What is a headless CMS?

A content system that stores and serves content through an API and does not render your pages. You model the content, editors fill it in, and your own front end decides how it is displayed. The trade is that you gain complete control of rendering and lose the templates that used to come with the CMS.

Which one should I choose?

Start with where it has to run, because that is the constraint you cannot engineer around. If it must be your own infrastructure, Payload is our featured pick and you are otherwise choosing between Strapi, Directus and the other self-hostable options. If a vendor can host it, Sanity is the strongest option for structured content, Storyblok for marketing teams who need visual editing, and Contentful when governance and procurement decide.

Is there a genuinely free option?

Several, and they split into two kinds. Open-source tools like Payload, Strapi, Keystone and Wagtail are free forever if you run them yourself, so you pay for hosting instead of licences. Hosted platforms with real free tiers include Sanity at 20 seats and 10,000 documents, Prismic with unlimited documents and 4 million API calls, and Hygraph at 3 seats and 500,000 calls.

Which ones work with Next.js?

Most of them, and the list is long enough that it should not be your deciding filter. What actually varies is the quality of the integration: whether draft mode and tag-based revalidation are supported, whether there is a first-party toolkit, and whether visual editing works against a live preview. Sanity, Storyblok, Payload, Contentful and Prismic are the strongest on that axis.

Open source or hosted?

It is a question about who carries the operations, not about the software. Self-hosting means your database, your backups, your upgrades and your uptime, in exchange for no seat limits, no request metering and no pricing changes. Hosted means a vendor takes all of that and prices it. Teams without a developer who will own infrastructure should not self-host, whatever the licence says.

Does going headless help SEO?

Not by itself. It moves responsibility for titles, canonicals, sitemaps, redirects and structured data out of a plugin and into your codebase. Done deliberately that is an improvement, because you emit exactly what is on the page. Done by accident it is the most common way a migration loses traffic, because the fields still look filled in while nothing is rendering them.

How long does a migration take?

About four weeks for a normal marketing site: a week to model the content, a week or two to migrate it with a one-to-one redirect map, a week on templates and the metadata layer, and a final week of editor testing and cutover. A site with three page types is faster. A multi-brand estate with thousands of URLs is a different conversation.

What is the difference between open source and source available?

An open-source licence lets you use the software for any purpose, including competing with the people who wrote it. Source-available licences such as BSL, ELv2 and Directus's MSCL let you read and usually modify the code but restrict commercial use. It matters more than it sounds: Directus moved to a source-available licence in 2026 and dotCMS is free in production only while Total Finances, the largest of revenue, budget or funding, stay at or below $5m.

The directory

Headless CMS platforms, compared on what they really cost

55 platforms, researched from their own pricing pages and their own LICENSE files rather than their marketing. What each one charges once your team grows, where it actually runs, whether you can host it yourself, and which licence you are really agreeing to.

Browse the directory Read our featured pick

55: platforms reviewed
26: genuinely open source
32: you can self-host
50: usable free

The directory

Every platform, filtered by how it runs

Filters are on the left. Hosting is the one worth starting with, because it decides who carries the operations and that is harder to change later than any feature.

All 55 headless CMS platforms below were checked against their own pricing pages and, where the code is public, their own LICENSE files rather than a comparison post. Two of the headless CMS options here are described as open source almost everywhere and are not, which is the kind of thing only the licence file tells you.

Showing 16 of 55 platforms

Payload

Featured

Best for Next.js teams who want to own the database

A MIT-licensed CMS that installs into your Next.js app rather than sitting beside it. Config is TypeScript, the admin panel is generated from it, and the database is yours.

Runs inside your Next.js app, same repo and same deploy
Postgres, MongoDB or SQLite, your instance
Admin UI generated from a TypeScript config

Next.js
React
GraphQL API
TypeScript / Next.js

FreeCloud or self-hosted · Open source

Visit Payload Read the review

Sanity

Best for structured content at scale

The structured-content platform behind a large share of serious Next.js marketing sites. You build the editing Studio as React code in your own repository; Sanity hosts the content and serves it over GROQ.

GROQ query language, plus a GraphQL API you deploy per dataset
Studio is React code in your repo, not a hosted form builder
Image CDN with on-the-fly transforms and hotspot cropping

Next.js
React
Vue / Nuxt
TypeScript / React (Studio)

$0Managed SaaS · Proprietary

Visit Sanity Read the review

Contentful

Best for enterprise governance

The enterprise default, and a Salesforce company since September 2026. Mature APIs, serious governance and localisation, EU data residency, and a pricing model that jumps from free to $300 a month with nothing in between.

Content Delivery, Preview, Management and GraphQL APIs
Environments and environment aliases for safe schema changes
Deep localisation and role-based governance

Next.js
React
Vue / Nuxt
Hosted SaaS

$0Managed SaaS · Proprietary

Visit Contentful Read the review

Storyblok

Best visual editing

The visual editor everyone else copies, wrapped around a component-based content model. Metered on seats, traffic, API calls, locales and AI credits, with a 97% uptime SLA on the self-serve tiers.

Real visual editing against your own live front end
Content Delivery, Management and GraphQL APIs
Image Service with on-the-fly transformation

Next.js
React
Vue / Nuxt
Hosted SaaS

€0Managed SaaS · Proprietary

Visit Storyblok Read the review

Strapi

Best known open source option

The best-known open-source headless CMS, self-hostable and Node-based. The MIT grant is narrower than everyone assumes: having a Strapi Cloud account is one of the things that voids it.

Self-hostable Node.js CMS with an admin panel non-developers can use
Auto-generated REST and GraphQL APIs from your content types
Role-based permissions and a plugin ecosystem

Next.js
React
Vue / Nuxt
JavaScript / Node.js

FreeManaged SaaS · Open source

Visit Strapi Read the review

Directus

Best for an existing SQL database

Wraps any existing SQL database in a REST and GraphQL API plus an admin app. Not open source, but free and fully permissive for organisations under $5m revenue and 50 staff.

Points at an existing SQL database rather than owning one
REST, GraphQL and realtime APIs generated from your schema
Flows for automation, and a vendor MCP server

Next.js
React
Vue / Nuxt
TypeScript / Node.js

FreeManaged SaaS · Source available

Visit Directus Read the review

Ghost

Best for publishing and newsletters

A publishing platform with memberships and newsletters built in, MIT licensed and genuinely self-hostable. Excellent at articles, deliberately narrow at everything else.

Content API and Admin API over a real publishing model
Memberships, paid subscriptions and email newsletters in core
MIT licensed, self-host with no vendor limits

Next.js
React
Astro
JavaScript / Node.js

FreeManaged SaaS · Open source

Visit Ghost Read the review

DatoCMS

Best pay-for-what-you-use pricing

A GraphQL-first hosted CMS with an imgix-backed asset pipeline and the most granular pricing here. Ten separate meters, each with a published add-on rate.

GraphQL Content Delivery API with responsive image variants
Real-time Updates API for live edit overlays
Asset API backed by imgix transformations

Next.js
React
Vue / Nuxt
Hosted SaaS

€0Managed SaaS · Proprietary

Visit DatoCMS Read the review

Hygraph

Best for content federation

GraphQL-native from the start, and the only platform here treating content federation as a first-class feature. Growth is $199/mo and caps you at 10,000 entries.

GraphQL-first content API with a visual Schema Builder
Content federation: stitch remote sources into one API
Components, live preview and assignment workflows

Next.js
React
Vue / Nuxt
Hosted SaaS

$0Managed SaaS · Proprietary

Visit Hygraph Read the review

Prismic

Cheapest realistic paid entry

Slice-based page building with a realistic paid entry at $10 a month. Priced per repository and metered on locales, which is the axis that has caught customers out before.

Slices: reusable page sections editors compose themselves
Visual Page Builder with unlimited documents on every tier
4 million API calls a month even on the free plan

Next.js
React
Vue / Nuxt
Hosted SaaS

$0Managed SaaS · Proprietary

Visit Prismic Read the review

Builder.io

Best for marketer-built landing pages

A visual CMS that has become an AI development platform. Metered in Agent Credits and priced per user, with the drag-and-drop page building still underneath.

Visual drag-and-drop editing against your own components
Agent Credits as the primary meter, not documents or calls
Built-in MCP servers on Pro, custom ones on Team

Next.js
React
Vue / Nuxt
Hosted SaaS

$0Managed SaaS · Proprietary

Visit Builder.io Read the review

Statamic

Best for Laravel teams

A Laravel-native CMS with a perpetual $349-per-site licence rather than a subscription. Headless mode, the REST API and GraphQL are all Pro features, so the free edition cannot be used headlessly.

Built on Laravel, flat-file or database content
Blueprints and 40+ fieldtypes for content modelling
REST and GraphQL APIs, on the Pro licence only

REST API
GraphQL API
Next.js
PHP / Laravel

FreeSelf-hosted · Source available

Visit Statamic Read the review

TinaCMS

Best git-backed visual editing

Visual editing on top of Markdown and JSON in your own Git repository, Apache-2.0 licensed. The content stays in your repo whether or not you keep paying.

Content lives as Markdown or JSON in your Git repo
Visual editing against your live front end
Apache-2.0, with a self-hostable backend

Next.js
React
Astro
TypeScript / Node.js

$0Managed SaaS · Open source

Visit TinaCMS Read the review

Decap CMS

Free git-based editing

A free, MIT-licensed admin panel that commits Markdown to your Git repository. Abandoned as Netlify CMS, handed to new maintainers, and shipping releases again.

Content committed as Markdown to your own Git repo
MIT licensed with no paid tier at all
A single-page admin app you host yourself

React
Next.js
Astro
JavaScript / React

FreeSelf-hosted · Open source

Visit Decap CMS Read the review

WordPress (headless)

Familiar editor, existing content

GPL software your client already knows how to use, with a REST API in core and GraphQL via a plugin. Nobody can reprice it, and nobody is maintaining it for you either.

REST API in core since 4.7, GraphQL via WPGraphQL
GPLv2 or later, so no vendor can change the terms
An editor most clients have already been trained on

Next.js
React
Vue / Nuxt
PHP

FreeSelf-hosted · Open source

Visit WordPress (headless)Read the review

Craft CMS

Best for structured PHP sites

A PHP CMS whose GraphQL API ships in the free edition, so headless Craft is priced by logins rather than traffic. Own a one-off licence or rent it inside Craft Cloud, while Craft 6 moves onto Laravel.

GraphQL API in every edition, including free Solo
Paid editions priced by logins: $279 or $399 once
Craft Cloud bundles the licence into hosting

Next.js
React
Vue / Nuxt
PHP / Yii 2 (Craft 5); Laravel in Craft 6

FreeCloud or self-hosted · Source available

Visit Craft CMS Read the review

Side by side

The six most-used, compared

Our featured pick leads. Every value below derives from the same fields as the cards above, so the table cannot disagree with them.

The headless CMS features that end up mattering are rarely the ones on a vendor's homepage. Visual editing, localisation and workflow separate these six far more than API design does, and the headless CMS solutions that win a shortlist usually win it on the editor's experience rather than the developer's.

Compare

Entry price

Free

€0

Free

Hosting

Cloud or self-hosted · Open source

Managed SaaS · Proprietary

Managed SaaS · Open source

Managed SaaS · Source available

Licence

Open source

Proprietary

Open source

Source available

Self-hostable

Free tier

Free forever, self-hosted, MIT licence

20 seats, 10k documents, 250k API requests/mo, forever

10 users, 100k API calls/mo, 10k records, 2 locales

1 seat, 1 space, 100k API requests/mo, 100GB traffic

Self-hosted Community edition, MIT with conditions

Core: 3 seats, 25 collections. Grant: no feature limits

GraphQL

Next.js toolkit

Visual editing

Localization

Workflows & roles

Media CDN

Vendor MCP server

Entry prices are the cheapest published route to a working install, read from each vendor's own pricing page in August 2026. Licences were read from each repository's LICENSE file. Both move, so confirm before you budget.

Buyer's guide

How to choose between headless CMS platforms

Six things that decide whether a platform fits, in the order they usually bite. Every figure below is computed from the directory above.

Be specific about which benefit you are buying

The headless CMS benefits people list in the abstract, meaning speed, flexibility and omnichannel delivery, are all real and none of them is why a particular team should switch. Decoupling buys you one concrete thing: the CMS stops deciding how your pages are rendered. Everything else follows from that, and so does the entire cost, because you now own the front end that used to come free.

If your current problem is that editors cannot ship a landing page without a developer, decoupling makes that worse, not better, unless you also buy visual editing. Only 22 of the 55 platforms here carry it.

Where it runs decides who carries the risk

34 of these are managed SaaS, where the vendor owns uptime, scaling and the rate limits you live inside. 32can be run on your own infrastructure, which moves all three onto your team and removes them from someone else's pricing page. 6 store content in a git repository instead of a database, which makes review and rollback free and concurrent editing hard.

There is no right answer, but there is a wrong process: picking on features and discovering the hosting model afterwards. It is the first filter for a reason.

Read the licence, not the marketing

26 of the 55 platforms here ship under a genuine open-source licence. Another 5 are source-available, which is a different thing: you can read and usually modify the code, but the licence restricts what you may do with it commercially.

This is not academic. Directus moved to the Monospace Sustainable Core License in 2026 and is still widely described as open source. dotCMS is free in production only while your total finances, the largest of revenue, budget or funding, stay at or below $5m over twelve months. Both facts come from the LICENSE file, not the homepage.

Model the price on your team, not your traffic

50 of the 55 can be run at no cost, either through a real free tier or an open-source licence you self-host. At the other end, several require four-figure monthly commitments before publishing a page.

The trap is the billing axis. Seats, records, API calls, locales and environments are all metered by somebody here, and the one that bites is rarely the one on the comparison page you read.

Select a band to see which of the 55 platforms sit in it. Several span more than one, so the counts add up to more than 55.

Check the API shape against your stack

39 of the 55 expose GraphQL and 48 ship a first-party Next.js toolkit, but the two lists are not the same and the gaps matter. A GraphQL-only platform is a hard blocker for a service that cannot speak it, and a REST-only platform will over-fetch on every page unless you build a layer to stop it.

If localisation is in scope, check it early rather than late: 47 platforms carry it, and among those the difference between field-level translation and a separate copy of the site is enormous.

Ask what the exit looks like

Every platform here will export your content. What none of them export is the query language, the rich-text format and the front-end code shaped around them. That is the real switching cost, and it is measured in weeks of engineering rather than in a data migration.

One new signal worth noting: 13 of these vendors now ship their own Model Context Protocol server, which lets an AI client read and write content directly. Favour platforms whose content model you could describe to a new developer in ten minutes. That is usually the same list as the ones you can leave.

The part nobody plans for

What changes for SEO when you go headless

Going headless does not help or hurt rankings by itself. What it does is move five specific responsibilities from a plugin to your codebase, and headless CMS SEO problems are almost always one of those five being nobody's job.

We have shipped all five wrong at least once, including on this site. The streaming-metadata one below took a Screaming Frog crawl reporting missing titles on roughly one page in eight to find.

Talk through your migration

01
Nothing renders your metadata any more
In a coupled CMS, a plugin writes the title, description, canonical and Open Graph tags into the page. Decouple, and that plugin is still storing those fields but nothing is emitting them. This is the single most common way a headless migration loses rankings, and it is invisible in the CMS because the fields still look filled in.
What to doQuery the SEO fields explicitly and emit them from the framework's own metadata API. Then diff the rendered <head> of ten old URLs against ten new ones before cutover.
02
You now choose the rendering mode, and it shows
Static, incrementally revalidated, streamed and fully dynamic all produce different time to first byte and different behaviour for crawlers that do not execute JavaScript. A CMS cannot make that choice for you once it is headless, so it becomes a decision somebody has to make deliberately per route.
What to doPrerender anything with organic intent. Reserve dynamic rendering for pages behind a login, where crawlers are not going anyway.
03
Async metadata can land in the body
Next.js streams metadata on dynamically rendered routes, which means </head> can flush before an async CMS query resolves and the title and canonical get emitted into <body> instead. It only fails for user agents outside the framework's html-limited-bots list, which excludes Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, Semrush and the AI crawlers. It is intermittent, so a crawl catches a different page every run.
What to doPrerender the route. Buffered HTML has a complete head by construction, which fixes the race rather than papering over it.
04
Sitemaps and redirects become your code
The CMS used to generate the sitemap and honour the redirect table. Headless, both are files or route handlers in your repository, and neither fails loudly when it drifts. A missing redirect map at cutover is how a migration loses the equity of every URL it changes.
What to doGenerate the sitemap from the same query that lists published content, and hold redirects in code so they are reviewed like code.
05
Structured data has to come from somewhere
Article, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList and Product markup were plugin output before. Now they are your responsibility, which is an improvement, because you can emit exactly what is on the page rather than what a plugin guesses. It is only an improvement if somebody actually does it.
What to doBuild the schema from the same fields the page renders, so markup and content cannot disagree, and validate the prerendered HTML rather than the preview.

Straight from Reddit

What developers actually say

Real, unedited comments from r/webdev, r/nextjs, r/cms, r/PayloadCMS and r/Strapi on picking one, migrating to it, what it cost and what it is like to edit in. Every card links to the original.

Picking one

“look at Contentful, Sanity, or Strapi Cloud. Contentful and Sanity have very polished UIs that editors pick up quickly, strong editorial workflows, and good Next.js support. Strapi Cloud gives you flexibility with familiar patterns but without managing infra. All three make frequent updates easy for non tech users and integrate cleanly with a Next frontend”

u/Sad-Salt24 in r/nextjsReddit

Picking one

“Yeah Sanity and Prismic aren't actually self-hosted, your content still lives on their servers. the whole "create a project locally and deploy" thing is just so your schema is code you can version in git instead of clicking it together in some dashboard. sanity will even host the studio UI for you if you run sanity deploy. strapi's the only one in your list that's genuinely self-hosted.”

u/Zealousideal-Ebb-355 in r/webdevReddit

Picking one

“All of that can be done pretty easily with PayloadCMS. I wouldn't pick Strapi if I needed even a slight bit of customization. Directus is a no-go since you need localization. Give Payload a shot.”

u/SirDarknight1 in r/PayloadCMSReddit

Picking one

“Honestly, if the biggest question is which CMS to use for a simple presentation website, I'd skip worrying about Next.js architecture for now. 😄 If the client only needs to manage public content (products, text, images) and there's no authentication or private data involved, Sanity on the free tier is probably all you need. Choosing Headless WordPress here feels like adding complexity without solving any real problem.”

u/Milo0306 in r/nextjsReddit

Picking one

“HTML, CSS and JavaScript, basic websites for small business don’t need anything else. Anyone suggesting headless CMS with Next JS front ends is just over complicating it for a site which probably only would get 100 hits a day”

u/key-bored-warrior in r/webdevReddit

Picking one

“I highly recommend using SSG unless your client needs to update the site without you. Then I suggest headless CMS.”

u/saltyourhash in r/webdevReddit

Comments are quoted from public Reddit threads and belong to their authors. Opinions are their own, shared here for context, not endorsements.

Use cases

What teams actually build

Each tile filters the directory to the platforms that fit.

Most headless CMS examples you find online are a blog with three posts, which proves nothing about the decision. These are the six shapes that actually recur, and the count on each tile is computed from the directory rather than asserted.

The first two tiles look like one question and are not. People searching nextjs headless cms are usually choosing how pages get rendered and who owns the metadata; people searching react headless cms are usually building an application and care about typed clients and what a server component can call. The shortlists overlap, the deciding criteria do not.

A Next.js marketing site

The most common build in this directory. Static or streamed rendering, a content model you control, and metadata that stays entirely yours rather than being emitted by a plugin you have to remember to query.

See the 48

A React app with content in it

Where the site is really an application. What matters is typed clients and an API you can call from a server component, not a page builder that wants to own the routing.

See the 49

Marketers who ship without you

Visual editing against a live preview, so a landing page does not need a developer or a deploy. The single biggest reason a CMS migration succeeds or quietly fails.

See the 22

Content you have to host yourself

Data residency, procurement policy or plain preference. These run on your own infrastructure, with your own database and your own backups.

See the 32

Content in the repository

Git-based platforms keep content as files alongside the code, so review, history and rollback are the tools you already use. Excellent for docs, awkward past a few thousand entries.

See the 6

A build with no budget

Either a free tier large enough for production or an open-source licence you can self-host. More of this directory qualifies than most people expect.

See the 50

Migration

What a migration actually takes

A headless CMS implementation for a normal marketing site is about four weeks of work, and roughly a third of it is not the CMS at all. These are the stages in the order they bite, with what each one should actually produce. Treat the weeks as the shape rather than the quote: a site with three page types and one editor is faster, and a multi-brand estate with 4,000 URLs is not.

01Week 1
Model the content, not the pages
The first mistake is modelling what the current site looks like instead of what the content is. Get this wrong and every future page type is a schema migration.
Content types
6 to 12
Reference graph
drawn
Reviewed by
editors
02Weeks 1 to 2
Migrate the content, with the URLs
Content moves through a script, not by hand, so it can be run twice. The redirect map is built in the same pass, because the old URL is only knowable while you still have the old system.
Import script
idempotent
Redirect map
1:1
Dry run
before cutover
03Weeks 2 to 3
Build the front end and the head
Templates, components and the metadata layer together. The metadata is not a finishing task: titles, canonicals, sitemap and structured data are wired as each template is built, not audited afterwards.
Prerendered routes
all indexable
Metadata source
CMS fields
Schema
from the same data
04Week 3
Hand it to the editors before launch
The migration that fails is the one where editors first use the CMS the week after go-live. Give them the real thing with the real content and fix what they trip over while it is still cheap.
Editor session
recorded
Fields renamed
usually several
Preview
working
05Week 4
Cut over and watch the crawl
Redirects live, sitemap submitted, then a full crawl of the new site compared against a crawl of the old one. Rankings move for a fortnight either way; missing titles do not fix themselves.
Crawl diff
old vs new
Head check
title, canonical
Search Console
resubmitted

Book a call See what we have shipped

Methodology

How we picked, and what we checked

This is a shortlist, not a census. We started from the platforms that actually come up when engineering and marketing teams pick one, then cut it to the ones with public documentation and a callable API. Nobody can tell you the best headless CMS in the abstract, because the answer changes with who is editing and who is on call, so the headless CMS platforms here are sorted by the constraints that decide it rather than ranked.

Every price was read from the vendor's own pricing page in August 2026, not from a comparison article. Where a vendor publishes no public rate, we say so rather than repeating a number from somebody's negotiated deal. 3 of the 55 publish nothing at all.

Licences were read from each repository's LICENSE file rather than from the marketing site. That is how Directus, dotCMS, Craft, Statamic and Pimcore ended up classified the way they are, and it is the single most common thing comparison posts get wrong.

No affiliate links and no paid placements. Nobody here pays to be listed, to be featured, or to rank higher in the directory. Outbound links carry nofollow and we earn nothing if you sign up.

Our featured pick is what we run ourselves. busyless.space is a Next.js app with Payload installed into it, and Payload is the platform we feature. State the obvious: that is a conflict, and you should read the review knowing it. The order it happened in was that we picked it for our own site, lived with it, and the recommendation followed. Nobody paid for it.

One more thing to weigh while you read it: Payload has been owned by Figma since 17 June 2025. Figma says Payload “will remain an open-source product” and that it will keep investing in the core, and an MIT licence on code already published cannot be withdrawn, which is the practical protection. It is still a larger company behind the badge than there was when we chose it, and no acquirer has ever promised a roadmap forever.

The honest counterweight is that the reason it suits us is not a reason it will suit you. We have developers, so running a database is a cost we already carry. If you do not, Sanity is the better answer and the one we recommend most often to clients, whatever the badge on this page says.

No invented ratings. We publish no star rating and no aggregate score. The scorecard on our featured review is an editorial read across six dimensions and it stays out of the page's structured data. Reddit comments are quoted for context and linked to the original, never restated as fact.

FAQ

Questions we get

What is a headless CMS?
A content system that stores and serves content through an API and does not render your pages. You model the content, editors fill it in, and your own front end decides how it is displayed. The trade is that you gain complete control of rendering and lose the templates that used to come with the CMS.
Which one should I choose?
Start with where it has to run, because that is the constraint you cannot engineer around. If it must be your own infrastructure, Payload is our featured pick and you are otherwise choosing between Strapi, Directus and the other self-hostable options. If a vendor can host it, Sanity is the strongest option for structured content, Storyblok for marketing teams who need visual editing, and Contentful when governance and procurement decide.
Is there a genuinely free option?
Several, and they split into two kinds. Open-source tools like Payload, Strapi, Keystone and Wagtail are free forever if you run them yourself, so you pay for hosting instead of licences. Hosted platforms with real free tiers include Sanity at 20 seats and 10,000 documents, Prismic with unlimited documents and 4 million API calls, and Hygraph at 3 seats and 500,000 calls.
Which ones work with Next.js?
Most of them, and the list is long enough that it should not be your deciding filter. What actually varies is the quality of the integration: whether draft mode and tag-based revalidation are supported, whether there is a first-party toolkit, and whether visual editing works against a live preview. Sanity, Storyblok, Payload, Contentful and Prismic are the strongest on that axis.
Open source or hosted?
It is a question about who carries the operations, not about the software. Self-hosting means your database, your backups, your upgrades and your uptime, in exchange for no seat limits, no request metering and no pricing changes. Hosted means a vendor takes all of that and prices it. Teams without a developer who will own infrastructure should not self-host, whatever the licence says.
Does going headless help SEO?
Not by itself. It moves responsibility for titles, canonicals, sitemaps, redirects and structured data out of a plugin and into your codebase. Done deliberately that is an improvement, because you emit exactly what is on the page. Done by accident it is the most common way a migration loses traffic, because the fields still look filled in while nothing is rendering them.
How long does a migration take?
About four weeks for a normal marketing site: a week to model the content, a week or two to migrate it with a one-to-one redirect map, a week on templates and the metadata layer, and a final week of editor testing and cutover. A site with three page types is faster. A multi-brand estate with thousands of URLs is a different conversation.
What is the difference between open source and source available?
An open-source licence lets you use the software for any purpose, including competing with the people who wrote it. Source-available licences such as BSL, ELv2 and Directus's MSCL let you read and usually modify the code but restrict commercial use. It matters more than it sounds: Directus moved to a source-available licence in 2026 and dotCMS is free in production only while Total Finances, the largest of revenue, budget or funding, stay at or below $5m.

Picked one? The build is the other half.

Choosing the platform is the easy part. We do the rest: the content model, the migration with its redirect map, the front end, and the metadata and schema layer that decides whether the new site keeps the traffic the old one earned. Usually live in weeks, not quarters.

Book a call See our SEO API directory

Headless CMS platforms, compared on what they really cost

Be specific about which benefit you are buying

Where it runs decides who carries the risk

Read the licence, not the marketing

Model the price on your team, not your traffic

Check the API shape against your stack

Ask what the exit looks like

Nothing renders your metadata any more

You now choose the rendering mode, and it shows

Async metadata can land in the body

Sitemaps and redirects become your code

Structured data has to come from somewhere

A Next.js marketing site

A React app with content in it

Marketers who ship without you

Content you have to host yourself

Content in the repository

A build with no budget

Model the content, not the pages

Migrate the content, with the URLs

Build the front end and the head

Hand it to the editors before launch

Cut over and watch the crawl

Questions we get

Picked one? The build is the other half.