed by the platform, checked on every publish, with no one to hire? That is Windrow's entire premise.

Staying with Statamic? There is a free gate for that

We meant it about running Statamic ourselves. So here is the honest position: if you have a developer and you like your setup, the answer is not to move.

Accessibility Gate is a free Statamic addon by the same person who builds Windrow. It installs into a Statamic 6 site, refuses to publish an entry that fails its checks, and shows what is wrong in a control panel while you write. It runs on a real Statamic 6.27.1 site today, refuses real publishes there, and carries 52 tests. It is not on the Marketplace yet.

It checks headings, link and button text, image descriptions, embedded video titles, and control size, on every page. It cannot see anything the theme's stylesheet decides, colour contrast included. Two further checks exist and need the site's templates to opt in.

Three things it will not do, and these are the reason it exists rather than features:

• No score out of a hundred. A number implies a measurement automated checking cannot make.
• No generated conformance statement. Deciding whether a site meets an obligation is work for a person.
• It tells you which checks could not run, rather than reporting a clean sweep. A check that silently finds nothing looks exactly like a check that passed.

It is narrow on purpose. Paid Statamic addons exist that check more, including running a real browser over the page, which this does not do. If that is what you need, go looking. This is for teams who want the publish stopped and want to be told what was not checked.

Moving your site

There is no one-click importer, and we will not pretend otherwise. What exists is a full content API built for AI agents: an assistant connected to Windrow can rebuild your pages, posts, and media in a working session, and every page it creates has to pass the same accessibility gate you do. Your old URLs can be forwarded with built-in redirects, so nothing you have shared goes dead.

Comparing more than one platform? Every comparison we publish lives at one page.