10 Best Headless CMS of 2026

Sanity ranks first because it pairs a flexible content model with one of the most generous free plans in the category. The free tier allows up to 20 user seats, 2 public datasets, 10k documents, unlimited content types and locales, and 1m API CDN requests a month, which covers many production marketing sites. Developers configure the open-source Sanity Studio in React and query content with GROQ or GraphQL, and editors get live previews, visual editing and real-time collaboration. The Growth plan costs $15 per seat per month and adds private datasets, more roles, comments, tasks, scheduled drafts and AI Assist, with pay-as-you-go charges above the included quotas, such as $1 per 25k extra API requests. The drawbacks are that the studio needs developer setup before editors can use it, and some add-ons are expensive: an extra dataset is $999 per month and dedicated support is $799 per month. Enterprise adds SSO, custom roles and an uptime SLA.

Storyblok ranks second because it is the easiest tool here for non-developers to work in day to day. Developers define components once, and editors arrange them in the Visual Editor while seeing the live page, which cuts the back-and-forth that slows many headless projects. The free Starter plan includes 1 space, 1 seat (up to 2), 100GB traffic, 100k API requests and 2 locales, which suits testing and personal projects. Growth costs $99 per month, or $90.75 per month billed annually, and includes 5 seats (up to 10), 400GB traffic, 1M API requests, single story scheduling, SEO meta tags and integrations such as Shopify. Growth Plus at $349 per month bundles 15 seats, 1TB traffic and 10 locales. The weak spots are that GraphQL, custom roles, workflows and SSO sit on custom-priced Premium and Elite plans, and extra locales on Growth cost $20 each, so multilingual teams should price the higher tiers.

Strapi ranks third because it gives you a complete headless CMS for free if you can host it. The Community edition is open source under the MIT license and includes REST and GraphQL APIs, role-based access control, internationalization, webhooks, dynamic zones and unlimited entries and API calls, on Postgres, MySQL or MariaDB. Teams that do not want to run servers can use Strapi Cloud, where Starter costs $35 per project per month with 100k API requests and 50 GB of storage and bandwidth, Pro costs $90 with 1M requests and weekly backups, and Business costs $450 with daily backups and a 99.9% uptime SLA. On self-hosted projects, the Growth plan at $45 per month adds live preview, releases, content history and Strapi AI for 3 users. The trade-offs are the operations work of self-hosting, Cloud Starter projects that sleep when idle, and review workflows and audit logs that are only in the Enterprise edition.

Payload ranks fourth because it removes the separate CMS service entirely for teams that build on Next.js. You write a Payload config in TypeScript, and the framework generates a full admin panel, a database with migrations, REST and GraphQL APIs, authentication, access control, file storage and live preview, all in one open-source codebase you own and deploy anywhere. Payload installs into a new or existing Next.js app, so the CMS and the website can ship together, and the auto-generated React admin UI can be extended with your own components. File uploads include image resizing and focal-point cropping. Payload also promotes visual editing and RAG vector embedding for AI features, and sells enterprise features such as SSO, publishing workflows and A/B variant testing through its sales team. The cost is in effort rather than money: every content type is defined in code, there is no visual schema builder, and you are responsible for hosting, scaling and backups.

Prismic ranks fifth and is the cheapest paid hosted option on this list. The free plan covers 1 user, 4 million API calls a month, 100 GB of CDN bandwidth, 2 locales and the Visual Page Builder, with unlimited documents, types and assets. Starter costs $10 per repository per month paid annually and adds 3 users and 3 locales, Small costs $25 for 7 users, Medium costs $150 for 25 users and user roles, and Platinum costs $675 with unlimited users and 10 million API calls. Developers build reusable slices, and editors combine them into pages, which keeps designs consistent while letting marketers launch new layouts. Prismic's pricing page says its plans have not changed while some competitors raised their floors. The limits are the single user on Free, user roles that only arrive at the Medium tier, and a product shaped around websites rather than content for many channels, so app-heavy teams may find Sanity or Contentful more flexible.

Contentful has the broadest feature set here but ranks sixth because its pricing jumps sharply after the free tier. The free plan includes 10 users, 2 roles, 2 locales, 100K API calls and 50 GB of CDN bandwidth a month, with no overages. The Lite plan costs $300 per month and adds 20 users, 3 locales, 1M API calls, 100 GB of bandwidth, comments, task management, scheduled publishing and live collaboration, with paid overages allowed. Developers get a long list of APIs, including content delivery, preview, management, image, sync and GraphQL, plus client libraries, a CLI and an App Framework for custom apps. Enterprise plans add custom roles, SSO, SCIM, EU data residency, multi-region delivery, up to a 99.99% uptime SLA, and add-ons for personalization, AI Actions and Studio. For small teams, though, the $300 step from Free to Lite is much higher than Sanity, Prismic or Storyblok.

DatoCMS ranks seventh as a well-rounded hosted CMS for teams that work mainly in GraphQL. Its documented features include a GraphQL Content Delivery API, a Real-time API, Images and Video APIs, a structured text editor, dynamic layouts, visual editing and cache tags for fine-grained invalidation, plus plugins and AI and automation tools. The free plan is free forever with 2 editors, 300 records, 10GB of traffic and 100k API calls a month, and allows up to 3 projects, but there are no overages: when you reach a limit, the service stops responding as expected. The Professional plan raises the limits to 10 collaborators, 100k records and 1TB of monthly bandwidth, with add-ons for extra projects, environments, locales and records. From our location the pricing page showed euro prices only, so we have marked the USD price as pending. The 300-record free cap is tight for anything beyond a small site.

Hygraph ranks eighth and stands out for content federation. Its GraphQL API can pull in data from remote sources, so a product page can combine editorial content from Hygraph with prices or inventory from another service in one query. The free Hobby plan includes 3 seats, 2 locales, 10 components, 1,000 entries, 500,000 API calls, 100 GB of asset traffic, unlimited asset storage, live preview and commenting. Growth starts at $199 per month and raises the limits to 10 seats, 3 locales, 10,000 entries, 1M API calls and 500 GB of traffic, with one remote source, two environments, 14-day version retention and email support. Enterprise adds scheduled publishing, SSO, custom roles, taxonomies, audit logs and custom SLAs, and Hygraph offers a 30-day Enterprise trial without a credit card. The main drawback is the gap between a tight free tier and a $199 first paid plan that still lacks scheduled publishing.

Contentstack ranks tenth because most of its depth sits in the Enterprise tier, but its entry plans are now easy to try. The free plan has no expiration and includes 1 production stack, 3 users, 100K API calls, 100 GB of bandwidth, 10 content types, 1K entries and 2 locales, plus the headless CMS, Visual Editor, Brand Kit, Agent OS and Launch hosting. Build costs $29 per month and adds a custom domain, 250K API calls, 250 GB of bandwidth and pay-as-you-go overages. Growth costs $299 per month with 10 users, 1M API calls, 1 TB of bandwidth, custom workflows, 2 custom roles and email support, and extra users cost $25 per user per month. Enterprise adds the Lytics CDP, personalization, Flows for omnichannel orchestration, a choice of AWS, Azure or GCP data centers and a 99.5%+ uptime SLA. Small teams will hit the 3-user limit fast, and the step from Build to Growth is steep.

Directus ranks ninth and is a different kind of headless CMS: it sits on top of a SQL database, and each collection maps directly to a database table, so it suits teams that already have data and want an admin studio and API over it. The Core plan costs $89 per month billed yearly or $99 monthly and includes 3 user seats, 25 collections, 5 automation flows, an AI Assistant and advanced role-based access control. The Team plan adds 10 SSO seats, 50 collections and 20 flows, with extra seats at $50 per seat per month. Self-hosting is available on every tier, and Directus says organizations under $5M in annual revenue and fewer than 50 employees qualify for its Open Innovation Grant, which makes self-hosting free. Directus Cloud adds a hosting fee on Core and Team. The downsides are tight Core limits, no SSO on Core, and a large price gap before Team for teams that do not qualify for the grant.