Launch HN: Payload (YC S22) – Headless CMS for Developers

WP is a blogging platform from the early 2000's that still uses many of the same code conventions that it started with. It does have a REST API, and you can extend it with plugins to work as a headless CMS, but it's riddled with inefficiencies and is truly a great example of why most devs would not think to reach for a CMS if they were building a SaaS app. Can you build a SaaS app with WP? Sure. Should you? Absolutely not. WP is good for its plugins and themes, but for anything more robust, it falls apart.

Strapi is a contender that is quite similar to Payload but they have a mixed focus on "GUI-based" logic and code-based logic. You design your content models with a GUI, and access control is highly limited to a typical RBAC pattern. Where in Payload, everything -starts with code-. You can version control your schema, because it's all just a config. Deploy to other environments (stage, prod, etc) with ease. Use and re-use functions across different collections. Even access control is handled beautifully with functions in Payload, and is significantly more powerful than RBAC.

I'd say our killer feature though is the simplicity, yet robustness of our admin UI. We have many features that Strapi does not have - like field conditional logic (Check a checkbox field, see more fields. Uncheck checkbox, those fields go away). Our admin UI is also completely extensible. You can create custom field types easily just by importing React components and passing them to a field config - then boom, your React component appears in the admin UI rather than the built-in component. It's intensely powerful.

There's a lot more, but these are just a few quick points. I've been using headless WP for ~6 years, and I've always liked the idea of Strapi, but never trusted it enough to hit production. That's why we built Payload.

> To devs, "content management system" is usually a swear word.

Yet "CMS" is in your tag line. Is that not a bad idea then?

2. My initial thought was, "this looks fantastic… just as good as Sanity, which is a problem because Sanity is already around so what's the point? Really my only gripe with Sanity is that there's no free open sou—" oh dang, there it is.

Yeah, I will definitely give your product a shot on my next project.

Prior to building Payload I was a consulting full-stack engineer. I have built large web apps using Laravel and have rolled my own admin UI a dozen times and I've worked within the official 'Nova' package too. Laravel had a few open source options which I didn't try as it seemed like support was better with Nova. The project I built went okay, but it was a ton of work over what you can do with Payload.

To add a field you have to: 1) create a migration to add a column to the DB 2) add your field to the model 3) define the field again in the nova "resource"

In Payload you do all of this in one place. Every field you define will have the proper DB schema, API and admin UI in a streamlined way without having to touch your app in a bunch of places.

Two other things that made me scratch my head while using Nova specifically. The first, I had to cobble together plugins for building blocks for component based field defintions and image uploads, but these didn't play well together at all. How could image uploads and blocks not be built-in core features? The other pain point with Nova is that it isn't refined at all, and they say it shouldn't be used for customer facing UIs.

Do you have a favorite framework/package you would suggest for mananging admin UIs and APIs that do a great job?