The 5 best headless CMSs for 2024 - The only guide you’ll ever need

If you’ve specifically clicked on a link about headless CMS, then I’m assuming you probably know the basics of headless software, and there’s a good chance you’ve already decided to go with a headless CMS (great choice, by the way). So, instead of preaching to the choir about the advantages of headless vs. traditional CMS, I’ll skip ahead to tips on evaluating headless CMSs and a look at a couple of great options for small to enterprise businesses.

The 5 CMSs on this list—Hygraph, Contentful, Strapi, Storyblok, and Prismic—all have strengths. I’m biased towards Hygraph, both because this is a Hygraph blog and because it’s an excellent CMS for a wide range of use cases, but I also wanted to highlight some key features of other platforms that could make them a better fit for your team.

So, while saying this is the “only” guide you’ll ever need might have been a bit of an exaggeration to please the SEO bots (I’d wager it’s not even the only one currently open in your browser), I do hope that it helps make the selection process a little easier.

#How to create your headless CMS shortlist

A new CMS will likely impact multiple teams, and gathering input can quickly lead to a laundry list of requirements for each department.

A good first step is to assemble a small cross-functional team to agree on which requirements are non-negotiable and which are nice-to-have. Ultimately, the goal is to find your goldilocks platform - one that’s advanced enough to meet your current needs and let you grow but isn’t so overpowered that you end up with a lot of unnecessary complexity.

Here are some areas to consider when making your shortlist requirements.

Editorial features

The CMS should make it easy to work with the content types, data sources, and channels you use. With functionality that lets all your user groups (developers, marketers, merchandisers, translators, etc) do their job independently.
Depending on your use case and users, the types of features to look for include:

• Content structure. How much flexibility you have to define content types and their relations, and how easy that is to do, is one of the big differentiators between headless CMSs. It’s the main indicator of how much complexity the system can handle - so it’ll be a top priority for teams with multiple channels and unique content models, but less important for standard marketing websites.

• Content creation. What features do you need to bring content to market quickly? Such as integrations with your existing tools, reusable content models, an intuitive UI for non-technical users, or the ability for developers to manage content programmatically.

• Workflows. What level of control do you need in areas like user roles, access permissions, localizations, content stages, versioning, scheduled publication, and collaboration features like comments and notifications?

General API considerations

Every headless CMS will have an API that passes content from the backend to the frontend, but not all make backend functionality available via APIs.

More often than not, this comes down to when the CMS was built. Platforms built after headless became popular tend to prioritize APIs in development from the start (API-first) and expose content and functionality as code. This offers a lot of flexibility to extend and integrate and is why an API-first CMS is especially useful in a composable tech stack.

While a lot of CMSs that were built before the rise of headless have tried to play catchup by adding an API layer on top of legacy code. Which, technically, makes them headless but backend functionality remains locked in a monolith (looking at you, WordPress).

The type of APIs the CMS uses is also important. Here is a much more detailed look at the differences between REST and GraphQL APIs, the two most common types in the CMS space, but at a very high level:

• REST is an architecture style that uses standard HTTP methods to share data neutrally between applications. REST APIs return a fixed data set for every request, making them relatively easy to implement and a good fit for simple data requests that don’t often change.
• GraphQL is a query language used to fetch data efficiently. It allows clients to ask for exactly the data they need, no more and no less, and to fetch data from multiple sources with a single GraphQL API call. This can be beneficial for performance, especially when data is complex, but can also be complicated to implement.

Content delivery and performance

Platform infrastructure is the main decider of how quickly, efficiently, and reliably content gets to your customers. You can choose to take this on yourself, or go with one of the many CMSs that are offered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) which handle cloud infrastructure for you.

If you do choose to go with a SaaS solution, make sure that it offers:

• A content delivery network (CDN) with data centers located in your customers’ regions.
• Advanced and well-documented caching strategies.
• Availability monitoring, from a publicly available status report to custom service level agreements (SLAs) that guarantee uptime.

Security, compliance, and privacy

The CMS should offer multiple ways to help keep data safe like encryption, audit logs, integration with your single sign-on (SSO) system, and convenient backup options. As well as features that help prevent human errors like granular permissions, field validations, and sandbox environments for testing. Depending on your organization’s policies the CMS may also need to have certification for data security standards, like ISO27001 or SOC2, and be compliant with regional consumer privacy regulations such as California’s CCPA or Europe’s GDPR.

Business flexibility

The CMS should offer a smooth path as your business scales.

• Platform. It should be easy to extend the CMS to support any channel, market, or user feature that you’re considering adding in the next few years - or simply be flexible enough to adapt to any use case.
• Pricing. The vendors pricing tiers and the limits used to define them (locales, content entries, traffic, etc) should be transparent and make sense with your roadmap. So that a relatively small business step doesn’t blindside you with a big price hike.
• Support. A variety of support options should be available to help you at every stage. From an active user community and clear documentation, to customer service channels, to a dedicated support manager and enterprise level SLAs.

#How we selected the 5 best headless CMSs

While the absolute “best” CMS will depend on your criteria, this list aims to help point your search in the right direction with 5 headless CMS options that are an excellent fit for a range of use cases.

To decide on the top 5, we evaluated the contenders based on:

• User reviews. What people had to say on G2 and Capterra (and a handful of subreddits).
• Core features. Is all the expected functionality there? Does it offer anything unique? Taking into account the different priorities of different use cases.
• Scalability. Can it be extended to support multiple channels, locales, content types, data sources, etc? With a critical eye on the CMSs that market themselves for global, omnichannel experience and a more lenient look at the ones meant for standard marketing sites.
• Value for money. All of the CMSs on the list offer a free version for small projects, but we focused more on the paid tiers. Do they offer a practical way for companies to grow, or are critical features locked behind the highest price tag? The list was also guided a bit by reputation. Headless CMS is growing but it’s still a pretty small world behind the scenes (a LinkedIn connections map would look like a Game of Thrones family tree) and after being in it awhile you get a general idea of where solutions fit in the market, which ones show up the most on shortlists, and which vendors people like working with.

#The 5 best headless CMSs in 2024

Hygraph: Best for global teams with complex content

Hygraph is a very flexible CMS that helps teams easily implement and efficiently manage complex, content-driven applications. It provides a single source of truth for content data, with tools that let developers and marketers leverage that content and scale it across markets, brands, and channels.

Key features:

• Flexible content modeling. Quickly define your unique content structure, programmatically or via a low-code schema builder, with support for custom content types and complex relationships (one-to-many, many-to-many, etc).
• Content Federation. A universal GraphQL API lets you efficiently fetch data from all sources using a single API call, without duplication or migration.
• Efficient workflows. Granular roles and permissions, custom stages, reusable components, bulk operations, and localization tools let marketing teams handle global content without developer assistance.

Limitations: Hygraph is natively built with GraphQL APIs, so there can be a learning curve for teams without GraphQL experience. The platform design does lean more towards the developer experience, and while the editing UI is easy-to-use it doesn’t offer a drag-and-drop page builder like some other CMSs on this list.

Hygraph pricing:

Prices per project/month, when billed annually.

• Free (3 user seats, 5K content entries) - $0
• Professional (10 user seats, 20K content entries) - $199
• Scale (20 user seats, 50K content entries) - $799
• Enterprise (100+ user seats, 1M+ content entries) - custom

Contentful: Best for large enterprise

Contentful was an early player in the headless space, earning it a pretty strong foothold in the market and giving it time to build up a solid partner network. It was originally considered a developer-centric platform, but in recent years feature development has leaned more towards the business user.

Key features:

• Prebuilt integrations. Has a large marketplace of apps and extensions to connect a range of tools.
• API-first design. Works with all modern frameworks and can deliver content to any frontend channel via API. REST-native with an added GraphQL API.
• Contentful Studio. A visual editor launched in 2024 that offers a big improvement to the editing experience, including the introduction of reusable components and collaboration features.

Image source: Contentful

Limitations: While Contentful is a very flexible CMS overall, it lacks a couple of factors when it comes to data modeling (e.g. no two-way relationships) and the developer experience (e.g. no integrated API playground). The Content Studio editor is also only available at the premium pricing tier, with a limited editing UI otherwise, making it mainly an option for enterprise companies.

Contentful pricing:

Prices per month

• Free (5 users, 10K content entries) - $0
• Basic (20 users, 10k content entries with option to upgrade) - $300
• Premium - custom
• Contentful Studio is a separate paid app with custom pricing

Strapi: Best open source option

Strapi provides core platform logic that developers can extend with custom- or community-built plugins. The combination of open source and headless makes it a great fit for certain companies - often ones at different ends of the size spectrum. Small business with tight budgets (and a developer that really likes headless) on one end and, on the other, huge organizations that use different CMSs for different use cases.

Key features:

• Low entry cost. The community edition is free, but you do take on the cost of hosting, feature development, and platform maintenance.
• Complete customization. The entire codebase is available on GitHub and open to customization, including the API.
• Open source community. There’s an active forum and Discord channel to help troubleshoot issues.

Image source: Strapi

Limitations. Strapi comes with the typical challenges of open source software. As a very developer-centric solution it can be hard to learn for business users and, since you’re fully responsible for performance and security, the more customizations you add the more complex (and expensive) it is to maintain.

Strapi pricing:

Prices for the self-hosted CMS per seat/month, when billed annually.

• Community - free
• Enterprise (SSO, audit logs, scheduled releases) - $99
• Prices for the managed cloud CMS per project/month, when billed annually.
• Developer (1 seat, 1K content entries) - $29
• Pro (5 seats, 100K content entries) - $99
• Team (10 seats, 1M content entries) - $499

Storyblok: Best visual editor for marketers

Storyblok offers an editing UI that feels familiar to content creators used to working with a traditional CMS, while keeping the underlying API-based content structure.

Key features:

• Visual editor. Drag-and-drop components and see changes in a live preview.
• Content modeling. Supports unique content types, global components, and the ability to nest components.
• Image optimization: Automatically resize images or edit them directly in the UI with tools to filter, crop, rotate, etc.

Image source: Storyblok

Limitations. With the focus on providing a really smooth editing experience, Storyblok sacrifices some technical flexibility with limitations in API logic and bulk operations. The developer documentation is also a bit sparse, especially around integrations.

Storyblok pricing:

Prices per month, when billed annually. Additional users can be added to any tier for $9/month.

• Community (1 user, 25K content entries) - free
• Entry (5 users, 40K content entries) - $99
• Business (20 users, 75K content entries) - $849
• Enterprise (custom) - custom

Prismic: Best for simple sites with strong brand design

Prismic lets editors build web and mobile pages “like a slide deck”. Developers create fully designed page slices (e.g. hero banner, product grid, customer testimonial) that editors can mix-and-match to quickly build pages.

Key features:

• Slices. Developers define content slices and create a variety of frontend design options for each slice using Next.js Nuxt, or SvelteKit as a framework.
• Page builder. Editors can pick different slices options to build a page, allowing them to create unique pages with a consistent design.
• Prebuilt templates. Ready-to-go slices for common pages elements that can be styled to match your brand.

Image source: Prismic

Limitations. Prismic is terrific for building slick looking marketing brochure sites, but it really isn’t intended to handle more complex use cases. There are no custom roles or workflows, it’s difficult to create relationship logic between slices, and a developer testing environment is only available at the platinum pricing tier (and is an extra $3000 a year).

Prismic pricing:

Prices per repository/month, when billed annually.

• Free (1 user, 2 locales) - free
• Starter (3 users, 3 locales) - $10
• Small (7 users, 4 locales) - $25
• Medium (25 users, 5 locales) - $150
• Platinum (unlimited users, 8 locales) - $675
• Enterprise - custom

#Finding the best headless CMS for your business

Navigating the CMS landscape isn’t always easy. There’s a lot of options out there and, especially when migrating from legacy to headless CMS, many of the critical differences are under the hood.

We’ve put together an eBook, The Ultimate Headless CMS Selection Checklist, to help teams kick-off their CMS search. With tips on assessing your organization’s needs, the technical bottlenecks a new solution can help solve, and a list of evaluation criteria when comparing headless CMS.