The world of business is changing with the advent of the digital age. The Internet is more content-driven than ever before, with a greater impact on online visitors and customers. It’s evident that you need to provide high-quality content that helps businesses grow, connect with new people, and deliver great digital experiences. It’s clear that it should be created and published.

But it’s also true that delivering poor quality content can even deter you or your customers from a smooth digital journey. Being on the digital frontier is critical to improving your online experience. Proper use of tools to deliver quality content is a top priority for any business looking to make a statement.

The advent of headless content management systems has made publishing high-quality content easier. Unfortunately, traditional CMS tools have weren’t able to to meet the underlying user needs in many ways. Like providing the flexibility you need to integrate new delivery formats or distribute content into existing channels.

Then, the age of IoT (Internet of Things) moved into the human world, increasing the need for a headless CMS, which brings challenges to the traditional CMS. Learn what a headless CMS means.

What is Headless CMS?

Headless CMS is a pure back-end content management system, where content can be created and stored in the back-end and delivered anywhere as data via API to where ever you choose.

Essentially, a CMS lets you create, edit, and publish digital content without code. You can use it to change page layouts, add content, change the look and feel of your web shop, and more. However, traditional CMS platforms have tightly coupled front-ends and back-ends. These platforms often limit content delivery to a single website or mobile application.

A headless CMS uses APIs to decouple its front-end or “head” and deliver content to devices like mobile devices, tablets, digital signage, AR and VR, and anywhere a potential customer sees your content.

• Headless CMS Capabilities
• Modeling, creating and authorising content
• Organising content repositories
• Improving workflow and collaboration
• Advanced image & Digital asset management
• Access controls

Let’s take a look at some advantages of headless CMS:

• Flexibility: Transitional CMS can be very restrictive and frustrating. A headless CMS allows you to design your front-end. Plus, with a well-defined API, more time is spent creating content rather than managing it.
• Compatible: Publish content on any smart device while controlling the back-end from one device.
• Secured: Using this environment prevents malware attacks because the content publishing environment is not accessible from the database.
• Scalable: Front-end and back-end are separated, so no separate maintenance is required. This allows you to customise your website at any time without sacrificing performance.
• Control: No rules, full developer control. Developers can integrate with any code base and use any language of their choice.

Now that we know what a headless CMS is, let’s take a look at some of the headless CMS available on the market.

1. Strapi

Strapi is the leading open source headless CMS for developers. It’s a self-hosted app, supports multiple databases like SQLite, MySQL, Postgres, GraphQL, RESTful, 100% JavaScript, auto-generated documentation, and is secure.

For end-users, Strapi has an API editor that users can use as a media library to upload images, videos, or other files. It is a flexible content manager and has a user-friendly interface.

Strapi includes customisable APIs, role-based access control (RBAC), SSO authentication.

2. CraftCMS

CraftCMS is an open-source content creator system with an easy-to-use interface that aims to make life easier for both developers and content managers. Users can create entry types and custom fields, and easily create relationships between entries. It also has a matrix field that allows users to create repetitive, lengthy content.

It includes an intuitive and accessible control panel, an auto-generated GraphQL API, a robust framework for developing custom modules and plugins, an integrated templating system, a headless API, and much more. features and is self-hosted, giving you complete control over your data and infrastructure.

3. ApostropheCMS

ApostropheCMS is an open source website builder for building custom solutions for enterprises, digital agencies, SaaS companies, universities, businesses, and more. This app is powerful, flexible and easy to use.

Provides drag-and-drop contextual live editing, real-time editing, manages your entire business from a single dashboard, integrates with native modules and flexible content APIs, and provides dynamic enablement styling Uses many visual design tools

Built on technologies such as Node.js, Express, MongoDB, Vue.js and released under the MIT license.

4. BoltCMS

BoltCMS is an open source CMS with extensive headless functionality. It is based on Symfony 5. Which is a popular PHP framework packed by a large community. It offers a completely headless experience using RESTful and GraphQL APIs.

BoltCMS comes with a built-in internationalised experience for your created content, the CMS itself acts as a rich dashboard of generated APIs that works seamlessly without any configuration.

5. SonicJS

SonicJS is a headless CMS using NodeJS, Express Framework, Bootstrap 5 with multiple database backends including MongoDB, MySQL, MS.SQL Server, DashDB, DB2, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, and even flat file and in-memory databases.

It comes with a rich dashboard that offers a rich page builder, dynamic content creation, form builder, custom content/field types, and an advanced user management system that supports extensive permissions.

6. Payload CMS

Payload is a free, open-source, headless CMS built on top of Node.js technologies such as TypeScript, React, and Express. It uses MongoDB as the database backend.

Features a clean and uncluttered admin control panel, extensive documentation, and a developer-friendly structure to build websites, CMS, mobile apps, e-commerce solutions, and any web app.

7. dotCMS

dotCMS is a hybrid content management system CMS integrated with Java. Providing the most flexible API-first infrastructure. Used by marketers and developers.

Lets you create and reuse content to create connected, engaging and memorable digital products. It also gives users the scalable and flexible enterprise content management capabilities, drag-and-drop editor experience, secure workflows, multi-language, and multi-tenancy capabilities they need.

dotCMS is secure, scalable and fully customisable. This allows you to set up authoring and publishing environments across geographic regions.

8. Webiny

Webiny is a self-hosted, serverless, open source enterprise CMS that helps you keep your data within the security perimeter of your own infrastructure. All written in TypeScript.

This CMS lets you manage content, create and deploy websites and forms, centralise all projects, and use sophisticated processes to support enterprise-wide collaboration.

Keep your data in your own cloud and run it in a highly scalable, fault-tolerant, serverless service. Used by marketing teams to manage content, landing pages, files, forms, and support multisite.

It has built-in utilities that reduce risk and ensure quality and control. B. Website Reliability, Content Control, and Access Control. This allows you to customise every aspect of the platform.

9. KeystoneJS

KeystoneJS is an open source programmable backend that allows you to create highly customised CMS and APIs in minutes.

It is the next generation development workflow and evolution platform. Automated CRUD, extensible GraphQL API, next-gen WYSIWYG, session management, 100% typescript, custom roles and access, flexible relationships, powerful filtering, database migrations, rich field types, event hooks, intuitive CLI It has many functions such as design schemas, customize content stories, query data and make it available anywhere.

10. Umbraco Heartcore

Umbraco Heartcore is a headless CMS with a powerful backend and editor experience that allows you to interact with your content in a comfortable, structured, logical and scalable way.

Users no longer have to worry about time-consuming administrative tasks, it helps them create great content, and it looks beautiful on the front end they create. It has a managed API. This means all user content is automatically served via RESTful APIs and written in C#.

11. Superdesk

Superdesk is a state-of-the-art digital newsroom system. It features powerful workflow capabilities for an end-to-end platform for news creation, production, curation, and distribution.

Superdesk workflows are created and controlled by editors. The system manages the production process from creation to distribution across all channels and uses flexible item templates to save time and effort.

12. Statamic

Statamic is a Laravel+ Git based open source CMS designed for building beautiful and manageable websites. Until you need a database, you don’t have a database.

Front-to-back CMS until you have to go headless. Full stack until you switch jam stacks. It has a nice control panel.