Non-technically minded users traditionally are limited in their ability to create functional pages or websites. They must rely on developers to have their products, services, and businesses live on the Internet. Now, an average Joe can create a website for e-commerce, blogging, or educational purposes, thanks to content management systems (CMS).
A CMS as a software helps create, manage, and modify website content without technical knowledge or know-how. However, there are certain limitations to traditional content management systems that headless CMS systems address, making them the talk of the town.
What is Headless CMS Platform Software?
A headless CMS is a backend-only platform that serves as a content repository. Headless CMS is designed to store and manage content unlike traditional CMS platforms with visual and interactive elements (frontend).
Using a traditional CMS platform like WordPress means being tied to the CMS platform’s presentation layer (or head), including themes and templates.
Also, you can’t repurpose or serve your CMS-powered website content to other platforms, such as mobile apps you may have. These limitations are eliminated in headless content management systems. Headless platforms focus on the content (or body), with you handling the head with frontend frameworks. With headless CMS, you can also deliver content to mobile apps, billboards, IoT devices, and more through APIs.
Headless CMS provides flexibility, omnichannel delivery, reusability, and efficiency benefits. Managing your content in a single location and displaying it on different platforms and devices saves time and costs associated with content creation and management.
Here are the 5 best headless content management systems in 2024.
#1 Contentful
Contentful is one of the top headless CMS content creators, marketers, and developers use to manage and deliver content across multiple platforms or channels. Its API-first design means the API engine comes first while the user interface part follows. This approach helps focus on how content hosted on the platform is stored, fetched, and served to other sources.
Contentful headless CMS provides software development kits (SDKs), providing developers with libraries, APIs, development tools, and more required to create customized solutions. The platform also allows developers to use their preferred fronted frameworks, such as React and Angular.
On the content management side are features to create powerful content experiences. For example, Contentful’s Rich Text editor supports regular text formatting options, can show live previews, and returns formatted text in JSON format, unlike other rich text editors that display text in HTML format.
Free plan: Yes.
Paid plan starts at $300/month.
#2 Sanity
Sanity is an open-source headless CMS using APIs for content delivery across multiple platforms. Sanity is all about structured content. Developers can define how data and documents are structured for easier content customization. This approach to content management helps developers and users efficiently and effortlessly display the same content across various platforms and devices.
Another platform feature is Sanity Studio, which provides real-time content collaboration among stakeholders. Changes are updated as they occur. Collaboration tools are important for projects requiring team input and concurrent editing.
Free plan: Yes.
Paid plan starts at $15/month.
#3 Ghost CMS
Ghost CMS is an open-source headless CMS with a presentation layer in traditional CMS systems. This makes it perfect for writers, bloggers, and publishers who’d like to use the platform for complete content creation without worrying about handling the frontend stuff.
However, using a separate frontend technology such as Reach, Next, Vue, and Angular for UI elements helps with increased website speed and performance. Using a frontend platform is also desired because of static build provision, areas in which Ghost performs awfully.
While there are provided apps you can use to build a Ghost blog with one click, these providers come with feature limitations if you don’t pay for premium features.
Other features that might make you consider Ghost headless CMS are multiuser roles and permissions for team collaboration, advanced scheduling to publish content when you want, and integrations with Slack, Zapier, and more web services.
Free plan: Yes.
Paid plan starts at $11/month.
#4 Kentico Kontent
Kentico Kontent, also known as Kontent.ai, is a cloud-based headless content management system that can be used for varying content creation and delivery needs. Dashboard internalization means the CMS interface can be rendered in multiple languages, and the multilingual content feature makes the platform suitable for those wanting to create and manage content in various languages.
See what content will look like when published with its preview feature, and content versioning means you can keep track of every single version. Version management is useful if you want to revert to a previous version.
Like Contentful, Kentico headless CMS is API-focused, providing APIs like REST and GraphQL support for fast content fetching and delivery across platforms and devices. Some other provisions by Kentico for excellent developer experience are webhooks, SDKs, and CLI tools.
Free plan: Yes.
The paid plan starts at: uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model.
#5 Strapi
Strapi is an open-source headless content management system designed to work with RESTful, GraphQl, and other services that make it flexible, customizable, and scalable. Built fully on Javascript, Strapi is one of the headless CMS platforms that seamlessly integrates with React and other modern frameworks. Perfect to use when looking for a solution to develop high-performance web pages and applications.
Changing your data structure or the API is as simple as using the code editor. Strapi comes with multi-database support, meaning you can choose from MySQL, SQLite, MariaDB, or Postgres – the supported databases. Support for GraphQL and RESTful APIs means React, Angular, and Vue developers have a system to rely on for data fetching when building and customizing frontend elements.
Free plan: yes, available in the self-hosted plan.
Paid plan starts at $29/project/month.
Conclusion
We hope the 5 best headless content management systems discussed in this post are insightful. Headless CMS platforms are a flexible and scalable options for developers and content creators to serve the same content across multiple channels.
Individual CMS on the list has unique features and different customization options. With their free plans, try looking around to discover the one that matches your development skills, needs, and requirements.