Supabase is pretty nice, strapi is great if you mainly need a headless CMS.
Node Red is really interesting is you need more of a workflow style thing.
Honestly though, I've mostly just fallen back to good 'ole express. With a well architected set of middleware, you can have declarative auth and all the bells and whistles directus offers, but at 100x the performance and trivial debugging.
It used to be a bit more work, but with Claude these days, spitting out high quality restful routes is a matter of minutes...
Node Red is really interesting is you need more of a workflow style thing.
Honestly though, I've mostly just fallen back to good 'ole express. With a well architected set of middleware, you can have declarative auth and all the bells and whistles directus offers, but at 100x the performance and trivial debugging.
It used to be a bit more work, but with Claude these days, spitting out high quality restful routes is a matter of minutes...