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Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

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Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#2
We recently landed on Strapi. There’s an open source version but we use the hosted one (for now). All in all good. There are a few quirks in the UI (sometimes smaller changes weren’t saved - although this might be a user issue from my side) and the markdown editor could be more user friendly.

We are sticking with it for now because it’s indeed good enough and I haven’t found any better options (give the price).

Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#3

We recently landed on Strapi. There’s an open source version but we use the hosted one (for now). All in all good. There are a few quirks in the UI (sometimes smaller changes weren’t saved - although this might be a user issue from my side) and the markdown editor could be more user friendly. We are sticking with it for now because it’s indeed good enough and I haven’t found any better options (give the price).

IIRC Strapi is a great option for green field projects. C/p from their docs:

"Strapi applications are not meant to be connected to a pre-existing database, not created by a Strapi application, nor connected to a Strapi v3 database. The Strapi team will not support such attempts. Attempting to connect to an unsupported database may, and most likely will, result in lost data."

Unfortunately, most of the time I do not have such luxury. What are the CMS options for pre-existing databases?

Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#4
There are plenty available: https://jamstack.org/headless-cms/ Keystone mb?

You may also want to check things like Appwrite for hosted solution (free plan available) or PocketBase for self-hosting on any VPS (fly.io does not charge below 5$). Those are more developer-focused, but also should be much less restrictive.

Have no real experience with any of them.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#8

PayloadCMS seems really interesting, I’ve used it successfully for a small blog but I feel it has a lot of potential. It’s not fully open source, if you want additional features like SSO you have to pay for premium version.

They got acquired by Figma so I would not build on payload anymore, I fully expect the product to wither away now given Figma has their own priorities and has a non-technical userbase.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#9
post #7

I wouldn't be setting up a static site + headless CMS for a non-technical organization. This is basically asking for a constant headache. Just set them up on a website builder like Webflow/Framer/Ycode/Squarespace/etc that has a CMS built in.

On the other hand I worked for a small place that was spending over 250k'ish per year on website maintenance to a company that setup their headless CMS website that they sold them.

They complained about it constantly but they kept paying (7 years and going when I was doing work for them which by they way they constantly tried to shortchange me). Never feel bad about taking money from a company, its just business. Setup your income stream and take care of yourself. I'm not sure why there is this bizarre self sacrificing mentality in tech to make other people rich at your own expense.

Not to mention if you invoke those companies you are putting yourself in their walled garden that makes them money and takes control of your income away from you. Why would any person want to do that? There is no moral quandary here.

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