starter.wiki

Product

CMS

Choose editorial content architecture across site-centric, managed headless, self-hosted, and application-owned models.

Recommendation

Choose the content operating model before the CMS.

WordPress fits site-centric publishing; Sanity and Contentful managed structured content; Strapi self-hosted headless; Payload application-owned TypeScript.12

For: Teams modelling, authoring, governing, and publishing editorial content

Main trade-off

A CMS accelerates editorial operations and content delivery while coupling models, workflows, APIs, assets, permissions, runtime, migration, and commercial limits to the chosen architecture.12345

Four CMS architecture routes

Website ownership, structured-content operations, infrastructure, and application coupling lead to different systems.

  1. Content and editors

    Model types, references, assets, locales, preview, workflow, roles, history, collaboration, and publishing.3

  2. Delivery architecture

    Define page rendering, APIs, caching, search, webhooks, environments, release coupling, and availability.12

  3. Ownership and data

    Choose hosted versus self-operated runtime, database, assets, backups, regions, access, export, and migration.12

  4. Commercial shape

    Normalize seats, projects/spaces, records/documents, API/CDN, assets, locales, environments, support, and overages.13

CMS routes

Choose by editor workflow and system ownership rather than headless branding.

Site-centric publishing

Choose WordPress

The website, publishing interface, themes, and plugin ecosystem are the primary product surface.

Verify: Own or delegate runtime maintenance, updates, compatibility, security, performance, and recovery.1

Managed structured content

Choose Sanity for developer configuration or Contentful for enterprise content operations

Both delegate the content data plane; Sanity emphasizes a configurable Studio, while Contentful emphasizes established spaces, environments, locales, roles, and governance.

Verify: Test editor workflow, schema evolution, APIs, assets, projects or spaces, environments, usage, regions, export, migration, and plan-gated governance.12

Self-hosted standalone headless CMS

Choose Strapi

The team wants an extensible admin and content API service on controlled infrastructure.

Verify: Own deployment, database, assets, upgrades, backups, availability, and security; verify edition boundaries.4

Application-owned TypeScript CMS

Choose Payload

Schemas, admin UI, APIs, access control, and database integration should live with the product codebase.

Verify: Accept application coupling and ownership of database, files, migrations, deployment, and editorial release coordination.5

Boundary: This Task excludes website hosting, API documentation portals, digital asset management as a standalone decision, and implementation tutorials.

Content-system boundaries

Editorial publishing differs from operational data administration and general input collection.

CMS versus admin panel
CMS governs editorial models and publishing; Admin Panels operate application data.15
CMS versus forms
CMS publishes structured content; Forms collect submissions.2
Managed versus self-operated
Self-hosting transfers runtime, storage, upgrades, security, and recovery to the team.12
Standalone versus application-owned
A separate content service and an embedded application CMS create different release and failure boundaries.45

Official resources

Verify current product boundaries, deployment options, data handling, plan limits, pricing, and operating requirements in first-party material before adoption.

Starter stacks

Sources

Official product documentation supporting the bounded routes and decision criteria on this page.

  1. 1
    WordPress documentation

    WordPress · Accessed Official

  2. 2
    Sanity schema introduction

    Sanity · Accessed Official

  3. 3
    Contentful data model

    Contentful · Accessed Official

  4. 4
    Strapi documentation

    Strapi · Accessed Official

  5. 5
    Payload documentation

    Payload · Accessed Official