Headless CMS Review
Note on Hugo
Unfortunately, Hugo cannot create Hugo pages (i.e. with permalinks) from Data yet. If you want to use an API-based CMS wwith Hugo you are limited to only displaying the content in a page. By OlafG1 on Reddit
This is based on a video by Jon D Jones (see below).
1. Contentful
- SaaS
- Uses a REST API
- There is a free tier, single space for up to 5 users.
- Lots of plugins to integrate with other services like Shopify
- best design, sleek and minimal
Note after the free tier there is a big price jump to $500 pcm.
2. Strapi
A CMS for people who hate SAS. Open source. There are only about 10 or 12 self-hosted CMS’s including Wordpress.
Strapi is hands down the best option out there.
Jon D Jones on non-SaaS CMS’s
Self hosted is free. Requires a database and other build requirements. Strapi has a list of hosting providers some which have free tiers such as Render
There is also a cloud based option in the pipeline.
Limited plugins but include GraphQL, email…
Claim to be the most customizable CMS too.
Strapi tutorial by Laith Harb
3. Contentstack
This is for enterprise level CMS, cost around 100k per year.
4. Storyblok
- Inline editing experience
- SAS but has a free plan: “Free forever: for developers, freelancers and small businesses” for one seat (user). Additional seats are €9 pcm.
5. Netlify CMS
- Git powered only.
- Easy install. Choose your static site generator and click install. This will create a Github repo with all the files plus hosted on Netlify.
What about Prismic and Sanity?
I like Sanity and Prismic, however, the marketplace/thrid-party integration support its no where as good in them. This means more dev effort if you want to integrate things like shopify, optimizely, google analytics etc… Contentful’s environment feature is also better than the others IMHO. As a dev team we use the environments on every build. Most of the clients we have deemed Contentful/Sanity have preferred Contentful’s UI, however, this last point is more subjective.
Jon D Jones
- Prismic community tier is free with unlimited api calls and 100gb of CDN bandwidth pcm.
- Sanity free tier is more restrictive. 500k CDN api requests, 100k api requests, 10gb bandwidth and 5gb assets, 3 non-admins, unlimited admins. (api, CDN and bandwidth is doubled with Syntax offer - for how long though?)
Other Git backed CMS’s
- Publii is a desktop app that allows you to make changes locally before committing to origin.
- Cloudcannon is a cloud based CMS. It has a free for devs option that allows 3 users. It’s also advertised and an ‘all in one platform for modern static sites’ so can be used to do everything. Once off the free tier it costs $250 pcm.
- Tina is an inline editor. It currently still in development. It is cloud based but currently free and sounds like it will continue with a free tier later. Tina connects to git repos via a Graph QL API.
Other API driven CMS’s
SaaS (Caas)
SaaS is Software as a Service and CaaS is Content as a Service
- Graph CMS The free forever tier allows 1m API calls and 100gbs of data. All based on GraphQL.
Open Source self-hosted
- KeystoneJS is another open source alternative to Strapi that runs on GraphQL. It’s free and so requires hosting somewhere.
- Cockpit another open source offering. Requires PHP 7.1 or more, SQLite or MongoDB, Apache with mod/rewrite enabled.