Burrow for Craft CMS agencies

There is no ManageWP for Craft CMS. That’s the problem Burrow solves.

WordPress agencies have it figured out. ManageWP, MainWP, WP Umbrella — install the plugin on every site, open one dashboard, see the full portfolio. Updates, backups, uptime, client reports. Done.

Craft CMS agencies have nothing like this.

You manage 15 Craft sites. To understand the state of your portfolio, you log into 15 separate control panels. You check entries in one tab, form submissions in another, Commerce orders in a third. You SSH into servers to check logs. You open GitHub to count deploys. You assemble the client story from memory and screenshots.

Burrow is the centralized operations layer that Craft has been missing. Install the plugin on every Craft site you manage — it takes about 2 minutes per site. The setup wizard auto-detects your form plugins and Craft Commerce, backfills historical data, and starts streaming events immediately. Open one dashboard. See every site’s activity — entry publishes, form submissions, Commerce orders, deploy history, uptime — in a unified timeline per client. With site snapshots showing current visual state, your Monday morning prep goes from 15 control panels to one screen.

What the Burrow Craft plugin captures

This isn’t a generic “connect your webhook” integration. Install the plugin, enter your API key, and the setup wizard auto-detects everything — which form plugins you’re running, whether Craft Commerce is installed, and which sections have entries. Here’s what flows into Burrow automatically:

Entry lifecycle events — entry created, saved, published, deleted. Tracked per section, per entry type, with author attribution and draft-to-live status transitions. When the content team publishes 12 articles in a month, your client digest shows it without anyone counting manually.

Form submissions from Formie (verbb), Freeform (Solspace), and Sprout Forms — auto-detected on install. The plugin captures form handle, submission timestamp, and page context. When form volume drops to zero after a Craft update, Burrow flags the anomaly before your client forwards an email about missing leads.

Craft Commerce events — auto-detected if Commerce is installed. Order completed, payment received, fulfillment updated, refund processed. Revenue totals, order counts, and checkout health across every Commerce store you manage. More on this below — it’s a bigger deal than it sounds.

System events — Craft updates applied, plugin changes, environment health signals. When a Friday afternoon composer update breaks a form handler, Burrow’s timeline shows the correlation: update at 3:47pm, form volume drops at 3:48pm.

History backfill — the plugin doesn’t start from zero. On installation, it scans existing entries, form submissions, and Commerce orders (configurable window, default 90 days) and populates your timeline retroactively. You see context immediately.

Craft Commerce has no reporting dashboard. Burrow fills the gap.

If you manage Craft Commerce stores, you already know this pain. Commerce is a capable e-commerce engine — flexible product types, variant management, solid checkout flow. But when the client asks “how did the store do this month?”, you’re logging into the control panel, eyeballing the order list, and doing math in a spreadsheet.

Craft Commerce ships without:

• A revenue dashboard or sales summary
• Order volume trending over time
• Checkout health or conversion monitoring
• Any form of automated commerce reporting

Compare that to Shopify, which has built-in analytics, or WooCommerce with its reports tab. Commerce stores run on Craft because the content modeling and editorial experience are superior — but the agency managing the retainer has no centralized way to see how the store is performing across clients.

Burrow captures Commerce order events as they happen. Across every Commerce store you manage, your Burrow dashboard shows: order volume this month, revenue totals, average order value, fulfillment status, and refund activity. When a checkout integration breaks after a Craft update, the anomaly is visible in the timeline alongside the update event that caused it.

For agencies running 3, 5, or 10 Commerce stores across different clients, this is the difference between “I think the store is doing fine” and “here’s exactly what happened this month, per store, per client.”

The scenario Craft agencies live every month

It’s the last Wednesday before your monthly retainer call with Pinnacle Media. They run a Craft CMS editorial site with 4 sections, a Craft Commerce store selling digital assets, and a Formie contact form that feeds their sales pipeline.

Without Burrow: You log into Pinnacle’s Craft control panel. Scroll through recent entries — looks like the team published some articles, but how many? You click through sections counting. Then you switch to the Commerce tab and scan the order list. Revenue? You export to CSV and sum the column. Form submissions? Open Formie, eyeball the list, estimate volume. GitHub deploys? Open another tab. By the time you’ve assembled a coherent narrative, you’ve spent 40 minutes and you’re still not confident you haven’t missed something.

The call starts. The client asks: “We launched that new product category three weeks ago — how’s it performing?” You don’t have the Commerce data broken out by date range. “Let me pull that and follow up.” The client asks: “Has the contact form been working? We feel like we’re getting fewer leads.” You checked Freeform but didn’t cross-reference with the deploy that happened two weeks ago. “I’ll look into it.”

Two follow-up emails. An hour of investigation. Trust erodes a little.

With Burrow: You open the Pinnacle Media project in Burrow. The timeline shows: 18 entries published across editorial and product sections, 6 Commerce orders totaling $4,200 (up from $2,800 last month — the new product category is working), form volume steady at 12/week, 2 GitHub releases deployed, uptime 99.98%. The site snapshot shows the current state of the homepage.

The call starts. You share the portal link. Every question the client asks is already answered in the timeline. “The new category generated $1,400 in its first three weeks. Form volume is stable — 48 submissions this month, consistent with the prior 90-day average. Two releases shipped, both related to the checkout optimization you approved.”

The call ends in 20 minutes. The client forwards the portal link to their CEO. The retainer renewal email arrives Thursday.

Site snapshots: see every Craft site at a glance

Managing a portfolio of Craft sites means context-switching between control panels, staging environments, and production URLs. Burrow captures periodic site snapshots for every connected project — a visual thumbnail of the current state of each site.

Your dashboard shows a grid of every Craft site (and WordPress, Shopify, and static sites) you manage. At a glance, you can see: Is the homepage still rendering correctly after last night’s deploy? Did the client’s content team update the hero banner? Is the staging site diverging from production?

Snapshots don’t replace QA. They’re a quick visual gut-check across your entire portfolio — the kind of thing you’d do by opening 15 browser tabs, except Burrow does it automatically and keeps the history.

How Burrow fits in a Craft agency’s stack

Craft agencies typically run a leaner tool stack than WordPress shops. Here’s where Burrow sits:

• Craft CMS control panel: content management, editorial workflow, Commerce store management — where editors and store managers work
• Servd / Fortrabbit / custom hosting: deployment, environment management, server infrastructure
• Ploi / Forge / custom CI: server provisioning, automated deploys
• GitHub / GitLab: version control, code review, release management
• Oh Dear / UptimeRobot: uptime and SSL monitoring
• Burrow: the operational layer across all of the above — unified client timelines, form health monitoring, Commerce analytics, site snapshots, automated reporting, and client portals

Burrow doesn’t replace your Craft control panel or your hosting provider. It’s the layer above that answers: “What happened across this client’s entire stack this month?” — and shares that answer with the client through a portal or automated digest.

For agencies running mixed portfolios (Craft + WordPress + Shopify), Burrow normalizes signals from every platform into the same per-client timeline. Your Craft projects get the same operational visibility as your WordPress projects — which, until now, was only possible for agencies that ran 100% WordPress.

You chose Craft for a reason. Burrow helps you prove the investment was worth it.

Agencies that choose Craft CMS are making a deliberate bet on quality — flexible content modeling, clean architecture, long-term maintainability. The work is more thoughtful and more complex than a typical WordPress build. But that complexity is invisible to the client paying for the retainer.

Burrow makes the invisible visible. Entry publishes, Commerce revenue, form health, deploy history, uptime — all in one timeline, all shareable through a client portal. When the client sees “23 content entries published, $8,400 in Commerce orders processed, 99.97% uptime, 4 releases shipped, zero incidents” — the value of the retainer isn’t a conversation anymore. It’s documented.

Multi-CMS agencies use case | Form monitoring use case | Client reporting use case | Compare with ManageWP | Compare with MainWP