The Top 10 Headless CMS Platforms of 2023 [Updated]

The headless approach makes it possible to have a single CMS that can distribute your content to multiple platforms in one click. As any headless CMS disconnects the back end “body” from the front end “head”, it gives you the ability to create, manage and store your content in the “body” while you format, design, and distribute it from the “head”. These two parts are connected only by an API which enables communication between them. So, what are the best headless CMS platforms you should check out when you decide to adopt the new approach? In this blog article, we’ll take a look at the 10 top headless CMS solutions for 2023, most of which have a free plan for you to test the platform’s capabilities. 

Updated: 27 September 2023

 

When we talk about great traditional CMS options, it’s easy to point out popular, powerful, and proven platforms such as  WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce, Webflow, CraftCMS, Hubspot CMS, and Squarespace. However, which are the headless CMS options you might like to have a look at to find your best fit? Let’s review these options here.

Contentful is a cloud-based headless CMS that makes it easy to connect the dots with different APIs and make your website the way you like. Its headless CMS approach focuses on being a CMS with eCommerce capabilities rather than an eCommerce solution with CMS capabilities.

The platform gives you the freedom of building custom content models so you can decide what content your website needs, manage it, and quickly distribute it across various channels.

 

Pricing: Free, premium, and enterprise plans

The free plan is ideal for developers with personal projects to test the platform and play around with its capabilities: from test sites to hackathon projects. It includes 1 intro space license, 5 users, 4 standard roles, 2 locales, a Tasks app, Compose app, and other perks.

For more advanced features, more users, and a Launch app, there’s the Basic Plan that amounts to $300 per month, as well as a Custom Premium Plan for large organizations or multiple teams with scaled digital experiences.

You can also check out the full Contentful review with all the pros and cons of the platform, how it works, and what makes it more than a headless CMS.

Visit Contentful

 

Considering going headless? Schedule a meeting with our tech-savvy managers to discuss if the headless approach is right for your business.

 

Prismic is an API-based headless CMS that allows you to manage your content with cloud service and integrate with other platforms. The platform allows you to design custom content types and create Slices (reusable fields) to personalize your workflow. It also provides REST, GraphQL, SDKs for developers to work in their preferred framework or language, and a global CDN.

In addition, Prismic is user-friendly for all levels of expertise and gives content teams the independence to create new pages without the need to ask for help from developers.

The SliceMachine feature, on the other hand, gives you the ability to add Slices (new sections) and reuse them on any other content type.

 

Pricing: Free, premium, and enterprise plans

The Free Plan supports 1 user, unlimited API calls, documents, custom types, locales, assets, and image optimizations as well as 100GB of built-in CDN.

There are the Starter Plan for $7 per month and the Small Plan for $15 which both include everything in the free plan for 3 and 7 users, respectively.

Moving to more advanced features, the Medium Plan goes for $100 per month and includes 25 users, user roles, basic support, and 500GB of built-in CDN. This plan is recommended for scaling small and midsize businesses.

For companies continuously adding features to their websites and mobile applications, the Platinum Plan $500 per month includes everything from the Medium Plan plus unlimited users, 1TB of built-in CDN, SLA (API uptime), back-ups, and the option for a development environment. If a large company needs even more advanced security and support, a dedicated point of contract, and more advanced features, there’s also the option for a Custom Plan.

Visit Prismic

 

This multi-tenant SaaS headless CMS has built-in components for managing content, ticketing, landing page design, and eCommerce. The platform empowers editors to work with authoring features and reuse the content.

And last, Agility integrates with numerous third-party applications, including CRMs, external databases, video tools, and eCommerce platforms.

 

Pricing: Free trials and various subscription plans

Agility doesn’t offer a Free Plan, however, you can use the Free Trial option to test the platform’s plans.

The Starter Plan goes for $1,249 per month for a single website and small teams. It includes up to 10 users, 50K entries (content, pages, and assets), a 1-page management sitemap, 1TB asset storage, 1TB asset traffic, unlimited models and types, unlimited API calls, and unlimited locales.

For larger teams that handle multiple websites and content hubs, the Pro Plan $2,499 per month includes 25 users, 250K entries, 5 pages management sitemaps, 5TB asset storage, 2TB asset traffic, SLA, unlimited models and types, unlimited API calls, and unlimited locales.

The Enterprise plan is an annual custom plan where you can talk to an expert to help you build the ideal plan for scaling and controlling everything you need.

Visit Agility

 

Kontent.ai is a SaaS headless CMS for enterprise-level teams to manage content. It offers real-time collaboration, a single page React app, and project management features.

The platform has a very intuitive user experience that makes it easier for marketers and content creators with little to no technical knowledge to produce content.

 

Pricing: Free Developer Plan and Premium Plans for Scale and Enterprise

Let’s start with the Free Plan for developers. It gives you all the essentials you need to develop a non-commercial project and basically test the platform and see how it works. The plan includes 2 environments and 1 project; 2 active users, 500 content items, unlimited content types, 2GB asset storage, and 2 languages.

When you’re ready to scale with a more advanced set of capabilities, you can opt for the Scale or Enterprise plans that both require custom quotes.

Visit Kontent Ai

 

Directus is a cloud-based CMS that connects custom SQL databases with dynamic APIs, enabling businesses to manage content easily. It offers features like branding, bookmarks, revisions, SSO, status tracking, multi-language support, and data filtering.

The platform includes content authoring workflows for project status management and role-based permissions. Its API mirrors SQL database structures and executes custom code via events and webhooks. Users can create or delete projects, including databases, storage adapters, and configurations, with the option to keep project names private.

Directus offers an intuitive, customizable UI for easy editing. It supports various content fields like title, teaser text, and author info, along with layout options such as tables, calendars, maps, kanban, and cards. Managing media assets is a breeze through the File Library.

The content editor in Directus is WYSIWYG, with the option to choose between WYSIWYG and Markdown-based on your subscription tier.

Directus also provides publishing workflows with different statuses: Draft, Review, Approved, and Published, all controlled by role and permission settings. For instance, authors can create content but only save it as drafts or for review, while managers with higher access can approve and publish.

 

Pricing: Self-Hosted and Cloud Plans

Directus provides four pricing options:

Community Self-Hosted, which is free for individuals and organizations with finances under $5,000,000; Enterprise Self-Hosted, with flexible pricing for larger enterprises and government entities.

Professional Cloud at $99 per month (annually billed) for development and medium-scale projects; and Enterprise Cloud, starting at $599 per month (annually billed) for mission-critical projects, offering configuration flexibility.

Visit Directus

 

The open-source JavaScript and ReactJS-based unified content platform Sanity is a very popular headless solution for everyone who’s just getting started learning to use the headless approach. It offers essential features for marketers, such as tools for real-time collaboration, live previewing, and versioning.

In addition, the platform has personalization features and content performance analytics out of the box.

 

Pricing: Free, premium, and enterprise plans

One of the best things about Sanity is the Free Forever Plan which is awesome for getting started and you can add a credit card later for pay-as-you-go for more resources or add-ons. The free plan gives developers an open-source editing environment; a hosted real-time content database; free admin users, and 3 non-admin users.

Moving on to the premium plans, Sanity has a Team Plan for $99 per month that includes 10 non-admin users, a revision history (30 days), and an additional usage quota. For mid-size companies with more complex content requirements comes the Business Plan for $949 per month with 20 non-admin users; SAML SSO (security); advanced dataset management; revision history (90 days) and a high volume quota.

In addition, there’s also the option for a Custom Enterprise Plan.

Visit Sanity

 

Ghost is a very lightweight CMS with a minimal admin dashboard, which is ideal for beginners. The platform makes it easy for users to handle installations, configurations and the CMs features in addition to the ability to customize their experience.

As mentioned, the platform offers powerful built-in SEO options so users don’t need to add third-party tools.

 

Pricing: Starting and Premium plans

Ghost CMS provides 14 days free trial plan for beginners, however, it doesn’t offer a free plan. Once you test the platform, you can opt for any of the following premium plans.

The Starter Plan goes for $9 per month 1 staff user; free and official Ghost themes; standard built-in integrations. Moving on to the Creator Plan $25 per month, it includes 2 staff users, unlimited custom themes, 1K  + Zapier integrations, and the ability to build custom integrations.

The Team Plan $50 per month includes everything from Creator plus 5 staff users, priority support, and higher usage limits; while the Business Plan $199 per month, adds unlimited staff users, advanced domain configs, and 99.9% uptime SLA.
Visit Ghost CMS

 

Netlify is known as the only static hosting service with integrated continuous deployment; while Netlify CMS is an open-source React-based application that wraps up your Git workflow by using the GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket API. With this in mind, the platform is community-driven, becoming the headless version of community ecosystems such as WordPress and Drupal. More importantly, you can use Netlify CMS without Netlify and deploy your web application on any server you like. Respectively, you can also use Netlify without Netlify CMS and edit your static site in an editor of your choice.

Another interesting feature is that, when you add Nettlify CMS to your web application, you add a tool for your content editors to commit to your repository without having to learn Git.

 

Pricing: Free and Premium Plans

Developers can get started for free and later pay for additional features with the Free Plan. It includes live site previews with a collaboration UI for team members; rollbacks to any version, and deployment of static assets and dynamic serverless functions.

The Pro Plan $19 per month features advanced tools and support for professional web projects; such as support for private organization-owned Git repos; background features, 1TB bandwidth, and 25k build minutes; etc.  You can find additional collaboration, security, and compliance features for larger teams in the Business Plan for $99 per month. In addition, Custom Enterprise Plan is also available for tailored features according to specific performance requirements.

Visit Netlify

 

Cockpit CMS is an open-source self-hosted API-driven headless CMS that comes with a user-friendly interface and built-in multi-user support, easy data filtering for targeted results, and the ability to list down all the data in one go with the help of codes next to each element.

Another great perk of using Cockpit is that it uses SQLite as a storage engine, making the process of maintaining and porting across different servers, easy as cake.

 

Pricing: Free Open-Source, Pro, and Enterprise Plans

Cockpit CMS is a free open-source CMS for developers to immediately download and start working with. The Free Plan offers the Cockpit core features and all essentials.

If you wish to expand the platform ca[abilities with pro-add-ons, you can opt for the Pro Plan for $268 per project (with 50% discounts for verified non-profits, open-source projects, or educational institutions). You can also test and trial Cockpit Pro while your site is in a non-public development environment.

In addition, you can also consult for a Custom Enterprise Plan depending on specific licensing requirements, individual consulting, and the need for general high-level support.

Visit Cockpit

 

Strapi is a developer-friendly open-source and free-to-use service that provides a headless approach with powerful features from traditional CMS platforms, such as content search, authentication methods, and content relationships. You can create products from scratch and manage them with zero to no tech experience.

It’s important to mention that Strapi has top-notch security features and a built-in authentification system that protects your data from cybersecurity threats and malware.

Keep in mind that Strapi is a great option when you start from scratch. If you need to migrate your backend system, you’ll have to manually implement all the essential components, which makes the process very challenging.

 

Pricing: Free, Premium, and Enterprise Plans

To start with, you have the option to host on your own server or have Strapi host your applications on theirs. Same as Sanity, Strapi also has a Free Forever Community Plan for developers. It’s an open-source self-hosted plan with everything you need to get started. This includes REST & GraphQL API; a highly flexible content structure; infinite customization; unlimited usage (entries, API calls, assets, etc.); unlimited locales; up to 3 default roles, and community support.

To unlock some enterprise features, Strapi also has several premium plans. The Bronze Plan is $9 per admin user per month for a self-hosted application with granular access controls and billing and license support.

Next is the Silver Plan for $29 per admin user per month with guidance and assistance; and a Custom Gold Plan for Enterprises with single sign-on; audit logs; technical support with SLAs; customer success manager; and technical onboarding.

 

Visit Strapi

 

 

Honourable Mention ❤️

Craft CMS has a clean-slate approach to content modeling and front-end development and a headless mode. This feature is welcomed by developers who need to provide content for a single web application or static site generators. For example, it comes in handy when you have a React-based app with a backend to fetch data from. You can use the Headless Mode along with GraphQL to easily query data from the database. Custom API approaches are also possible if you’re using Craft CMS modules.

Craft has become an established CMS platform and a popular alternative. For example, in 2017, Craft was selected s the Best WordPress Alternative in CMS Critic’s People’s Choice Awards.

 

Pricing: Free, Pro, and Enterprise plans

When you’re building a website for yourself or a friend or you just wish to get crafty and test your skills, Craft CMS has a Free Forever Plan for you. This plan includes ultra-flexible content modeling; powerful front-end tools; multi-site; localization and an admin account.

However, when you want to go headless, opt for the Pro Plan for professional projects costs $299 per project. It includes unlimited user accounts; enhanced content previewing; GraphQL API; system branding and developer support.

As usual, there’s also a Custom Enterprise Plan for specific requirements, licensing, and needs.

While we were testing many new CMS platforms, we came across Craft CMS. Amongst the variety of available options and tools for creating do-it-yourself websites, this platform can also handle custom complex designs and provide maximum performance at the same time. We’ve been using it to build websites for more than three years, so you can check out the top 10 things we love about Craft CMS with you.

Visit Craft CMS

 

To Sum Up

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, however,  depending on your budget, the size of your team, and the level of customization you need, all of the mentioned solutions have the potential to be the one headless CMS, perfect for your business. Fortunately, most of the platforms offer a free plan, so you can check them out, make a test project and see which one is the right fit.

In the meantime, you may also be interested in some of these related articles:

• 18 Live Contentful Website Examples for Your Inspiration
• 10 Reasons Why Your Agency Needs White Label Web Development
• What is a Headless Shopify Store: Benefits, Use Cases, and Examples