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

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

#81

Post by swyx »

sneek_ wrote: post #49
arraypad wrote: post #48

As someone who's been actively looking for a headless CMS recently, I'm curious about how you compare yourselves to Contentful [1]? From a quick look the key difference is that Payload's backend can be self-hosted, but Contentful is SaaS only. You've said that you're targeting enterprise customers and mention an SLA in that respect. Does that mean your enterprise offering is also SaaS only? [1] https://www.contentful…

Hey there - your points are accurate! Here are a few more: - We are open source / MIT - You can re-use Payload's auth layer in your own apps and with Contentful you can't - Contentful has rigid RBAC, but Payload features function-based access control down to the field level - Payload supports field conditional logic, meaning "check a checkbox, see more fields, uncheck it, extra fields disappear". This is huge. And is…

for what its worth - would take this "word vomit" and polish it up and post it somewhere. Coherence does a great job of this: https://docs.withcoherence.com/docs/coherence-vs-other-softw...

most people wont read it, but the serious people will. and better to claim your narrative than leave it in the hands of users who know less than you about your own market.

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

#82

Post by swyx »

sneek_ wrote: post #22
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #15

1. Outstanding marketing site. 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.

Yeah! The other big difference with Sanity is that the API side of Sanity is 3rd-party. So you never truly have control over the API logic or backend side at all. Whereas with Payload, you control both the admin UI AND the entirety of your API. That's what I mean by "closing the gap" between an app framework and a headless CMS. Lots more backend potential with Payload.

any chance the website itself is open source? i'd love to see how Payload uses Payload.

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

#83

Post by uzername »

Congrats on the launch. I saw payload here on HN a few months ago. Good seeing it again.

On the "Enterprise" sso approach, are your first party offerings just plugins? I've worked with various node cms recently, and for our needs we often see the only way to extend is by dangerously forking the upstream rather than hooking in through the plugin architecture.

The second aspect I wondered about, is why Mongo? It doesn't seem as "open" compared to a postgres, although maybe works better for your hosting platform offering. I wonder if an adapter to pg/json might be possible.

Thanks, and good luck with launch!

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

#84

Post by graphememes »

I think that we do need more CMS. However, I was really put off by the homepage. It's very hard to figure out what really differentiates you from others, the interface is very hard to go through with all of the scrolling left / right. Based on the responses here it seems open source?

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

#85

Post by sneek_ »

uzername wrote: post #83

Congrats on the launch. I saw payload here on HN a few months ago. Good seeing it again. On the "Enterprise" sso approach, are your first party offerings just plugins? I've worked with various node cms recently, and for our needs we often see the only way to extend is by dangerously forking the upstream rather than hooking in through the plugin architecture. The second aspect I wondered about, is why Mongo? It doesn'…

Thank you!

Yes, all of our first-party offerings are plugins and 100% of their functionality can be accomplished with Payload core itself. No need to fork or extend. Our plugin infrastructure runs incredibly deep and it's super straightforward.

Mongo was extremely deliberate. The nature of "content", especially pages and posts, lends itself extremely well to the document-based structure of NoSQL. Add in complex field types like arrays, a block-based layout builder, groups, and more, and this becomes even more apparent. But this all being said, supporting Postgres is on our radar and will be happening at some point. Our internal infrastructure is already quite organized and swapping out a different database adapter won't be a monumental task. It'll require some work, for sure, but it's doable.

Thank you for the great questions!

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

#86

Post by sneek_ »

graphememes wrote: post #84

I think that we do need more CMS. However, I was really put off by the homepage. It's very hard to figure out what really differentiates you from others, the interface is very hard to go through with all of the scrolling left / right. Based on the responses here it seems open source?

Thanks for the feedback! Our website has changed minimally since launch. In about a month or so, our focus will be shifting back toward sharpening our messaging and presence online.

Yes—as you mentioned, Payload is self-hosted, open-source, natively TypeScript and extremely extensible both on the API and admin UI sides. Outside of specific features that we support and others do not, those are the big differentiators. But there are lots more!

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

#87

Post by sneek_ »

swyx wrote: post #82
sneek_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah! The other big difference with Sanity is that the API side of Sanity is 3rd-party. So you never truly have control over the API logic or backend side at all. Whereas with Payload, you control both the admin UI AND the entirety of your API. That's what I mean by "closing the gap" between an app framework and a headless CMS. Lots more backend potential with Payload.

any chance the website itself is open source? i'd love to see how Payload uses Payload.

Not yet. When we built the site, Payload's licensing and business model was built around a SaaS model, and was all baked into Payload's frontend. Of course, it does use Payload on the backend (including the entirety of our old SaaS billing infra) but for those reasons, we did not open-source it.

However, v2 is coming and that will 100% be open-source!

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

#89

Post by sgammon »

Currently working on some SaaS, so I'd like to take a look at this and see if it fits.

Curious if there are multi-tenancy features baked in, since you mentioned targeting SaaS companies? Really happy to see all the recent innovation in this space, congrats on the launch :)

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

#90

Post by sgammon »

sgammon wrote: post #89

Currently working on some SaaS, so I'd like to take a look at this and see if it fits. Curious if there are multi-tenancy features baked in, since you mentioned targeting SaaS companies? Really happy to see all the recent innovation in this space, congrats on the launch :)

For example, can the cloud version do sub-tenants? Is the admin panel exposable to end-users? That sort of thing
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