Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation
80 comments
·August 31, 2025geocrasher
The answer isn't headless WordPress. It's WordPress.
You're building something for a volunteer community, which means at some point you'll be gone and somebody will be wondering how the heck to manage the site with this "custom" setup that they can't figure out with chatgpt or a youtube video.
Set them up for the future, not for the now. WordPress. Just WordPress.
Reference: 26+ years in hosting, 4 years in WordPress-only hosting.
aosaigh
Exactly. I don't know if they've gotten better, but I worked on a headless Contentful + Gatsby site (because the previous developers got sucked into JAMstack hype) and it was a comedic catastrophe.
It required constant developer oversight, even when only publishing one or two articles a week. Things broke all the time. Builds broke constantly. Things went wrong left right and center.
Don't do it. Give them a Wordpress site.
mdrzn
This is the only correct answer.
Wordpress, give them email and password, and a .pdf with screenshots on where to click to create a new post/page or edit stuff.
justinrubek
In my experience, wordpress is very confusing for non-technical people to navigate. It is largely not different than a "custom" setup because it's always some patched together job of various plugins to the point that it becomes brittle and difficult to work with. I get the sense that technical people think it is more straightforward and prescribe it to people, but any non-technical person I've worked with is utterly lost in it.
I don't think the LLMs change the argument either. If anything, dealing with the complexities of wordpress could make it even more difficult without someone who knows what they're doing.
Somewhere around 15 years ago, I thought wordpress was viable, but I think we need to leave it in the dust. I worked with it again 5 years ago, and the situation was no different from what I could tell.
farseer
Its just a website to post community events, don't think any plugins would be required.
geocrasher
That never stopped anybody from installing them.
dizlexic
I hate to agree because I hate WordPress, but when building something for others especially in a volunteer community it's still the go-to solution.
Pros, a ton of docs, easy non-technical customization, long term support, many already experienced users, made for basically exactly what you're doing.
Cons, it's WordPress, and the actual wp-loop is a nightmare of bad choices.
justinrubek
In every experience I've had, non-technical people have had a terrible time doing customizations. Not a single time have I ever seen them successfully navigate customizing pages without someone else stepping in. I see this as the worst case scenario: non-technical people can't do it and technical people also can't because they only have subpar tools to do so. I disagree wholeheartedly with this assumption.
dabockster
Same. Or maybe something using PHP just as a basic templating engine (like how people used to use it). Something that can be copy/pasted to a dime a dozen cPanel powered shared webhost at a moment's notice.
geocrasher
For better or worse, you just described WordPress.
type0
Why not Ghost instead?
michaelsalim
Most people don't know Ghost. Almost everyone knows wordpress
skeptrune
Keystatic[1] is awesome. It's local-first by default and made for static site builds, so you can keep costs low by not using a server.
I've used it alongside Astro for both my personal blog[2] and two company sites[3][4]. It's worked amazingly well each time.
[2] https://github.com/skeptrunedev/personal-site
blakeburch
I really enjoyed sanity.io a year ago. It had the best data structure flexibility by a mile, with the ability to have multiple user draft states and merge conflict resolution.
Other Headless CMS felt restrictive, with shared drafts or the requirement for all published items to have changes go live instantly.
Once you're set up with your schema, the UI is easy enough for non-developers (and you can customize it for them if needed).
codegeek
Why headless ? If non technical admin will post details about events, you can find a WordPress plugin for it and setup a WP site. Headless makes sense if you want to really customize the experience but you want "cheapest option" so I would assume they cannot pay for customizations anyway.
kevin_thibedeau
How else are they going to synergize with the latest paradigm shift?
Headless is for sharing a common backend between a web site and phone apps. If you don't have the resources for the apps then it serves little purpose.
rovr138
> Headless is for sharing a common backend between a web site and phone apps.
Or build/add an API when needed
edu
I’m building my personal blog with 11ty as a static site builder and Decap[0], previously known as Netlify CMS, to manage content.
Basically it provides a UI and all changes are pushed to GitHub which will launch the release process back in Netlify.
Seems it might fit your requirements too.
ngc6677
Also highly recommending decap CMS, or the svelte version sveltia[0]. With Gitlab backend and PKCE authorization, this CMS connects directly to gitlab without any other middleware (unlike when using Github, which will require one for the auth). With a gitlab pages + decap CMS + static site (jamstack), it is possible to have a site running at no cost. Currently having 20+ sites running this setup for clients and never hit an issue "modeling" the data as Decap config, widgets (also custom ones), can allow pretty much anything.
One downside for this setup, is that uploaded media are not re-sized or compressed (since there is no backend job doing it), so a client must be briefed into "making smaller images" (on the web client side with squoosh.app[2] for example), or using a SSG that does that built-in (hugo, gatsby)
1. https://decapcms.org/docs/gitlab-backend/#client-side-pkce-a...
leo_researchly
We recently landed on Strapi. There’s an open source version but we use the hosted one (for now). All in all good. There are a few quirks in the UI (sometimes smaller changes weren’t saved - although this might be a user issue from my side) and the markdown editor could be more user friendly.
We are sticking with it for now because it’s indeed good enough and I haven’t found any better options (give the price).
mkranjec
IIRC Strapi is a great option for green field projects. C/p from their docs:
"Strapi applications are not meant to be connected to a pre-existing database, not created by a Strapi application, nor connected to a Strapi v3 database. The Strapi team will not support such attempts. Attempting to connect to an unsupported database may, and most likely will, result in lost data."
Unfortunately, most of the time I do not have such luxury. What are the CMS options for pre-existing databases?
mierz00
I’m curious as to why you need to use a pre-existing database?
Can you run some migration scripts to port the old database content into a new CMS?
Y-bar
You have twenty good tips already, but nobody seems to have mentioned that you can run WordPress fully headless.
steviedotboston
Drupal works very well as a headless CMS now
https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/decoupled-drupal https://www.lullabot.com/resource/decoupled-drupal
Drupal has a really strong community behind it, and was completely rebuilt a number of years ago with modern PHP. It uses Symfony, composer, etc.
falibout
[dead]
rla3rd
Wagtail CMS, built on top of django. https://wagtail.org/
type0
I might be biased but I love wagtail mainly because of django, can't stand php insanity. I'm sure there are some good cms's written in Personal Home Page language, I just haven't seen any
whilenot-dev
Used directus[0] (v9) for a customer project[1]. I needed to sync the CMS content with meilisearch[2], so I had to write a custom extension that registers some hooks[3] for that. I discovered some weirdness in the API, since the payload of a hook behaves differently whether the CMS change gets triggered via UI event, API request, or CSV upload. Was a bit annoying, but got it working in the end. Don't know if that improved in later versions, but I honestly also didn't keep up with development since the license change.
[0]: https://directus.io/
[2]: https://www.meilisearch.com/
[3]: https://directus.io/docs/guides/extensions/api-extensions/ho...
wuhhh
Craft CMS - https://craftcms.com - is superb and still seems to be under the radar, I often wonder why it’s not more widely used
yodon
Headless is a constraint you added as a developer for yourself - it's definitely not a thing the users will care about. Ghost is a great, simple, batteries included non-headless CMS for things like you describe. Self-hosted or as a service.
I am exploring options for a headless CMS for a community website where a non technical admin will post details about events in the community like a meeting or volunteering done by the community. They don't have funding. What is the cheapest option out there?