Choosing a Headless CMS in 2026: A Straight-Talk Guide

At FocusReactive, we've specialized in headless CMS since 2018. I've personally overseen dozens of projects across a wide range of content management solutions. This is a direct, opinionated guide—consider it the "Dutch" approach: straightforward, no politics, to the point.

Apologies in advance to some of our CMS partners, but honest assessment requires self-criticism too. FocusReactive has no exclusive obligations to any vendor, we pick and work with the best-suited Headless CMS case by case..

Let's name them upfront. The main players: Contentful, Storyblok, Sanity, and Payload CMS. We'll also cover Hygraph, Directus, and Strapi—strong platforms, but more niche in their use cases.

There are other worthy contenders out there. But when advising clients, we prioritize well-funded, well-established platforms we've tested in practice ourselves. Narrowly missed the list: DatoCMS and Prismic, worth a look for specific scenarios.

And no, we're not going to find the unicorn CMS. As always, "it depends." But I'll do my best to define clear defaults for common use cases—before the finer nuances come into play.

TLDR: Pick Your CMS in 60 Seconds

Contentful — Safe enterprise choice. Expensive, rigid, but nobody gets fired for picking it. Budget 40-60% more than quoted. Worth the premium if their content personalization features deliver ROI for your specific use case.

Storyblok — Best solution for small-to-medium marketing websites with standard requirements. Fantastic UX, marketers will genuinely be happy. But if you need to scale beyond typical marketing site complexity, prepare for architectural constraints or a rewrite.

Sanity — You have a small team of developers capable to develop deep platform experties, lots of data to organize, and your use case matches their published case studies for content operations. Be prepared for high license fees at scale. Visual editing exists but is lacking—overkill for a regular marketing website.

Payload CMS — You have experienced developers who love Next.js and need unlimited customization, ability to self-host and fully own your software. If you're ready to bear upfront development costs, the sky is the limit. Highest potential for building an Ideal CMS tailored to your needs, without open-source license limitations.

Hygraph — You genuinely need GraphQL and complex data orchestration across multiple systems. The editing UI isn't great for non-technical users. Don't choose this for standard content needs.

Strapi & Directus — You need an open-source solution and can't afford Payload's upfront development investment, or you need to leverage an existing ecosystem of plugins. Choose Strapi if you're building fresh with a separate database. Choose Directus if you need to attach a CMS layer onto an existing database.

Quick Decision Tree

The One-Liner Version

The Full Picture

Contentful: The Enterprise Standard

Contentful is the IBM of headless CMS. It's the safe choice nobody gets fired for making. The product is mature, the uptime is solid, and your procurement team can tick their compliance boxes without drama. Thirty percent of the Fortune 500 uses it, which means plenty of case studies to reference in your vendor evaluation deck.

The pricing reality is harsh. Contentful's model is designed to extract maximum value from customers. You'll start on a plan that seems reasonable, hit content type limits faster than expected, face usage-based overages, and discover that "enterprise features" you assumed were included require expensive add-ons.

The product itself is rigid. Developers find the content modeling constraining compared to more flexible alternatives. Your marketing team gets a functional but uninspiring editing interface.

When Contentful makes sense: The premium becomes worth it if their marketing personalization and experimentation features—Contentful Studio, AI content generation, built-in A/B testing—deliver measurable ROI for your specific use case. If you're running sophisticated personalization campaigns and need enterprise compliance, Contentful's all-in-one approach may cost less than assembling equivalent capabilities from multiple vendors.

When to avoid: Cost-conscious projects, small teams, organizations that hate surprise invoices, or situations where you're paying the enterprise tax without using enterprise features.

Storyblok: The Marketer's Platform

Headless CMS has a fundamental problem: it liberates developers while imprisoning marketers. Content teams gain nothing from decoupled architecture if they still need to file tickets for every page update.

Storyblok built their entire product around solving this problem. Their visual editor isn't a bolt-on feature—it's the core experience. Marketers drag and drop components, see live previews, and publish without developer intervention. For marketing sites, landing pages, and campaign content, this workflow difference is transformative.

For small-to-medium marketing websites with standard requirements, Storyblok is the best solution available. The UX is fantastic. Marketers are genuinely happy. The component-based architecture makes sense for typical marketing site patterns: heroes, feature sections, testimonials, CTAs.

The scaling problem is real. Storyblok's component-based architecture means developers build blocks that marketers arrange. You're working within Storyblok's system rather than building your own. For complex content models, unusual data relationships, or multi-channel content beyond web, this constraint becomes limiting.

While the number of components and pages would scale well, the bottlenecks will start to show when customizing editor expeient and interface, data complexity grows, conten system demands more domains and content ops.

If your project starts as a marketing site but evolves toward application-like complexity—custom workflows, sophisticated data relationships, headless commerce integration—you may hit architectural walls. At that point, you're looking at significant rework or migration rather than incremental scaling.

Storyblok announced a suite of content ops features coming soon, which will propel it's competitevness wiht Sanity.

Best for: Marketing sites, landing pages, campaign content, agency work where clients need to self-serve. Organizations where marketing autonomy is a genuine business requirement.

Avoid for: Complex content models, unusual data relationships, projects likely to evolve beyond typical marketing site patterns.

Sanity: The Content Operations Platform

Sanity has earned its reputation as the best CMS for developers who typically hate CMSs. Schema-as-code means your content model lives in version control alongside your application. The real-time collaboration genuinely works—multiple editors in the same document without conflicts, Google Docs style. GROQ, their query language, lets you fetch exactly the data you need with transformations in a single request.

The ideal Sanity customer has a small team of experienced developers, lots of content to organize, and a use case that matches Sanity's published case studies for content operations. Think media companies managing massive article archives, e-commerce brands with complex product content, or organizations where content structure itself is a competitive advantage.

Visual editing exists but is lacking. Sanity's Presentation tool provides preview capabilities, but it doesn't match Storyblok's drag-and-drop experience. Your marketing team will need developer assistance for almost everything beyond basic text editing. The flexibility that developers love creates dependency that marketers hate.

The cost reality: Sanity's generous free tier is genuine for small projects, but license fees scale aggressively with usage and team size. Enterprise deployments can reach $100K+ annually. The pricing model rewards efficient content modeling and punishes sprawl.

Sanity is overkill for a regular marketing website. If you're building a standard corporate site with typical pages and blog posts, you're paying for capabilities you won't use while suffering from an editing experience that's worse than simpler alternatives.

Best for: Content operations at scale, media companies, complex product content, organizations where content modeling is strategic. Small, strong dev teams who will build a custom editing experience.

Avoid for: Long-term budget constraints; high Studio customization needs; Standard marketing websites; organizations where marketers need independence.

Payload CMS: Build Your Ideal CMS

Payload is the newer entrant making waves in the TypeScript/Next.js community. It provides a solid foundation, with maximum customization flexbility and demands 0 licensing fees. Community and plugin ecosystem is growing fast, given other alternatives are heavily paywalled.

It requires upfront development/setup costs to adjust to your team needs, but when set up right, it can serve you well for anything from regular marketing website needs (with ability to scale when needed), to sophisticated inter-conntected content systems and e-commerce.

It integrates natively with Next.js, for both front-end and the admin/editor panel. Self-hostable and easy to scale.

If you have experienced developers who love Next.js and need unlimited customization, Payload offers the highest potential for building the Ideal CMS tailored to your specific needs. There's no ceiling imposed by the platform. Whatever you can build in Next.js, you can build with Payload as your content layer.

Crucially, Payload uses the MIT license—no open-source restrictions that create awkward conversations about commercial use or require license purchases at scale. You own your implementation completely.

The trade-off is upfront investment. Payload doesn't give you pre-built solutions. You're building your CMS experience, which means developer time before you have a usable product. The ecosystem is younger, documentation has gaps, and the community is smaller than Strapi or Sanity.

Microsoft, ASICS, and Blue Origin use Payload, which provides validation, but you're still betting on continued platform growth and development.

Best for: Teams deeply committed to Next.js and TypeScript, organizations that want to own their CMS implementation completely, projects with unique requirements that don't fit standard CMS patterns.

Avoid for: Teams not using Next.js, organizations that want turnkey solutions, projects where time-to-market matters more than long-term flexibility.

Strapi & Directus: The Open-Source Path

Some organizations need open-source solutions—whether for compliance, cost, philosophical reasons, or simply because they can't justify Payload's upfront development investment and need to leverage existing plugin ecosystems.

Strapi dominates this segment with ~70,000 GitHub stars and the largest headless CMS community. The JavaScript/TypeScript platform provides a visual content type builder, plugin marketplace, and flexibility to deploy anywhere.

Choose Strapi when you're building fresh with a new, separate database. The ecosystem offers pre-built solutions for common needs: authentication, media handling, SEO fields.

You can self-host or use Strapi-cloud, but bear in mind that while the core is free, the essential plugins do incur licensing fees with per-seat fees.

Directus takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than building a CMS that stores content its own way, Directus wraps existing databases. Point it at your PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQLite database and it auto-generates REST and GraphQL endpoints with an admin interface.

Choose Directus when you need to attach a CMS layer onto an existing database. Internal tools, legacy system modernization, situations where the data already exists and you need API access plus an admin UI.

The BSL 1.1 license is free for organizations under $5M annual revenue. Larger companies need commercial licensing.

Best for: Organizations requiring open-source, situations requiring existing plugin ecosystems.

Strapi specifically: Building fresh, new database, want largest community.

Directus specifically: Wrapping existing database, internal tools, exposing legacy data.

Avoid for: Teams wanting zero maintenance, those lacking DevOps capacity, organizations that underestimate operational overhead of self-hosting. Depending on situation, licencing costs could be steep.

Extended Comparison Matrix

Final Perspective

The CMS decision matters less than most teams think. For typical marketing websites, any competent platform will work. The differences emerge at the edges: complex content models, scaling requirements, genuine marketer autonomy needs, or unusual architectural constraints.

It is also essential to pick a solution you're confident you or your development partner is capable to implement efficiently. Don't forget your future scaling needs, but do not overthink, re-platform is not always as scary as it sounds.

The most common mistakes:

1. Paying enterprise tax without using enterprise features. Contentful's personalization capabilities justify the premium—if you use them. Otherwise, you're overpaying for a logo.

2. Developer-friendly does not mean hostile to editors Sanity and Payload are excellent for developer-led teams, and if set up correctly, will deliver outstanding editor UX. But it needs to be planned and executed carefully.

3. Underestimating scaling constraints. Storyblok is perfect for marketing sites until it isn't. Know your growth trajectory before committing.

4. Over-engineering for imaginary requirements. Hygraph's federation is powerful. You probably don't need it. Sanity's content modeling is sophisticated. A marketing site doesn't require it.

Pick the platform your team can implement and use effectively, budget realistically (including hidden costs and internal time), and implement properly. Your competitive advantage comes from what you do with your content, augumentent and accellerated by the use of proper tools.

If you need expert help choosing a Headless CMS or need an audit of your current solution for scalability and costs, speak with us.