Best Headless CMS Platforms in 2026

Contentful is a hosted, API-first content platform in which editors model content as typed entries that are delivered to websites, apps and other channels through APIs. Salesforce announced a definitive agreement to acquire the company on 1 June 2026 and states that it completed the acquisition on 1 September 2026; Salesforce positions Contentful as the content layer of its Headless 360 offering. Contentful continues to sell its own plans. The pricing page lists a Free plan at US$0 with 10 users and 100,000 API calls a month, a Lite plan at US$300 a month for a single project with up to 20 users and one million API calls, and a quote-based Premium tier; paid plans add overage charges for API calls and asset bandwidth.

Sanity combines a hosted datastore, the Content Lake, with Sanity Studio, an editing interface that developers configure in JavaScript or TypeScript. The Studio is published on GitHub under the MIT License, so teams can customise the editing environment extensively while the content itself is stored and served by Sanity. Content is queried with GROQ, Sanity's own query language, designed to return exactly the fields an application needs. Pricing has three tiers: a Free plan at US$0, a Growth plan at US$15 per seat per month, and an Enterprise plan with custom pricing. Seat-based billing keeps costs low for small editorial teams, while usage-heavy projects tend to move to Enterprise contracts.

Strapi is an open-source headless CMS written in JavaScript and TypeScript. The project describes itself as open source under the MIT licence, and the self-hosted Community edition can be deployed on any Node.js infrastructure. Strapi 5 exposes content through a REST API by default, with GraphQL available through a built-in plugin. For teams that do not want to run their own servers, Strapi Cloud is priced per project: Starter at US$35, Pro at US$90 and Business at US$450 per project per month, with annual billing reducing the price by up to 17 percent. The combination of an MIT licence and an optional managed service gives organisations a path from self-hosting to hosted operation without changing platforms.

Storyblok was started in Austria in 2017 by Dominik Angerer, its chief executive, and Alexander Feiglstorfer, its chief technology officer; the operating company is Storyblok GmbH. The product is a headless CMS whose distinguishing feature is a visual editor that shows editors a live preview of the page they are changing, while developers keep control of the front end through a component model. Published plans are Starter (free), Growth at US$99 a month (US$90.75 a month billed annually) and Growth Plus at US$349 a month (US$319.91 a month billed annually); Premium and Elite tiers are quote-only through sales. The visual approach makes it popular with marketing teams that are used to page-builder workflows.

Contentstack sells a headless CMS as part of a broader digital experience platform. In January 2025 it announced the acquisition of Lytics, a real-time customer data platform, in a deal that closed in December 2024, and it now packages structured content, customer data and personalisation together; the company's boilerplate names Steve Madden, LG Electronics, Costco and ABN AMRO among its customers. Contentstack now publishes self-serve pricing: a Free plan at US$0, Build at US$29 a month with pay-as-you-go overages, Growth at US$299 a month including 10 users (additional users US$25 per user per month) and a custom-priced Enterprise plan. The product is aimed primarily at large brands running many sites and markets.

Payload is an open-source headless CMS and application framework built on Next.js and TypeScript, in which content schemas are defined in code. Figma announced on 17 June 2025 that Payload had joined the company, stating that Payload would remain open source and that Figma would continue to invest in the project. Payload is MIT-licensed and can be deployed free of charge anywhere a Node.js application runs; the vendor's pricing page lists no prices for managed or enterprise options and directs enterprise buyers to sales. Because the admin panel and APIs live inside the developer's own application, Payload suits teams that want a CMS to behave like part of their codebase rather than a separate service.

Hygraph began with the goal of building a headless CMS that was fully GraphQL native and traded as GraphCMS until it rebranded as Hygraph in July 2022. Its distinguishing feature is Content Federation, which lets a single Hygraph GraphQL API include content from external REST or GraphQL sources through remote fields and a caching layer, without migrating that content into Hygraph. Published plans are Hobby at US$0, Growth from US$199 a month and a custom-priced Enterprise plan. The federation model is aimed at organisations that need to combine CMS content with data held in commerce, product-information or other back-end systems.

Directus is a backend and headless CMS that connects to an existing SQL database and generates REST and GraphQL APIs plus an administration app on top of it, rather than imposing its own content store. The code is source-available under the Monospace Sustainable Core License 1.0. Directus moved its website from directus.io to directus.com. Its pricing page lists a Core plan at US$89 a month billed yearly or US$99 monthly, a Team tier and a custom Enterprise tier; self-hosting is available on every tier, and organisations with under US$5 million in annual revenue and fewer than 50 employees can apply for the Open Innovation Grant, which makes self-hosted use free.

Prismic is a hosted headless CMS that organises content into reusable page sections called slices, which developers build as components in frameworks such as Next.js, Nuxt and SvelteKit and editors assemble into pages. Pricing is set per repository and paid annually: Free at US$0, Starter at US$10, Small at US$25, Medium at US$150 and Platinum at US$675 a month, with a custom-priced Enterprise plan. The low entry tiers make it a frequent choice for agencies and small marketing sites, while the slice model gives editors page-building flexibility within limits set by developers.

DatoCMS began in 2015 as an internal tool for an Italian web agency and describes itself as a bootstrapped, independent company that does not take venture capital. Its Content Delivery API is written in GraphQL and served through a content delivery network, while a separate Content Management API handles writes. Pricing consists of a Free plan, a Professional plan starting at €149 a month billed annually or €199 billed monthly, and a custom Enterprise plan. The product is used mainly for content-driven websites built with static-site and server-rendered JavaScript frameworks.

Kontent.ai started in 2015 as an internal start-up at Kentico, launched as Kentico Draft in 2016, became Kentico Cloud in 2017 and Kentico Kontent in 2019, and has operated as the standalone company Kontent.ai since 2022; it reports six offices in six countries. The product focuses on governed content operations for large organisations, with workflow, permissions and content modelling for multiple brands and markets. Kontent.ai does not publish plan prices: its pricing page offers a calculator based on user seats, content types and content items, and buyers request a tailored quote from the sales team.

Builder.io offers a visual CMS, labelled Content in its product line-up, that lets marketing and content teams build pages visually while developers register their own components through SDKs for JavaScript and mobile frameworks. The company sells per-user plans: Free at US$0, Pro at US$24 and Team at US$40 per user per month, with custom-priced Enterprise contracts. The pricing page offers both monthly and annual billing, and its Enterprise tier is sold through the sales team. Builder.io describes the headless product as a central hub for structuring, governing and distributing content to any front end across brands, locales and channels. Builder.io has increasingly positioned itself around AI-assisted design-to-code tools, so the CMS is one part of a wider product rather than its sole focus.