Top 10 Headless CMS's You Should Check Out (and what they are!)

Hey developers, today we're going to look at 10 different headless CMSs. We're going to look at each one of them. I'm going to talk a little about the different features each has and pricing. And then we're going to discuss why you should maybe think about using a headless content management system on your next project. Hey, and if you didn't know, my name is Eric. I'm a software developer. I have several years of software development experience. And before we start, let's go ahead and see a quick message from our sponsor. Before we begin, let me thank our sponsor WebDoc.io. WebDoc.io is a VPS hosting solution that uses special Linux containers. Linux containers is a new way of running your virtual machines and it's much faster than classical virtualization. So WebDoc is a new VPS hosting provider and they use the Linux containers with fast SSD drives to make them much faster than most of their competitors out there. So with WebDoc, you can create your perfect virtualized servers. You can configure it however you want, and they actually give you a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate too. Another reason you should use WebDoc is that it gives you a lot of free backups that a lot of other providers don't. So please check out WebDoc.io. And just for you guys who are watching this video, if you use the coupon code PROGRAMWITHERIC, you'll get one free month. So click on that link below, sign up for it for your one free month. It's awesome and amazing. Check it out. All right, let's take a look at these 10 different headless CMSs. Now, one reason you might want to use a headless CMS is because basically it can deliver content to your website, to your app, or your device, your mobile phone, anything that you're using, and you can centralize all the information in one place. And also, depending on the headless CMS, it actually might be easier for your sales team, your marketing team, everybody else to get into the content management system, to create articles, to create content. And then you can be sure that next time you do a build, or depending on how you're using the API, that that information gets added to your application, to your web app seamlessly. And you don't have to teach the developer. You don't have to worry about talking to a developer every time something in the content management system changes. So in the olden days, you might have to do something where anytime the marketing person needed a change, they would have to talk to a developer, and the developer would have to make a change on the site. Of course, that doesn't work perfectly. So there's a lot of things that came out of that, like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, where you had a really simple interface. You can create all these pages, and anybody can do it. But now a lot of people have looked at WordPress and other sites and said, maybe that's too complicated. We don't want to have this whole system here. We want a little bit more flexibility. So in that case, they stop using WordPress. They'll have a web app, but they still want to have that ease of use of being able to create content. So there's quite a few different reasons why you might want to consider headless CMS. It's definitely something I see more and more often. Many, many sites are doing this. In fact, there's a whole JAMstack, which is a modern web development architecture based on client-side JavaScript reusable APIs and prebuilt markup, which has this idea in mind where instead of having the old LAMP stack, where you have Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and you have this monolithic CMS, now we're talking about decoupling the CMS from the front end, and that you're using APIs to make calls, and that you're using markup or markdown. I will leave this link in the description below if you want to know more about that. But let's go ahead and talk about some of these CMSs. So now there's two types. There's different types of content management systems out there, headless ones. There's ones that are open source, which you could always download and run on your own server. And then there's services that offer it too. So I'm going to start with the one that are services that have maybe API first. So in other words, these are ones that are built for teams that need to connect to this, and they have the API built in. So here's like Contentful. So they call it, and these are the ones that I see most often, they call it Break the Content Ball Neck Agile Teams Use Content Infrastructure Deliver. It has pretty good APIs. It has a Sandbox environment, SDKs for popular languages. I heard the dashboard's pretty easy to use. The pricing, I know that this is kind of weird for some people. It's $39 for microspace, and then it jumps up to like $879. That's the biggest drawback I hear about people talking about this. But if you're a large team or corporation, this might be an awesome thing to do because it has a lot of, it's been around for a while, and you can afford that $879 price tag for it. But you can see here, it has quite a bit of features, and let's see, look at the features here. So it has the RESTful API, optimized for C microservice architecture, and it's of course mobile-friendly. You could take a look how the Tears of Joy, that's more than a text editor, looks really simple to use. And I've heard good things about this. In fact, a lot of people who use like Gatsby, I know a lot of people have used Contentful with it. If you want to know more about Gatsby, I'll be doing a future video on it. So another one is Prismic. This is another really big headless CMS that a lot of people talk about. One CMS backend for all your websites and apps. If you look at the pricing on it, they have a free tier, which is great. So you can jump in and just kind of play around. It's pretty cheap, three user for seven and 15 for small. Once you start to get like professional businesses, it starts, as you can see, does go up in price. You can have unlimited users log into the system, so you can have multiple users logging in with different levels of security that they can do. A feature route-wise, you got the custom type builder, scheduling previews, full revision history, multi-language, integration fields. I've heard some people say this gets a little complicated in a couple of forums I've seen. I haven't used this one, but it's worth mentioning because it has a lot of features and a lot of people love it. So I would recommend to take a look at that. Datto CMS, your API-based CMS your editors will love. This has a really easy, this really focuses on the ease of use with the dashboard. It's really easy to create your posts, your content on here. The pricing is pretty reasonable. It's free for a developer version. By the way, a lot of these you have free options, so it might be worthwhile to try multiple ones to see which ones work best for your business before you purchase one. This one seems to be around pretty well. You can see it's nine dollars or nine euros, 20, 125. So it might be one to check out. Features, the visual model builder, powerful image manipulation, dynamic layout, so it has really ease of use that way and that's a good one to check out. The next one would be headless CMS. This one is made by the CosmicJS people and once again you have a full demo here. The pricing is similar to the other ones. Free trial is obviously gives you 5,000 API requests, only 10 megs of storage. Starters 29, 99 pro, 249. And the next one I want to talk about is Storyblock, CMS done right, API-based and headless. So once again, let's take a look at the pricing. So you have, once again, they have a free plan for zero. You see it does scale up pretty quickly depending on how many users you want. If you want the premium, which has all the advanced features, a higher SLA, which is the availability of the server, you want like 99.999% availability, you're want, you probably have spent a lot of money. Let's take a look at the features on this one. You get content blocks, so it has a visual composer, which once again, a lot of these have nice composers of how to put together your content. There's different content types, image and assets, custom field types, collaborators. It doesn't say anything about this, how much space you can put in, probably a lot. So this very, very nice looking one. Content stack is another one, digital experience platform meets CMS. If you look at the pricing, which I can't even find partners, resource products. This one might be a more of an enterprise level because I cannot find a pricing on it. You have to get a demo. Anytime you see, get a demo, you're probably going to be spending quite a bit of money, but let's, oh, here it is. Product pricing. Let's take a look. Yeah, you can see here free, and then it goes up to $3,500 a month for business. So this is definitely a higher end, maybe enterprise level, small to medium, large businesses would probably be able to afford this. Let's see the features. See content previews has a really nice dashboard, automated publishing, group releases, custom fields. So a lot of high-end stuff. Mobile optimized, managed in the cloud, probably really high availability, high premium SLA, service level available 24 seven support. So you could see definitely this would be more of a higher end headless CMS, not for maybe your weekend playing around with CMSs. WordPress, I talked about having a monolithic CMS and how that has kind of gone out of style, but having a headless WordPress or headless Joomla or headless Drupal, especially headless WordPress is still really popular. They have a really solid REST API built into WordPress right now. So you can just spin up a WordPress site. This is open source, so you can host it on your own server. Or you can get something like WP Engine or any other WordPress hosting providers out there, set it up as headless, probably have to do a little bit of security. And then you can easily start axing that from your mobile web apps, whatever you need to, to get the information out of it. So it's really powerful. I mean, yes, you're in the WordPress ecosystem, but definitely if you're in a world where you're marketing people, you're developers, everybody knows WordPress really well, this might be a great option to just use a headless WordPress. And of course it's free to use, it's open source. Strapi is another one they have, looking for an efficient API creation tool. It's another open source one. I don't see, from looking at the features on this for this headless CMS, it has, it's definitely more developer focused. I could see it's heavy on the API. It looks like you can content types, has tons of built-in plugins. This is probably the most popular GitHub open source headless CMS. That's not WordPress or Joomla or Drupal, just because it's, it has a pretty good, it's definitely API focused on here and it works well and has all these plugins that you can kind of throw into it. Netfly, Nellify CMS, you probably get it confused. Nellify has their paid service where they help you with hosting and a bunch of other things, but they also created this CMS, which you can use as your headless CMS. It's open source as well. And you can see here, not the greatest website, but you can kind of get the idea of what it looks like here. So there's a great site called headlesscms.org that goes over all the CMSs, headless CMS that I just talked to you about. And even tells you like, you can see your Strapi has 7,000 stars, Nellify CMS has 6,000, Cockpit, which we didn't talk about has 3,000. And then it gives you all the closed source services out there. Like we just talked about Contentful and Storyblock and Prismic. So this is a great site. I'll leave this in the link in the description too, so you can get a better idea of what's out there. So that's a lot of information there. So my recommendation is you should really look at these headless CMSs. I would try a bunch of the free trials, see what you guys like. I wanted to ask you, which ones do you like? I'll do a demo next week of one of these in one of my videos. I'll set it up with Vue.js and we'll see how it goes. So if you guys like one of these, leave a comment below. I'm going to put up a survey probably later this week based on the comments I see on this video. Let me know which one it is and I'll go ahead and do a demo of this and set it up with either like a Vue or a Nuxt or maybe an Angular, I'm not sure, app. So let me know if you guys like this video, make sure you click that subscribe button. Thanks!