Directus

One of the best Headless CMSes in the market

Comments: Directus has been our agency's love child for quite awhile. And it's our go-to CMS for anything bespoke. It's even more customizable than many paid competitors around that we tried.

Pros:

Extremely pleased and surprised that this a open-source software. The features provided out of the box is extremely robust and reliable. I've never had an issue with it and have been onboarding a lot of clients to switch to Directus from other CMSes for the past few years.

Cons:

There are pretty much no cons except that we have to set it up ourselves, but it's not too difficult once you get the hang of it.

Best headless CMS on the market - powered by Open-Source

Comments: I loved the previous versions, but especially the new V9 really excites me. I never experienced any smoother experience setting up any content management system (including the old guys like WordPress or Drupal). From a product and/or IT lead perspective, it brings you so much power for so many use cases - without a huge price tag or complexity.

Pros:

It is free, if you are able to host it yourself! It is completely white-label, which makes your employees love it even more. It is perfectly customizable. In case you miss something, you can easily jump on the train and add it for your project - or all Directus users (contributing in the open-source community). If you want it fully managed, there is a cloud-version at a fair price (cheap compared to others) too.

Cons:

Potential con for some people: The PHP version got more or less deprecated. There might be one version again, but focus is definitely with NodeJS. If you want to host it yourself and are not able to run Node or Docker, you might run into problems. File management could be better and more customizable (in terms of conditional rules how uploads get processed per collection and field).

Fantastic concept, medium user experience

Comments: Until now the experience is good: I like the idea and it works for the project that we started with Directus. We still need to resolve some issues, like how to properly manage pages and SEO data or how to overcome the lack of the repeater field, but it's working well. The experience with the support was fantastic. [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] was kind and friendly, in spite of my incompetence. I appreciate the enthusiasm and the open source spirit. Sometimes I experienced some limits for the reasons mentioned early, but I'm happy.

Pros:

I love the concept behind Directus: the idea to freely create a database in an easy way, organizing the content as you need or as you imagined it. I come from Kirby CM and Craft CMS and doing websites in which the custom design is the key, it's important to us to shape our content as we want. It's easy to install, the Slack support is friendly and helpful. In the search for the perfect headless CMS solution, it was my choice, also because it's open source and at the moment the pricing of others options is over budget for our clients. We were ok paying a fee for a license, but not a perpetual subscription. Moreover, a key point in the decision to adopt it is the self-hosted solution: we wanted to avoid every possible lock-in. Finally, the stack: working in a communication agency, we are not software engineers: PHP + Vue.js it's a perfect combination. React and node.js onthe server was a switch too big to take another leap.

Cons:

Above all, the bugs: being open source and free it's normal, but it is frustrating in the measure we decided to use it for clients works. Second: the lack of documentation for the interfaces or for the detailed use of the JS SDK. Moreover, sometimes I felt overwhelmed by the technical details of the interface. I don't have competence in relational databases and to me too much things doesn't have a meaning. But I'm mainly a front-end developer that try to be "independent", so I think that it's normal. Finally: the lack of a good repeater. At the moment it's impossible to use a file field in it, or to repeat a group of field. For us it's almost a strict requirement for clients projects.

One of the greats

Pros:

I'll start with the flexibility, you can create and edit every table in real-time and in an easy-to-use GUI. Best part is this can be clamped onto any SQL database and it will just start working then you can setup the table existing into the software.

Cons:

Well I mean it's not quite and intuitive as something like WordPress but point people in the correct direction and they soon get the hang of it

Best headless open source CMS

Comments: We're creating a completely custom web in which you can reuse components.

Pros:

It's community support, open-source, and features. Nothing to envy from really expensive proprietary CMS.

Cons:

Breaking changes in updates, lack of Many to Any support on App, failures updating large datasets with relationships, lack of a tool to perform migrations between environments and long URLs to consume. All of which are getting addressed at the moment :)