Every platform here publishes a price. That is not the same as being able to predict what you will pay, because on most of them the step that matters is not usage, it is people. Storyblok's $99 Growth plan hard caps at ten seats. Directus goes from free to $499 a month with nothing in between. Hygraph goes from free to $199. Contentful steps from a free plan straight to $300 a month, with an additional Space licence at $850 on top of that. Prismic is the only one here with four published steps before Enterprise. Model the plan you will be on in year two, not the one you sign up on.
How this list was built
Six criteria, weighted for this category. Full definitions are at /methodology.
- Specialisation and fit · 35 · Feature depth, editor experience, and what breaks first at scale
- Client evidence · 20 · Who is verifiably running at scale on it
- Commercial transparency · 15 · Whether the published price survives a growing team
- Independent recognition · 10 · Ratings and analyst coverage, which barely separate anyone here
- Tenure · 10 · Migration is expensive and rarely reversed, so longevity is evidence
- Documented outcomes · 10 · Published performance and scale figures
Disclosure: this site runs on Sanity. We pay for it, it pays us nothing, and it is the one platform here we can speak about from daily use.
What these nine publish
- Seat caps stated, not only seats included: Storyblok, Prismic, Hygraph, Directus
- The price of an extra seat named publicly: Storyblok at $15, Directus at $50
- Per-unit overage rates rather than a quote: Sanity alone
- A published tier above the entry plan: all except Payload, whose hosted plans run through a get-started flow
- Priced per project or per site rather than per seat: Strapi and Statamic, so growing the team costs nothing
- Sales-led above the top published tier: all nine
Two things true of the whole category
Open source does not mean free. Payload, Strapi, Directus and Statamic can all be self-hosted at no software cost. You then own hosting, upgrades, backups and security, which is a real budget line and a real person's time.
Every one of these now ships an official MCP server, so an AI coding agent can read and write content on any of them. That is table stakes rather than a differentiator. What still differs is where your content model lives. On Payload, Sanity, Strapi, Statamic and Prismic it sits in your repository, so an agent reads it and a change is a reviewable diff. On Contentful, Storyblok, Directus and Hygraph it lives in the vendor's database. Each of those four ships a CLI or SDK that exports it, which is real and worth using, but it is a sync: someone editing in the admin creates drift your repository does not know about.
Pick on the constraint that will not move, because everything else is negotiable and this decision is not easily reversed.
Your editors must work without a developer. Storyblok. The visual editor is the product rather than a feature bolted alongside one, and no other platform here matches it for a marketing team that ships pages weekly.
You are building on Next.js and want one repository. Payload. The content model, the admin panel and the API are part of your application rather than a service beside it, and the generated types mean the front end knows every field name.
You want the content model reviewed in pull requests. Sanity, Payload, Strapi, Statamic or Prismic. On all five the model is files, so a schema change arrives as a diff rather than as something a colleague did in an admin panel on Tuesday.
You are shipping marketing pages fast with a small team. Prismic. The slice library keeps editors inside components you control, the pricing ladder has four published steps rather than a cliff, and pulling the model generates your types on the way through.
You have a database already in production. Directus. It sits on top of what you have rather than asking you to move content into a second store, which no other platform here offers.
You are publishing into several markets and languages at once. Contentful. Multi-space and multi-locale delivery is what it is genuinely best at, and it is the reason large organisations keep choosing it despite the cost.
You want to own the whole stack and extend the CMS itself. Strapi. Community edition is MIT, the plugin ecosystem is the largest here, and cloud pricing is per project, so adding editors costs nothing.
Several systems need to sit behind one API. Hygraph. Content federation pulls other services into the same graph, which nothing else in this list does natively.
You build many sites on Laravel. Statamic. A one-time licence per site rather than nine subscriptions changes the economics for an agency, though the headless APIs need the Pro tier.
If none of those constraints is binding, the honest answer is that Sanity, Payload and Storyblok will all serve a team of five to fifteen well, and the deciding factor will be whether your editors need to see the page while they work.
