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

We've shipped headless projects across Contentful, Sanity, Storyblok, Payload, Hygraph, Directus, and Strapi. We have preferences. We also have the receipts. Here's what we've learned.

We work with all of these platforms. We have no preferred vendor, no exclusive partnerships, and no incentive to steer you toward any particular choice. We pick the right tool for the project — that's the only way this kind of assessment stays useful.

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 is the enterprise default. Mature, compliant, expensive. You'll pay 40–60% more than the headline price once you hit limits you didn't see coming. The premium is worth it if you're running sophisticated personalisation at scale. Otherwise, you're carrying cost you won't use.

Storyblok is the right call for standard marketing websites where editors need to self-serve. The visual editor is genuinely excellent. The constraint is architectural — once your content model outgrows typical marketing site patterns, the platform starts to push back.

Sanity is a content operations platform. Schema-as-code, GROQ, real-time collaboration — it's built for teams that treat content structure as a product discipline. It's overkill for a marketing site. It rewards developers who will invest in building a proper editorial experience on top of it.

Payload CMS gives you a Next.js-native CMS with no licensing ceiling and complete ownership. MIT licence, self-hostable, and deeply flexible. You're making a bet on your development team — upfront investment is real, but the ceiling is yours to define.

Hygraph is the right tool if you genuinely need GraphQL federation across multiple backends. Don't reach for it otherwise.

Strapi and Directus are the open-source path. Strapi if you're building fresh with a new database. Directus if you need to wrap an existing one.

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. For a detailed feature and pricing breakdown, see our Contentful vs Sanity comparison.

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. At this point you can benefit from consulting with Storyblok experts, for a one-off architecture review, or larger undertaking.

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. If you're deciding between Storyblok and a more enterprise-leaning platform, read our Storyblok vs Contentful comparison.

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, [developer-led teams](](https://focusreactive.com/sanity-expert-agency/) who will invest in building a proper editorial experience, organisations where content modelling is genuinely strategic.

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.

We've picked this open-source CMS to build our Ideal CMS on top of Payload, also solving the initial setup steep costs. Learn more what we're doing with Payload CMS.

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. For a deeper comparison of open-source options including Directus and Payload, see our open source CMS comparison for 2026.

Extended Comparison Matrix

The Decision That Actually Matters

The platform choice matters less than teams think at the start of a project. Any competent implementation on any of these platforms will manage content. The differences emerge at the edges: when complexity grows, when editors hit the boundaries of their interface, when you price out a renewal at scale.

The most common mistakes we see:

1. Paying the Contentful premium without using what makes it worth paying. The personalisation and experimentation features are genuinely powerful. If you're not running that capability, you're overpaying for stability you could get elsewhere for less.
2. Treating Sanity's developer experience as a guarantee of good editor experience. Sanity is excellent when a team invests in building the right editorial surface. It's difficult when they don't. That planning needs to happen before the project starts, not after editors start filing complaints.
3. Choosing Storyblok for a project that's going to grow beyond a marketing site. The fit is real and the UX is excellent — but know your growth trajectory before you commit. Replatforming 18 months in is avoidable.
4. Reaching for Hygraph's federation capabilities without a genuine multi-backend data architecture problem. That decision compounds in the wrong direction.

Pick the platform your team can implement well. Budget for what it actually costs. Then implement it properly — the competitive advantage comes from what you build on top of the platform, not from the platform itself.

We've navigated this decision across dozens of projects. If you're working through it now, let's talk through your specific situation.