Craft CMS Craft CMS
vs
Strapi Strapi

This is a side by side comparison of Craft CMS and Strapi. Two products that are similar in nature, yet provide unique feature-sets that are worth taking in to account before making a purchasing decision or start using the software. This page can help you broadly analyze the products and weigh pros and cons against one another. Allowing you scrutinize peoples opinions about Craft CMS and Strapi, before making a decision if any of the products fit your use-case.

What is Craft CMS?

Craft CMS is a flexible, user-friendly CMS for creating custom digital experiences on the web and beyond. Craft is designed from the ground up to empoer the entire creative process. From the user-friendly interface to the completely customizable back end, everything you interact with is designed to just make sense. With Craft your content comes first. No more trying to make your content work within the confines of the CMS.

How much does Craft CMS cost?

Solo

For when you’re building a website for you or a friend.

Free forever

  • Ultra-flexible content modeling

  • Define custom content types, fields, and relations needed to perfectly contain your unique content requirements.

  • Powerful front-end tools

  • Develop custom front-end templates with Twig, or use Craft as a headless CMS.

  • Multi-Site

  • Run multiple related sites from a single installation, with shared content and user accounts.

  • Localization

  • Cater to distinct audiences from around the world with Craft’s best-in-class localization capabilities.

  • Single admin account

  • The Solo edition is limited to a single admin account.

Pro

For when you’re building something professionally for a client or team.

$299

per project

Includes one year of updates.
$59/year for updates after that.

Upgrade in App

  • Everything in Solo plus:
  • Unlimited user accounts

  • Create unlimited user accounts, user groups, user permissions, and public user registration.

  • Enhanced content previewing

  • Preview your content from multiple targets, including single-page applications.

  • GraphQL API

  • Make your content available to other applications with a self-generating GraphQL API.

  • System branding

  • Personalize the Control Panel for your brand.

  • Basic Developer Support

  • Get developer-to-developer support directly from the Craft CMS team.

Enterprise

For when the project has specific licensing requirements and needs.

Contact sales for pricing.

  • Everything in Pro plus:
  • Priority Technical Support

  • Procurement

  • Custom Licenses

  • Launch Support

What platforms does Craft CMS support?

Craft CMS is available for Self-Hosted and PHP .

Top Craft CMS Alternatives

October CMS

October is a free, open-source and self-hosted content management system written in PHP on top of the framework Laravel. The CMS features a universal extendable dashboard, inspector, reusable CMS components and a plugin system that can be used to extend functinality of your website. The plugin store contains thousands of community-made plugins that can either be purchased or installed for free. As a data store, October CMS supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite.

Free & Open Source
👍 Most people think October CMS is a good alternative to Craft CMS.

WordPress

WordPress powers roughly 30% of all web pages online. It's a free and open source CMS designed and developed for self-hosted publishing by Automattic, Inc. The software is written in PHP and utilize either MySQL or MariaDB as a database, and is compatible with most web hosts. Wordpress includes a plugin architecture and a templating system that can be used to extend and customize your website. These are commonly known as WordPress plugins and WordPress themes and make up a whole open source and commercial eco-system where anyone is free to create products for the platform. 

Free & Open Source
👍 Most people think WordPress is a good alternative to Craft CMS.

Wagtail

Wagtail is a free and open-source CMS built on-top of Django and Python. The CMS is built by developers and for developers and provides a configuration-less solution to content management. Wagtail plays nicely with your existing tech, especially if that stack utilze Python and the Django web framework. Wagtail can be installed as a package in existing Django application and extends the Django Admin to be more suited for content management.

Free & Open Source
👍 Most people think Wagtail is a good alternative to Craft CMS.

The software Strapi Strapi is removed from the Top Craft CMS Alternatives since you are comparing against it. If you are looking for more software, applications or projects similar to Craft CMS Craft CMS we recommend you to check out our full list containing 98 Craft CMS Alternatives.

Craft CMS Gallery

What is Strapi?

Strapi is a free and open source headless CMS developed with JavaScript for Node.js. The software makes it really simple to generate REST and GraphQL APIs. Simply create your database schema and relationships in the Strapi admin panel UI, and Strapi will auto-generate API endpoints to represent the data structures provided. Strapi comes packed with features you come to expect from normal CMS's such as authentication, authorization, content management and a media library. The software can be used for free and can be self-hosted on any server and platform. Extra enterpise functionallity is currently being developed, and will be sold at cost.

How much does Strapi cost?

Bronze Plan

$9 per admin user/month, self-hosted

  • Granular access controls
  • Billing & License support

Silver Plan

$29 per admin user/month, self-hosted

  • Granular access controls
  • Guidance & Assistance
  • Customer Success Manager

Gold plan

contact sales for a quotation, self-hosted

  • Granular access controls
  • Single Sign-On
  • Technical support with SLAs
  • Customer Success Manager
  • Technical onboarding

What platforms does Strapi support?

Strapi is available for Self-Hosted , JavaScript and Node.js .

Top Strapi Pros & Cons

Does not handle database migrations

Strapi is a fantastic open-source CMS and API creation tool for frontend developers. However, one of the biggest concerns I have with Strapi is that your application does not record nor manage database migrations after schema changes to your database. This is a crucial part of building a sound and future proof application, without a record of schema changes things can get hairy quickly. It's kinda like building an application without using Git to track code changes.

Freddie
Freddie
4 years, 2 months ago
Con

Auto-generated GraphQL API and schema with the help of the "Shadow CRUD"

Possibly the fastest way to create a basic GraphQL API. With the help of Strapi graphQL plugin you can have your GraphQL API up and running in a matter of minutes. Where all necessary types and resolvers are auto-generated by Strapi's Shadow CRUD system. Simply install the plugin, and you can start using your GraphQL API with GraphiQL interface at /graphql.

Freddie
Freddie
4 years, 2 months ago
Pro

Quick and easy installation

I love the fact that Strapi is extremely easy to install. The Strapi CLI will guide you through the process of installing the headless CMS manually. A bunch of one-click-install's and containers are available for third-party platforms and hosting providers as well.

Millen
Millen
4 years, 2 months ago
Pro

Top Strapi Alternatives

Directus

An open-source tool for managing content across all your omni-channel digital experiences. Directus is free and open-source headless CMS written in PHP, that takes a data first approach. Developers and content creators use Directus to manage content and generate a powerful API that can be used by any frontend technology. Directus can be self-hosted and is absolutely free.

Free & Open Source
👍 Most people think Directus is a good alternative to Strapi.

Squidex

Squidex is 100% open source headless CMS, built by passionated developers. With Squidex both individuals and organizations can handle content for the new web with ease. Squidex modular platform allows users to create content APIs that can be consumed by any frontend framework or technology in a matter of minutes. The framework itself can also be extended and tweaked to suite individual use-cases. Squidex is provided as a fully open source software released and free of charge, for the self-hosted community edition. For organizations that want to get up and running fast, commercially hosted solutions are provided.

Freemium & Open Source
👍 Most people think Squidex is a good alternative to Strapi.

Netlify CMS

Netlify CMS is a static site generator that is based on client-side JavaScript with a reusable APIs and prebuilt Markup. Simply pull in Netlify CMS to /admin of you site and you have an SPA (Single Page Application) admin panel that can edit content stored in a Git repository. Serving applications like this, the JAMstack way, improves performance, lowers cost of scaling and provides for a better development experience.

Free & Open Source
👍 Most people think Netlify CMS is a good alternative to Strapi.

The software Craft CMS Craft CMS is removed from the Top Strapi Alternatives since you are comparing against it. If you are looking for more software, applications or projects similar to Strapi Strapi we recommend you to check out our full list containing 92 Strapi Alternatives.

Strapi Gallery