Multilingual CMS Solutions for Modern Websites

In a globally connected world, building websites that support multiple languages is no longer a luxury — it's a necessity. Whether you're managing a tech blog, a SaaS dashboard, or a multi-region e-commerce site, choosing the right multilingual CMS can dramatically improve your site's reach, usability, and SEO performance.

In this article, we'll explore the best CMS for multilingual websites, with a special focus on modern headless solutions like Sanity, Storyblok, Payload CMS, and others that integrate seamlessly with Next.js. We’ll analyze strengths, weaknesses, and base implementation details, including links to official documentation and code samples.

Why Choose a Headless CMS for Multilingual Websites?

A headless CMS multilingual setup decouples the backend content repository from the frontend rendering. You manage content via API, giving developers full control over how and where it’s displayed.

Key benefits of headless CMS for multilingual content:

• Native support for locales and i18n workflows
• Flexible integration with translation services and plugins
• SEO-friendly static and dynamic rendering
• Customizable content models for localization

Storyblok: Visual Editing Powerhouse with Full Localization Support

Storyblok is well known for its visual editor and component-based content structure. It’s particularly useful for non-technical editors managing content across many languages.

Strengths:

• Visual Editor allows live preview in all locales
• Supports field-level localization using Field-Level Translations
• Locale-specific content entries via "Story Variants"
• Built-in support for Next.js i18n routing

Weaknesses:

• Some limitations in relation handling across languages (e.g., linking translated blog entries)
• Managing large nested content trees can become complex

Integration Example (Next.js):

Here's a basic example of how you can fetch a story with a specific language using Storyblok:

const fetchStory = async (slug, locale) => {
  const storyblokApi = getStoryblokApi();
  const { data } = await storyblokApi.get(`cdn/stories/${slug}`, {
    version: 'published', // or 'draft'
    language: locale,
  });
  return data.story;
};

You can also fetch a list of all configured locales directly from Storyblok, which helps keep your project up-to-date—especially important for maintaining accurate sitemaps and alternate links.

export async function fetchConfiguredLocales(): Promise<string[]> {
  const storyblokApi = getStoryblokApi();

  try {
    const { data } = await storyblokApi.get('cdn/spaces/me');
    return [...data.space.language_codes, '']; // Include default locale
  } catch (error) {
    console.error('Error fetching configured locales:', error);
    throw error;
  }
}

Using this setup, we can fetch all stories separately for each locale, including their translated slugs. This allows us to build accurate URLs for each language version of the site. Managing translated slugs becomes crucial, especially in cases where switching languages also updates URLs to match their localized content.

As we've seen, Storyblok, when properly implemented in your codebase, allows for flexible management of localization within your project, all without the need for constant code changes.

This ensures that localization workflows, including essential tasks such as maintaining accurate sitemaps and alternate language links, remain efficient and developer-friendly.

Sanity: Fully Customizable Studio with Real-Time Previews

Sanity is a developer-first CMS offering a real-time editing environment and extremely flexible content modeling.

Strengths:

• Custom content studio lets you define multilingual schemas with full control
• Powerful querying via GROQ or GraphQL
• Real-time collaborative editing
• Best practices for localization via document-internationalization plugin

Weaknesses:

• No built-in visual editor (requires custom previews)
• Initial setup of multilingual schemas can be verbose

When you install the document-internationalization plugin in Sanity, you'll gain access to specialized localization-friendly field types. These additional schema types simplify the management of multilingual content, providing an intuitive and structured way to store translations directly within your documents.

Example Schema:

// schemas/article.js
export default {
  name: 'article',
  type: 'document',
  fields: [
    {
      name: 'title',
      type: 'i18n.string',
    },
    {
      name: 'body',
      type: 'i18n.text',
    },
  ],
};

Using these enhanced schema types (i18n.string, i18n.text), Sanity automatically manages translations in a clear, structured format, allowing your editors and developers to:

• Easily edit translations directly within Sanity Studio.

• Query localized content seamlessly using Sanity's GROQ or GraphQL APIs.

• Scale multilingual content effortlessly, without complicating your schema or content models.

This greatly simplifies both frontend integration and backend content management, making your multilingual setup robust, intuitive, and maintainable.

You can query localized versions of your document easily by using GROQ queries. Here's a clear example of how you could do this:

Fetching Localized Versions with GROQ

Suppose you've defined your schema using the document-internationalization plugin as shown above (i18n.string, i18n.text). To request a localized version, you'll use the locale code directly in your GROQ queries:

// Example GROQ query to fetch an article in a specific locale ('en', 'de', etc.)
const query = `
  *[_type == "article" && _id == $id][0]{
    "title": title[$locale],
    "body": body[$locale]
  }
`;

Then, when you fetch data (for example, using Next.js or Sanity's client), you pass the desired locale explicitly:

const article = await sanityClient.fetch(query, {
  id: 'your-article-id',
  locale: 'en', // 'en', 'de', 'fr', etc.
});

What this achieves:

• Clean separation and intuitive querying of translations.

• Simplified API integration on your frontend (e.g., Next.js).

• Direct and efficient fetching of multilingual content.

This structured approach significantly simplifies localization logic, allowing your application to remain organized and easy to scale across languages.

Payload CMS: TypeScript Power and Full Customization

Payload CMS is a fully self-hosted headless CMS built with TypeScript and Node.js. It offers deep extensibility and powerful localization tools.

Strengths:

• Full control over localization schemas and admin UI
• Localized fields, UI translations, and API responses
• Works seamlessly with Next.js self hosting
• Ideal for developers seeking total backend flexibility

Weaknesses:

• No built-in visual preview for non-technical users
• Requires server infrastructure (e.g., Docker or Vercel Functions)

Example Configuration:

// payload.config.ts
import { buildConfig } from 'payload/config'

export default buildConfig({
  serverURL: process.env.SERVER_URL,
  collections: [
    {
      slug: 'pages',
      labels: {
        singular: 'Page',
        plural: 'Pages',
      },
      fields: [
        {
          name: 'title',
          type: 'text',
          localized: true,
        },
        {
          name: 'content',
          type: 'richText',
          localized: true,
        },
      ],
    },
  ],
  localization: {
    locales: [
      { label: 'English', code: 'en' },
      { label: 'Arabic', code: 'ar', rtl: true },
      { label: 'German', code: 'de' },
    ],
    defaultLocale: 'en',
    fallback: true,
  },
});

Retrieving Localized Docs:

fetch('https://localhost:3000/api/pages?locale=es&fallback-locale=none');

An important advantage worth emphasizing is that Payload CMS provides built-in support for GraphQL. This allows developers to easily query localized data through GraphQL queries

query {
  Posts(locale: de, fallbackLocale: none) {
    docs {
      title
    }
  }
}

Useful Links:

• Payload Localization Docs
• Next.js + Payload Starter

Other Headless CMS Options

Contentful

• Easy i18n setup via locales
• Great documentation and SDKs
• Pricing can be expensive at scale
  🔗 Contentful Localization Docs

Directus

• Self-hosted, open-source CMS with REST and GraphQL APIs
• Requires manual multilingual configuration
  🔗 Directus Translation Guide

Final Thoughts

Modern multilingual CMS solutions make it easier than ever to build fast, flexible, and globally accessible web applications. Tools like Sanity and Storyblok stand out for their localization workflows, editor experience, and real-time capabilities.

If you prioritize:

• Visual editing → go with Storyblok
• Schema flexibility and real-time collaboration → choose Sanity
• Developer-first full control → use Payload CMS multilingual setup

No matter which route you take, adopting a headless CMS multilingual architecture is a future-proof strategy — and there’s no doubt that multilingual CMS is going mainstream.