With the growing volume of content you’re working with, it may be time to invest in a content management solution. Interested in headless? Explore some mid-market options suitable for smaller operations.
Today, many organizations rely on a content management solution to ensure that every digital touchpoint they have with customers is engaging and useful.
One type of CMS, a headless CMS, separates the management of content from what it looks like on a website or application. This differs from how traditional CMSs work. With a headless CMS, developers get more flexibility in how content will look, and marketers can create, update, and edit content with minimal developer involvement.
As more organizations notice the benefits of going headless, you may find that some of the most established vendors, like Kontent.ai, along with Contentstack and Contentful, more deeply cater to large enterprises. This is because the very nature of headless technology easily enables organizations who have:
Part of a small team? That doesn’t mean your search for the right headless CMS should come to a halt. You can still benefit from some of the key values of a headless CMS, such as developer flexibility and a positive editing experience. So what are some mid-market alternatives?
We’ve put together this quick reference list, so you can more quickly orient your research in the mid-market space and ultimately, select a headless CMS that’s suited to your team size and challenges.
Agility CMS
Agility is a headless CMS that aims to cater to business and technical users. They are proud of their authoring capabilities on top of their headless capabilities. They have a marketplace of apps to integrate with, a key benefit of headless CMS solutions.
Butter CMS
Butter is a headless CMS that caters to both marketers and developers who are primarily managing websites, landing pages, and blogs. It may be a good match for single developers and start ups to small businesses. As plan parameters range from 5 to 50 pages and 50 to 600 blog posts, connecting with audiences beyond this limit may prove to be more difficult or expensive.
dotCMS
dotCMS is an open-source, hybrid-headless content management system built on Java technology. If you’re set on a headless CMS, consider that many hybrid CMSs are still built on a traditional approach, organizing content around a web-first model.
Hygraph
Hypgraph is a GraphQL headless CMS that aims to enable teams to create and publish application content via a content studio or programmatically consume and deliver content through existing front-ends and back-ends. Its free community and self-service plans cater to small teams but do not include key security features such as custom roles and permissions, SSO, or long-term versioning retention.
MuraCMS
MuraCMS offers both hybrid and headless CMS capabilities, a WYSIWYG editor, as well as a content editor. It caters to US higher education and government institutions but offers no public pricing comparisons.
Sanity
Sanity is a headless CMS, or so-called Composable Content Cloud, for creating and distributing digital content across channels. It allows companies to use APIs to build editing workflows and share content between systems. Its Team and Business plans are catered to a range of 10-20 non-admin users, though its pay-as-you-go approach may cause your teams to constantly be on alert when scaling.
Storyblok
Storyblok is a headless CMS that caters to both business and technical users. Though it is usable for managing omnichannel content, website hierarchy is embedded in the system: content items and the hierarchy of folders used to organize content items both require a URL slug. Component-based page building & the visual editor make it a popular solution for mid-market, but it’s not easy to reuse or govern content, making it less suitable for teams who require something more omnichannel-focused and secure.
Strapi
Strapi is an open-source headless CMS. It’s 100% JavaScript and fully customizable. It prides itself on being developer-first, highlighting technical value, such as: being open-source, self-hosting, GDPR compliance, RESTful or GraphQL, JavaScript, and extensibility by design. Content teams who want more independence from developers may find Strapi doesn’t quite satisfy in terms of collaboration and workflow management.
Sometimes the line between mid-market and enterprise vendors is not as clearly defined as you’d like, with vendors working hard to market their solutions and get noticed in the space.
We recommend that you go into your research knowing what both your business users and your developers require; this will help ensure your headless selection and eventual implementation lead to the most successful outcomes. We have a handy guide to help you. Consult our Headless CMS RFP template for a useful set of questions to consider as you go through your long and shortlisting process.
If you’d like even more support on your search, feel free to also consult: How to choose a headless CMS and How to calculate the Total Cost of Ownership of a headless CMS.
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