Why choose Tank?
Tank gives you control
Tank isn’t just powerful – it’s empowering. Tank’s publishing and CMS capabilities enable you to take control over content creation, editing and media management – all within a single dashboard. It’s intuitive and easy to use, no developers required.
Tank scales with your business
Businesses scale, so Tank has been designed to scale with you. Create infinite pages, add custom features and continually evolve your content using your branded component library.
Tank takes care of all the hard work
From automated media scaling and asset management, mobile optimisation, SEO and page speed. Tank has got your back so you can focus on your content.
Tank is secure
Tank CMS undergoes a comprehensive security review by an independent security company every year and ensures we stay abreast of the latest risks and developments in the industry.
Tank is more than a CMS
Tank does more than just manage content. There are a number of ‘add-ons’ that help your business, from our Email Builder, User Roles, Form builder, and Multisite functionality, to custom CRMs or even LMSs.
Compare Tank
| Summary | Tank | Wordpress | Drupal |
Ease of use | Easy | Easy | Complex |
Beginner Friendly | Yes | Yes | No |
Required technical knowledge | Little to none | Some | High |
Scalability | Sites of all sizes | Small to large | Sites of all sizes |
Design/brand consistency | On brand always | Limited | Possible |
Security | Highly secure | Needs updates | Vigilance required |
Initial cost | Moderate | Low | Expensive |
Long-term cost | Low | Low | Moderate |
Delivery speed | Fast to market | Fast | Depends on complexity |
Ongoing developer support | Low requirement | Reliant on plugins | Reliant on developers |
Long-term content flexibility | Highly flexible | Reliant on developers | Costly updates |
We had come from a website that had limited capabilities, to something that is now responsive, accessible, and easy to use. The team were so patient in sharing their knowledge of Tank, while also helping me to fulfil my vision on not only how the website looked, but also worked. We had so many things we wanted to integrate, and the team were able to tick everything off our list. We’ve heard nothing but good things from our customers about the new website!
Rachel Churchland
Digital Marketing Coordinator, QSO
We were sceptical of a custom CMS. We have 10+ live sites powered by Tank and we have not looked back. Tank and Bigfish have completely exceeded our expectations in building our digital platforms to do exactly what we need when we need it.
Harleigh Venables
Communications Manager, Hutchinson Builders
The entire process from the conception through to deployment exceeded our expectations. Bigfish developed a simple and effective back-end interface which meant our staff and student coordinators could focus on developing relevant and engaging content vs. worrying about how to manage a back end and tech skills. The end result was a website that has seen us increase visitation in excess of 140% over previous years, and importantly provided a platform from which we can capitalise upon future developments and trends.
Shelley Valentine
Director Student Services, UNSW
We had come from a website that had limited capabilities, to something that is now responsive, accessible, and easy to use. The team were so patient in sharing their knowledge of Tank, while also helping me to fulfil my vision on not only how the website looked, but also worked. We had so many things we wanted to integrate, and the team were able to tick everything off our list. We’ve heard nothing but good things from our customers about the new website!
Rachel Churchland
Digital Marketing Coordinator, QSO
We were sceptical of a custom CMS. We have 10+ live sites powered by Tank and we have not looked back. Tank and Bigfish have completely exceeded our expectations in building our digital platforms to do exactly what we need when we need it.
Harleigh Venables
Communications Manager, Hutchinson Builders
The entire process from the conception through to deployment exceeded our expectations. Bigfish developed a simple and effective back-end interface which meant our staff and student coordinators could focus on developing relevant and engaging content vs. worrying about how to manage a back end and tech skills. The end result was a website that has seen us increase visitation in excess of 140% over previous years, and importantly provided a platform from which we can capitalise upon future developments and trends.
Shelley Valentine
Director Student Services, UNSW
We had come from a website that had limited capabilities, to something that is now responsive, accessible, and easy to use. The team were so patient in sharing their knowledge of Tank, while also helping me to fulfil my vision on not only how the website looked, but also worked. We had so many things we wanted to integrate, and the team were able to tick everything off our list. We’ve heard nothing but good things from our customers about the new website!
Rachel Churchland
Digital Marketing Coordinator, QSO
We were sceptical of a custom CMS. We have 10+ live sites powered by Tank and we have not looked back. Tank and Bigfish have completely exceeded our expectations in building our digital platforms to do exactly what we need when we need it.
Harleigh Venables
Communications Manager, Hutchinson Builders
The entire process from the conception through to deployment exceeded our expectations. Bigfish developed a simple and effective back-end interface which meant our staff and student coordinators could focus on developing relevant and engaging content vs. worrying about how to manage a back end and tech skills. The end result was a website that has seen us increase visitation in excess of 140% over previous years, and importantly provided a platform from which we can capitalise upon future developments and trends.
Shelley Valentine
Director Student Services, UNSW
Key Features
Your design system in Tank
Tank uses your brand for every touchpoint. Colour, typography and layout styles are all customised to your business. A set of design principles, sizes and grids are developed to provide a scalable solution which can be adapted to interface requirements moving forward.
Live Preview
Preview as you go at all responsive breakpoints. The design system uses these elements and principles to allow for powerful and adaptable variants for quick and easy layout designs without fear of breaking brand guidelines.
Flexible or fixed, you decide
Create fast and consistent layouts using section presets. From ten to a hundred users, Tank makes it easy to manage. We can fix templates or sections or you can create your own. No coding needed. Change how your content displays with just one click.
FAQs
Is Tank an open source CMS?
No, Tank is our custom built CMS and is not available to the open source community. Tank is developed on top of an open-source PHP framework (CakePHP).
Is Tank a custom CMS? I’m worried about wasting time on developing functionality that already exists in other CMSs
Tank is a secure, tried and tested custom CMS. However, new websites are not completely built from scratch. There is a core base install which exists for all Tank websites that has been thoroughly tested and refined for over 15 years. Each client’s install then has custom functionality added to suit their business. These are often customisations that were created for previous clients that can be re-utilised, and as such have already been refined and tested. In some very specific cases the function is completely custom to the client and is built to purpose. In Tank you only have the functions you need, not every single feature that you may never use, making it slimline and more usable for your team.
Can Tank manage user roles, content versioning and approvals?
Yes, user access is controlled with roles. Roles contain granular permissions for different CMS resources.
Can we move the website to another developer?
Yes, there are no IP restrictions for another developer to develop for Tank. Organisations working with Tank can't on-sell.
As Tank is not a standard CMS there would be a learning curve for a new developer to begin working with it, however this is true of any website. The code base and front-end of all websites are set up by a specific developer and so would still be un-familiar to a new one.
Our client Cleanaway completed the development of their website internally and continued to work on Tank without our assistance.
Tank doesn’t have SEO plugins. How will you support our SEO strategy/visibility?
Out-of-the-box Tank has more SEO in-built features than most CMSs. Schema integration, sitemap integration, meta fields, canonical URLs, rich data, OpenGraph social media integration, automatic image compression and mobile-optimised performance. For real-time SEO feedback we can integrate with the Seobility API to bring more targeted SEO features directly into Tank.
Our production team are not technical. How will they work with Tank?
Tank’s page builder (Cockpit) will look familiar to anyone who has used Wordpress or similar CMSs, using industry standard features and semantics. However, where Tank excels is in the way it empowers users to customise layouts and page content without any developer intervention. All pages use customisable sections rather than templates, meaning pages can adapt to suit the content rather then being restricted to the same layout on every page. Styling presets and section templates (a collection of frequently used sections) then help streamline the creation of new pages. New page layouts can be designed by the CMS user, but always remain on brand thanks to the underlying design system.
How do you deal with third-party integrations?
Tank can integrate seamlessly with any third-party platform. We have previous experience integrating with most industry standard CRMs (Tessitura, Hubspot, Salesforce etc), recruitment platforms (Pageup etc), shops (Shopify etc) and social platforms. The level to which the platform is integrated is determined in the scoping phase.