Strapi: Budget-friendly self-hosted

Teams on a limited budget that need to self-host or need a relatively simple website can take advantage of Strapi's easy-to-use platform and built-in content models.

Pricing

Strapi’s paid plans start at $9 per month, Sanity’s start at $99 per month, and Contentful’s start at $300 per month (as of May 2023). We’ve also found Strapi and Sanity’s free plans to be very generous and great for small teams getting started.

Self-hosted CMS data

We recently chose Strapi to build a simple website for a client in a highly-regulated industry because getting approval to host data on an external server would take weeks to months (or be rejected).

Those with in-house IT teams, hardware, and network infrastructure may also find self-hosting more cost-effective compared to cloud-based services.

Easy to get started

A key advantage of a headless platform is flexibility, but starting from scratch is difficult. Strapi provides a middle ground.

Strapi’s opinionated content model is designed to provide a ready-made structure for storing and managing content, making it easier for teams to get started. They define standard fields and relationships between content types, allowing teams to focus on creating and managing their content without having to architect their own content model.

Strapi is simpler to set up than Sanity and Contentful. Developers and teams without much headless CMS experience may prefer Strapi to Sanity or Contentful.

However, the architecture Strapi offers may not work for custom or complex builds.