How to choose the best headless CMS

Most "best headless CMS" lists rank platforms that solve different problems. A CMS that is excellent for one marketing site can be an expensive fit for a team running fifteen brand sites, and a platform built for fifteen sites is overkill for a personal blog. The useful question is which model matches your team.

This page compares the major options at the capability level. Every vendor claim links to the page it came from and the date it was read, so you can check our work.

All vendor figures on this page were read on September 25, 2026. Pricing changes often. Follow the source links before you commit budget.

How to evaluate a headless CMS

Five questions separate the options faster than any feature matrix:

1. How does the vendor charge? Per seat, per project, per API request, or per plan. This single decision drives your cost curve more than any feature.
2. Who runs the infrastructure? Fully managed SaaS, a vendor cloud on top of an open source core, or your own servers.
3. How many properties will you run? One site and fifteen sites are different purchases.
4. What does the read API look like? REST, a proprietary query language, or a typed SDK you can hand to a junior developer.
5. What does a non-technical editor actually see? If marketing has to file a ticket to change a headline, the CMS has failed regardless of its benchmarks.

Pricing models at a glance

The row that matters most is the middle column. A per-seat platform gets expensive as your team grows. A per-project platform gets expensive as your site count grows. A self-hosted platform moves the cost from a subscription line to an engineering line.

Cosmic

Charging model: per-project plans with a fixed team allowance, plus $29 per month for each additional user.

Cosmic is a fully managed headless CMS with a REST API and a TypeScript SDK. Plans, read from cosmicjs.com/pricing on September 25, 2026:

• Free: $0/month. 1 Bucket, 2 team members, 1,000 Objects.
• Builder: $99/month. 2 Buckets, 3 team members, 5,000 Objects.
• Team: $299/month. 3 Buckets, 5 team members, 20,000 Objects.
• Business: $499/month. 5 Buckets, 10 team members, 50,000 Objects.
• Enterprise: custom pricing.

Additional users are $29/user/month. Feature add-ons (Webhooks, Localization, Revision History, Automatic Backups) are $99/month each, or $199/month for all four bundled.

For teams running several properties under one bill, Cosmic also sells Workspace plans: Small Workspace at $999/month (10 team members, 5 Projects, 10 Buckets) and Large Workspace at $2,999/month or $32,389/year (30 team members, 10 Projects, 30 Buckets). Both include a 30-day free trial. Workspace feature add-ons are $199 each per month, or $399 bundled, applied across every Project in the Workspace.

Developer experience. Cosmic exposes a REST API and the official TypeScript SDK, @cosmicjs/sdk:

import { createBucketClient } from '@cosmicjs/sdk';

const cosmic = createBucketClient({
  bucketSlug: 'your-bucket-slug',
  readKey: 'your-read-key',
});

const { objects: posts } = await cosmic.objects
  .find({ type: 'posts' })
  .props(['title', 'slug', 'metadata'])
  .depth(1);

That is the whole setup. There is no schema compilation step and no local server to keep running in order to fetch content.

Editor experience. Content models are defined in the dashboard, so adding a field does not require a deploy. Maximilian Wuhr, Co-Founder at FINN, described the value this way: "Cosmic is: us never having to ask a developer to change anything on the backend of our website."

Best for: teams that want managed infrastructure, a predictable plan price, and editors who can ship without a developer. Cosmic is a Y Combinator W19 company.

Start free or compare plans.

Sanity

Charging model: per seat, with usage-based add-ons.

Read from sanity.io/pricing on September 25, 2026:

• Free: $0. Up to 20 user seats, 2 permission roles, 2 datasets (public only), 10k documents.
• Growth: $15 per seat/month. Up to 50 seats, 5 roles, 2 datasets (private or public), 25k documents, comments, tasks, and scheduled drafts.
• Enterprise: custom pricing, with SSO, custom roles, and an uptime SLA.

The add-on prices are where Sanity budgets tend to move. On the same page: Dedicated Support is +$799/month, the Increased quota add-on is +$299/month, and extra datasets are +$999 per dataset/month. Additional documents on Growth are listed at $299 for 50k in total.

Sanity's editor, Studio, is open source and built with React, and it is self-hosted or hosted by Sanity for free. Content is queried with GROQ, Sanity's own query language, and the pricing page lists GraphQL and GROQ query language support on all plans.

Best for: teams that want a deeply customizable editing environment and are comfortable learning a proprietary query language. The seat model suits small teams and gets expensive with large editorial groups.

Strapi

Charging model: per project, per month on Strapi Cloud. The CMS itself is open source and can be self-hosted.

Strapi Cloud plans, read from strapi.io/pricing-cloud on September 25, 2026:

• Starter: $35 per project/month. 100k API requests, 50 GB asset storage, 50 GB bandwidth. The page notes this tier "sleeps when idle."
• Pro: $90 per project/month. 1M API requests, 250 GB storage, 500 GB bandwidth, always on, CRON jobs, weekly backups, multi-environment.
• Business: $450 per project/month. 10M API requests, 1,000 GB storage and bandwidth, daily backups, 99.9% uptime SLA, 2 environments included.

Additional environments are +$60 per environment/month on Pro and +$300 per environment/month on Business.

Read that pricing again with a multi-site team in mind. Strapi Cloud bills per project, so ten brand sites on Pro is ten times $90 before you add environments. Self-hosting removes the subscription and replaces it with servers, database administration, and upgrade work that someone on your team owns.

Best for: teams with real DevOps capacity who want to own the stack, or single-project teams that fit inside one Cloud plan.

Payload

Charging model: open source and self-hosted.

Payload is a code-first CMS that runs inside a Next.js application. Its own page puts it plainly: "Anywhere you can run a Next.js app, you can run Payload."

There is important news here that affects any 2026 shortlist. As stated on payloadcms.com/cloud-pricing, read September 25, 2026, Payload has joined Figma. That page says Figma is committed to maintaining and investing in Payload's open source core, that deployment of new Payload Cloud projects is currently paused, and that no pricing changes are planned for existing Cloud customers.

The practical read: Payload remains a strong self-hosted option, and the managed hosting path is not currently open to new projects. If your plan depended on Payload Cloud, check that page before you build around it.

Best for: teams that want their CMS to live in the same repository and deployment as their Next.js app, and who are hosting it themselves.

Running more than one website

This is the decision most comparison posts skip. If you manage a portfolio of sites, a franchise network, a media group, or client sites as an agency, your cost is driven by how the vendor counts properties.

• Per-project billing multiplies with every site you add. Strapi Cloud's tiers are priced per project.
• Per-seat billing multiplies with every person you add, and shared editors across brands can help here. Sanity's Growth plan is $15 per seat/month.
• Portfolio plans put several properties on one bill. Cosmic's Workspace plans cover multiple Projects and Buckets under a single subscription.

Work out your real number of properties and your real number of editors before you compare sticker prices. The cheapest entry plan and the cheapest plan at your actual scale are frequently different vendors.

Talk through your setup with our CEO if you want a second opinion on the math.

If you are building with React or Next.js

React and Next.js are the most common front ends paired with a headless CMS, and every platform on this page supports them. The differences are in where the CMS lives relative to your app.

Payload runs inside your Next.js application, which means one repository, one deploy, and one thing to operate. Strapi runs as a separate service you host or buy from Strapi Cloud. Cosmic and Sanity are managed services your app fetches from over the network, so there is no CMS server in your deployment at all.

For a managed option, the integration is a data fetch inside a server component. With Cosmic, @cosmicjs/sdk returns plain JSON objects, so a Next.js App Router page reads content with a single awaited call and no client-side state. Static generation, incremental revalidation, and on-demand revalidation all work normally, because the CMS is an HTTP API rather than a framework plugin.

The thing to check before you pick is caching. Decide early whether pages are statically generated at build time, revalidated on a timer, or rendered per request, because that choice affects your API request volume, which is a billable unit on several of the platforms above.

We maintain deeper guides for both frameworks: React CMS covers wiring content into a React app end to end, and Next.js CMS covers the App Router specifics.

So which is the best headless CMS?

There is no single winner, and any page that declares one is selling something. Match the model to your situation:

• One site, small team, wants managed infrastructure: Cosmic or Sanity.
• Highly customized editing experience, developers comfortable with GROQ: Sanity.
• Full control, real DevOps capacity, comfortable self-hosting: Strapi or Payload.
• CMS in the same repo as your Next.js app: Payload.
• Several properties on one bill, editors who ship without developers: Cosmic.

The fastest way to settle it is to model one real content type in two or three of them. A weekend of building tells you more than a month of comparison tables.

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