Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

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).

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.

Wordpress? Why does it need to be headless though?

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.

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.

[dead]

Keystatic[1] is awesome. It's local-first by default and made for static site builds, so you can keep costs low by not using a server.

I've used it alongside Astro for both my personal blog[2] and two company sites[3][4]. It's worked amazingly well each time.

[1] https://keystatic.com/

[2] https://github.com/skeptrunedev/personal-site

[3] https://github.com/devflowinc/trieve/tree/main/website

[4] https://github.com/patroninc/patron/tree/main/website

Im using directus (https://directus.io/) for my personal website with a vacation blog and some posts…

So far it works pretty well and my gf is also able to use it on her own, so you could say its non-tech user approved haha

I also did some websites using hugo and DecapCMS from netlify. That also worked but the ui isnt to fancy and it gets a bit confusing on complex pages. But it can directly push to a git repo so you have version control out of the box

I think it depends a little on what your intended head is? Headless CMS is just CRUD UI for a database that has an API.

i've been super happy with Ghost for our blog http://mixpeek.com/blog

Not immediately practical -- I've been looking into using Pharo (smalltalk) to build a web authoring / static site generator that non-devs can use, and something that devs can quickly customize or extend.

I really enjoyed sanity.io a year ago. It had the best data structure flexibility by a mile, with the ability to have multiple user draft states and merge conflict resolution.

Other Headless CMS felt restrictive, with shared drafts or the requirement for all published items to have changes go live instantly.

Once you're set up with your schema, the UI is easy enough for non-developers (and you can customize it for them if needed).

Craft CMS - https://craftcms.com - is superb and still seems to be under the radar, I often wonder why it’s not more widely used

Why headless ? If non technical admin will post details about events, you can find a WordPress plugin for it and setup a WP site. Headless makes sense if you want to really customize the experience but you want "cheapest option" so I would assume they cannot pay for customizations anyway.

Headless is a constraint you added as a developer for yourself - it's definitely not a thing the users will care about. Ghost is a great, simple, batteries included non-headless CMS for things like you describe. Self-hosted or as a service.

I’m building my personal blog with 11ty as a static site builder and Decap[0], previously known as Netlify CMS, to manage content.

Basically it provides a UI and all changes are pushed to GitHub which will launch the release process back in Netlify.

Seems it might fit your requirements too.

0. https://decapcms.org/

Sorry I know you said headless, but have you considered wordpress? Its unsexy, but the ecosystem is really well suited for this and hosting is dirt cheap.

Because its so popular and been around for so long, theres tons of free themes, plugins and videos which will reduce your support burden - plus your admin could get help easily as its not something you rolled.

Other than that, decap on gitlab is easy to run for free, and will provide the admin with a ui for editing content. Astro is also great and stable for this type of thing.

Dev budget under $25k: Statamic [1] or Wordpress (with ACF [2] & Acorn [3])

Professional work above that: Sanity [4] or Hygraph [5]

[1] https://statamic.com

[2] https://www.advancedcustomfields.com

[3] https://roots.io/acorn/

[4] https://www.sanity.io

[5] https://hygraph.com

I use Craft CMS’ GraphQL capabilities with my Eleventy site. Works well and helps me keep my page loads static. I would also recommend Directus for this, as it has some nice quality-of-life benefits.

To manage deploys, I have used Cleavr, which does a good job at it without being too user-unfriendly. That’s a paid service, about $6/month.

Payload CMS Is the best out there. Its free to host yourself.

Wagtail CMS, built on top of django. https://wagtail.org/

Used directus[0] (v9) for a customer project[1]. I needed to sync the CMS content with meilisearch[2], so I had to write a custom extension that registers some hooks[3] for that. I discovered some weirdness in the API, since the payload of a hook behaves differently whether the CMS change gets triggered via UI event, API request, or CSV upload. Was a bit annoying, but got it working in the end. Don't know if that improved in later versions, but I honestly also didn't keep up with development since the license change.

[0]: https://directus.io/

[1]: https://genopedia.com/

[2]: https://www.meilisearch.com/

[3]: https://directus.io/docs/guides/extensions/api-extensions/ho...

> They don't have funding.

Well how are they then going to pay for their web hosting? Tell them to scram.

If you have a registered nonprofit, like a 501(c)(3), you can often get a substantial break from some SaaS companies.

Some will give you the service for free (rate-limited, probably), while others may not give you a break at all.

I will say Caveat Emptor. If you keep your backend on Someone Else's Machine, they can hold your data hostage. Hosting should be fine, but some SaaS companies have a nasty habit of considering any data they have access to, to be "theirs." May be fine, until they sell the company, at which time, bend over and squeal.

Source: Been doing nonprofit development work since last century.