Learn why you should choose a headless CMS like Cosmic over any other
Cosmic vs. Strapi
The purpose of this Headless CMS comparison page is to outline the differences between the Cosmic headless CMS and other available content management solutions. By comparing technology, maintenance, security, features, and cost analysis, it is our goal to show you the benefits and tradeoffs to help you decide if the Cosmic Headless CMS is the right solution for your team.
About Strapi
Strapi is an open source Node.js Headless CMS that offers the ability to build customizable APIs. Cosmic is an alternative to Strapi that your developers and content creators will love.
Developers and Creators
Check out the Cosmic API docs and the Strapi API docs to see the difference in approach.
Cosmic provides everything your team of developers and content creators need: powerful and intuitive APIs for developers, and an easy-to-use dashboard for content creators. We've removed all complexity and CMS maintenance, so your team can focus on building great products faster, together.
Additional Maintenance
With Strapi, you will need to maintain and host everything yourself, adding additional development costs to your projects. With Cosmic, we provide a hosted web dashboard so can focus on what really matters: creating great content and user experiences, not CMS infrastructure and maintenance.
Cosmic | Strapi | |
|---|---|---|
| Technology | API-first platform with REST API. Built-in AI agents for content creation, code generation, and automation. No proprietary query language to learn. | MongoDB database, Node.js. |
| Scalability | Fully managed, globally distributed infrastructure. Scales automatically with no configuration. AI agents scale with your content needs. | Does not scale easily. Limited by your servers, hosting provider, and budget. |
| Security | SSL everywhere. Role-based access control included on all plans. | You manage the security yourself. No default data encryption at rest or in transit. |
| CMS maintenance | Fully managed platform. Zero maintenance, zero DevOps. Dashboard, media library, AI agents, and all tools hosted and updated automatically. | You deploy, host, and maintain everything yourself. Along with your application and content, you need to maintain updates and security for your CMS system. |
| Global caching | Global CDN with edge caching. Automatic cache invalidation on content publish. No configuration required. | No caching included out of the box. |
| Media CDN | Built-in imgix media CDN with on-the-fly image optimization, resizing, and transformation. AI image generation included on all plans. | No CDN included out of the box. |
| Image processing | imgix-powered transformations via URL parameters. AI image generation creates original images from text descriptions directly in the CMS. | Manually manage your own image sizes and optimizations. |
| Extendability | Webhooks, API integrations, and AI agents that connect to GitHub, Slack, WhatsApp, and Telegram. Multi-agent workflows for custom automation pipelines. | Themes and integrations. |
| Frontend | Works with any frontend framework. Official templates for Next.js, React, Astro, Vue, and more. Autopilot builds and deploys complete applications from a prompt. | Front end is decoupled from the backend CMS. |
| Number of projects | Free plan includes 1 project (bucket). Paid plans include 2 to 5 projects with additional projects available as add-ons. | One login, multiple projects. |
| Annual costs | Free forever plan. Paid plans from $49/mo (Builder) to $499/mo (Business). AI tokens included on every plan. | You will need to hire developer resources to maintain the CMS. Average salary of a full-stack developer is $111,600 per year. You may need to hire 1-3 developers to maintain the CMS. |
Want a Comprehensive CMS Comparison?
Download our free 12-page guide comparing Cosmic, Contentful, Strapi, and Sanity. Learn about AI features, pricing, developer experience, and more.
Uptime you can depend on
Reliable infrastructure
No need to fear downtime for your content. Our service is built to auto scale through bursts of high traffic so you can focus on your content and business, we'll handle the infrastructure.
Upgrade your uptime
Get a 99.95% uptime guarantee with our Enterprise plans.
Trust our history
Check out our status page for historical uptime on our serverless, cloud infrastructure.
Ready to migrate to Cosmic?
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