Editorial take
Why it stands out
With Strapi you need to think in two layers: CMS licensing and cloud hosting. It is easy to compare only the headline cloud price and forget that self-hosting shifts operations back to your team.
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Tool profile
Headless CMS for managing content through APIs across websites, apps, and digital products.
Jamstack and mobile backends you fully control
Strapi is a Node.js headless CMS: admin UI, REST and GraphQL APIs, plugins, and self-hosted control.
The Community Edition on GitHub is MIT licensed at $0—your costs are hosting, database, S3-compatible storage, backups, and engineer time for upgrades.
Strapi Cloud (PaaS) and Enterprise Edition (self-hosted license) add managed operations, SSO, role workflows, SLAs, and premium support. strapi.io/pricing-cms and cloud.strapi.io gate live USD prices behind plan pickers—capture quotes at purchase. Strapi AI may be a separate line item.
Compare Storyblok, Sanity, and Contentful when editors need more polished visual composing out of the box.
Quick fit
Editorial take
With Strapi you need to think in two layers: CMS licensing and cloud hosting. It is easy to compare only the headline cloud price and forget that self-hosting shifts operations back to your team.
What it does well
Primary use cases
Fit notes
Compare with
Pressure-test this pick against nearby alternatives.
Pricing snapshot
Strapi now publicly markets both its open-source CMS and Strapi Cloud hosting pricing. Community remains MIT-licensed at $0 plus your infrastructure. Strapi Cloud has a Free plan, with newer published yearly cloud prices of Essential at $15 per project, Pro at $75, and Scale at $375, while Scale+ and Enterprise remain custom or sales-led depending on hosting and CMS needs.
Directus
Free planInternal tools needing a polished admin on Postgres or MySQL
Open source data platform that adds APIs and a visual admin layer on top of SQL databases.
Versus Strapi Cloud: different hosting and extension models—pilot both.
