Posted Sunday, September 17, 2023
Headless CMS List
Can any of these defeat WordPress?
The goal is to find a WordPress replacement. Don't get me wrong, I think WordPress still remains the most powerful editing experience for content as you can do almost anything with it. The Block Editor brings a drag and drop to it as well.
You will need to but must have plugins such as Gravity Forms, ACF Pro, Timber (free). For e-commerce WooCommerce is excellent but you will then likely need even more WooCommerce plugins.
However, the more plugins you add the harder maintenance becomes. Maintenance becomes a chore (copying the DB, copying the media, etc). Whereas with a headless CMS there is very little you have to do if any.
You can do headless WordPress but then you still have to deal with maintenance issues. Headless WooCommerce is difficult because a lot of plugins don't support it.
At A Glance
| CMS | Pricing/Plans | Hosted DB | Search | Nesting | Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prismic | Free, $100, $500 | Yes | Yes | No | Message board, slow |
| Decap | Free | Git based | No? | Yes | Git issues |
| Strapi | Self hosted, $99, $499 | Paid | |||
| Directus | Self-hosted,$99, $599 | Paid | |||
| Sanity | Free, $$99, $949 | Yes | |||
| Cloudcannon | $45,$250 | Git based | Yes | Yes |
Prismic
- no nesting
- no table in editor - there are workarounds though
- no subscript or superscript in the editor
- quite good for the price
- support could be better
Verdict: B
Decap
- very flexible
- not very mature and slow on updates
- no search; you will have to implement something like Algolia