How to choose a headless CMS without the vendor pitch

How to pick the right headless CMS for your team.

Five CMSs. Five strong opinions. Here is how to cut the noise and pick the one that fits your team.

The short list.

We work with all five. Sanity, Payload, Strapi, Contentful, Storyblok. Each one suits a different team.

The decision.

Pick by team type and by what you plan to build.

Sanity suits teams that do a lot of writing and want an easy flow.

Payload fits developers who want to add code to the CMS.

Strapi fits teams that want to host it and hold their own data.

Contentful fits big firms with many content steps.

Storyblok fits marketing teams that want to edit pages by eye.

The CMS choice sits inside a wider stack decision. See our SaaS MVP tech stack guide for how host, data and front-end choices fit together.

The demo.

Always try three to five CMSs with your own content. A demo with real content tells you more than any list of features. For how the frontend rendering architecture of your CMS choice affects search engine indexing, see our JavaScript SEO crawling and rendering guide — it covers the SSR vs client-side trade-offs that apply to every headless CMS build.

The move.

Plan the move with a map of your content and a map of your redirects. We have moved dozens of sites with no loss of search rank. Run the on-page SEO checklist as a check after the move. It covers canonical tags, schema and link fixes. Those stop your rank from falling while you switch.

The handover.

Write down your content models and how your team will work. Train your team. Stay free for the first 90 days.