# FluentCMS - Open Source ASP.NET Core & Blazor CMS

URL: https://momentaj.com/case-studies/fluentcms/
Updated: 2026-10-09
Client: Open source (Momentaj project)
Momentaj's role: Creator and lead developer
Years: 2023 - 2025
Team: Core team + 16 contributors
Technologies: ASP.NET Core, Blazor, C#, Tailwind CSS / Flowbite, LiteDB / MongoDB, AI writing assistant
Tags: Open Source, CMS, Headless, Blazor, .NET, AI-Powered
Project: https://fluentcms.com

An open-source CMS for .NET, built on ASP.NET Core and Blazor, that works as both a page-building CMS and a headless CMS on one API, with AI-assisted writing built in. Created by Momentaj; 560+ GitHub stars.

Outcomes:
- 560+ GitHub stars, 16 contributors, MIT licence
- Page-building and headless CMS on one ASP.NET Core API
- AI writing assistant for content teams
- Runtime compilation and render caching: 45 ms to 3.8 ms per render, about 250 to about 1,120 users on 8 cores

## Overview

FluentCMS is an open-source content management system for .NET that runs as both a page-building CMS and a headless CMS on a single API. Built natively on ASP.NET Core and Blazor, it gives developers a modern .NET platform and gives content teams a dashboard with AI-powered writing assistance. It is released under the MIT licence and had passed 560 GitHub stars as of September 2026.

## The challenge

Few modern, open-source CMS options were built on Blazor. .NET teams often faced restrictive legacy systems that hindered the integration of modern front-end tooling, AI-assisted workflows and personalised experiences. Blazor itself raised a performance question: component rendering had to be fast enough for a CMS serving many concurrent editors and visitors from one server.

## What we built

FluentCMS separates the front and back ends through a headless architecture on ASP.NET Core, while a Blazor-based site builder lets non-developers assemble pages from components. It includes an AI writing assistant for content creators, Flowbite and Tailwind styling, an extensible plugin model, and flexible storage on LiteDB or MongoDB. To solve the performance question, we compiled Blazor components at runtime and cached at the renderer level, which cut a page render from 45 ms to 3.8 ms and lifted the capacity of an 8-core server from about 250 to about 1,120 concurrent users.

## Results

FluentCMS passed 560 GitHub stars, with 1,456 commits from 16 contributors; its latest release, v0.0.5, shipped in December 2024. Its packages are published on NuGet as `FluentCMS.*` under the [fluentcms profile](https://www.nuget.org/profiles/fluentcms); the bare `FluentCMS` package id belongs to an unrelated project. It is also where we plan to prototype an AI-first CMS, where agents operate the content system by default and people write the rules and review what matters before it goes live.