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by thogenhaven 3115 days ago
We almost went with contentful when we chose a headless cms. But their pricing for large multilingual sites was through the roof.

Directus is an open source alternative that has the same features for free. So we wet with this. Very happy with this CMS.

3 comments

Played with Directus a bit today.

The "Create content model" UI is definitely not as polished as the one from Contentful or Kentico Cloud - but it works. You have to actually manage relationship tables yourself, which some people might like.

Unfortunately their only trial is for the smaller plan which is limited to 3 tables, and I don't have the energy and motivation to install the Open Source version...

Still interesting.

yeah, pricing did not make sense for us. We went with Kentico Cloud (hosted, but it is also open source that you can deploy).
Kentico Cloud hosts the content inventory/management part, the frontend is hosted on your end. Not aware of any possibilty to host content management part yourself.
> but it is also open source that you can deploy

Do you have a link for that? I couldn't find anything about self hosting.

(But I did check it out, and it definitely is quite capable!)

I asked Kentico Cloud support, this was their reply.

> Kentico Cloud is a SaaS model, so you need to host the application that consumes data from it. I'm not aware of an option where you would host the content management application.

So no self hosted option.

I'm looking at the awful web site[0] for Directus, and it sure has a lot of screenshots of what appears to be a fairly traditional web-based CMS UI.

I get that what we're seeing may just be a front-end "app" connecting to the core headless CMS via its own API, but at what point has your "headless CMS with a nice UI" just become another traditional CMS?

[0]: https://getdirectus.com

All I see on their homepage is backend UI. A headless CMS has no client/visitor facing UI.
Headless CMS in this context means it's just the CMS backend (the tail) and not a frontend (the head). The raw content is rendered to a FE view by something else.
Back-end and front-end often mean server-side and client(browserside respectively, eg Front-end developer.

So to be clear, headless CMSs have an admin-facing front-end and back-end to manage content, but only an API for a process to render the content into HTML/CSS/JS for visitors.

That said, headless CMSs can be used for more than just websites.

Hence the "in this context" part