Hosted Headless CMS
Most suitable hosted, headless CMS
The CMS is where content editors will spend most of their time. These CMS's are not traditional in a few ways. They are...
Headless - They just take in data and spit it out, they have no concept of the presentation. Although the website is one target, these CMS's have no concept of what the data will be used for and as such the data could be used for any target.
Hosted - They handle the scaling, updating, security and hosting of the CMS.
We reviewed over 74 platforms, the following were the best in class.
Requirements
Candidates
Contentful
Dato
GraphCMS
Takeshape
StoryBlok
Sanity
Prismic
❌ Prismic
Prismic has been in the Headless CMS game longer than most. Over the years it's built up a solid roster of clients.
Given that it's not easily extendable as a CMS this isn't an option. They have no sense of a custom input field and as such there are certain limitations it would put on the editorial experience. Although it is a stable and solid solution development over the past 5 years has been extremely slow.
✅ Sanity
Sanity has a very different approach to its competitors. The CMS is essentially built on the developers machine, rather than in the cloud. It is then published up. A huge advantage for the platform is that it is highly extendable.
Sanity is very developer focused and is the most extendable of any of the platforms. Although they offer image manipulation and hosting if this is insufficient you can easily connect this to cloudinary, an enterprise digital asset manager. It's a little more expensive than some of the other options at $199 per month. However, with generous usage quotas it is unlikely this will go any higher. As a solution it possibly feels less polished with not enough focus on the end user. This also is apparent in the docs which are sorely lacking. A final gripe is that plugins / extensions need to be written in React, all competitors give you the freedom to write extensions in vanilla JS.
❌ StoryBlok
Unlike the others StoryBlok is very focused on the visual editorial experience and acting as a CMS for a website rather than a CMS for any target. This means you can drag and drop the actual components and create a far richer editorial experience.
There are so many things to like about storyblok and the visual editorial experience is wonderful. However they fall down in a number of areas. Firstly it's short sighted and limiting to have the content input and website so closely tied, the site is just one target. The image manipulation and serving is one of the poorest out of the options and they don't offer dynamic format support. This is where the format of the image is determined by the browser, the format with the best performance will be served. This can make a big difference to site performance.
❌ TakeShape
TakeShape offers one of the nicest user experiences. It's fairly new compared the the other platforms. Recently they announced a new product, mesh, which seems to be taking development resources away from the TakeShape CMS.
Given that it's not easily extendable as a CMS this isn't an option. They have no sense of a custom input field and as such there are certain limitations it would put on the editorial experience.
❌ GraphCMS
GraphCMS has been gaining huge traction over the past 3 years and is certainly one to watch. In the last few months they've announced UI Extensions. This will allow developers to extend the platform. They've already made this available to some enterprise clients, but they have been fairly guarded in sharing information about what the implemenation will look like.
Given that it's currently not easily extendable as a CMS this isn't an option. They have no sense of a custom input field and as such there are certain limitations it would put on the editorial experience. Furthermore although the documentation is excellent in some place, in others it's simply not present. Although this is a well established company, who is developing quickly and has strong financial backing, we'd currently not feel comfortable recommending the platform.
✅ DatoCMS
Dato has an excellent blend of User & Developer experience. It is evolving very quickly and the support and uptime is excellent.
Dato has the best support of any of the other platforms. Although prices can increase fairly quickly if you exceed the limits on your plan, the base price is extremely low. The platform is extendable and the user experience is one of the best.
❌ Contentful
Contentful is the market leader with a firm focus on enterprise clients. Rotate° historically used contentful for most of our builds and they have many enterprise features such as schema versioning which aren't offered on .many of the competitors.
The editorial experience for contentful is one of the poorest out of the options. It's ugly and fairly confusing in places. Having spoken to their product team in Berlin it's clear that their primary focus is on enterprise clients spending over £1,500 a month. In recent years uptime has been less than satisfactory. Finally features that competitors are offering in free plans aren't available on Contentful unless you are on enterprise.
Winner - DatoCMS
Both Sanity and Dato are great options. However, currently Dato just edges ahead due to their superior support and editorial experience.
Dato fees start at €19 a month, however the final cost is based on usage.
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