I see the appeal against Wordpress. Wordpress is hell to integrate, slow and a security nightmare. But I don't see the advantage compared to, say Kirby.
There's a post somewhere down below saying smashingmagazine moved to netlify from a Rails, Shopify, Kirby mix[1]. "move would need to include solutions for a decoupled CMS, comments engine, eCommerce platform, and member login."
What Netlify provides, reminds me of what parse used to provide. Except that it adds a CMS and targets Web applications with identity[2] etc. They sell a client facing website platform. Good for them. But that's not what the post is about. So yeah, I do find it misleading.
[1]: https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/11/21/smashing-magazine-is...
However, the CMS itself is not tied to our deployment and automation platform. It can also be setup to work for GitHub pages or self-hosted setups.
The basic idea is that's its an editor friendly content management UI for persisted data stored in a GitHub repository. What you do with that data is up to you.
Since it was discussed in a different subthread: If you would describe it like that, why isn't something straightforward like that the blog post title?
In a broad sense there's nothing that can't work with the CMS - you can integrate a Mailchimp sign up form in your template and never have the CMS touch it. Beyond that, reach out in the spectrum community for help with a specific use case: https://spectrum.chat/netlify-cms
The only problem is it typically locks out less-technical contributors, so it's often with a bit of sad resolve that I've then brought Wordpress into the equation—just to empower other editors.
This is an alternative. The Netlify CMS cleverly provides CMS UI that then commits editors' changes via git (with no git knowledge needed), so they look to me just like another contributor. Since content is managed in static files, any participant can use any tool to to participate.
Some developers love Wordpress with it's ecosystem of plugins and capabilities. This is not for them. Other developers would rather not run Wordpress, yet are just looking for a way to bring in other contributors to a web project, working in a compatible workflow. Those devs, I think, will relate to the ideas of this CMS.