Today’s consumers consider omnichannel and personalized content delivery a bare minimum requirement from the brands they interact with. Enterprises need to step up their digital experience game in order to get ahead. 

The choice of CMS is one of the biggest factors affecting any brand’s digital experience delivery. Headless CMSs are a great option for businesses that need to deliver content and experiences across multiple channels. By decoupling the frontend from the backend and implementing the right content modeling structures, enterprises can simplify content reuse and go to market faster with new channels. The benefits of a headless CMS include faster performance, easy multi-channel content delivery, and a high degree of flexibility and extensibility. 

Open-source headless CMSs help to reduce upfront costs for businesses. But there are many options in the market, and it can be difficult to know which one to use. 

In this article, we’ll compare two popular open-source headless CMSs: Umbraco and Strapi. 

Strapi

Strapi is a modern open-source headless CMS that is extremely developer-focused, making it very easy for developers to work with the API, content types, and built-in plugins. 

In fact, it is one of the most popular open-source headless CMSs after CMSs like WordPress which have been around for significantly longer than Strapi. 

Strapi can be used with RESTful and GraphQL APIs as well as frontend frameworks like Gatsby, Vue.js, Next.js, Angular, and React. 

It is self-hosted, and a good choice for businesses that don’t want to invest in a SaaS CMS and keep paying the monthly fee. Another advantage that a CMS like Strapi offers over a SaaS CMS is in terms of information security — data isn’t stored in a database that’s owned by the vendor, reducing the risk of breaches and loss of data. 

The content editor in Strapi (Source: Strapi)

Strapi’s goal is to empower users to create any project they might have in mind. And it delivers on its promise. Although it’s equipped with some defaults, you can customize every single aspect of this CMS — not only data models but also the entire admin panel. This gives complete freedom to developers and content editors to set up the content editing systems, permissions, folder structures, and more, according to their own preferences. Strapi also offers easy internationalization with unlimited locales for site visitors in different geographies. 

Users can also extend the CMS further with custom plugins. A collection of plugins is available via Strapi Market, the official plugin marketplace. 

Strapi is supported by an active community of users and developers who are always adding to the available pool of learning resources. New users can get access to detailed tutorials, ask questions in the community forum, check out other developers’ work through the community showcase, or connect with other developers at physical and virtual meetups.  

As an open-source CMS, Strapi is free for anyone to download and use. It’s used by brands like Toyota, Walmart, NASA, Accenture, and IBM. Enterprise plans are available which include features like granular access controls, support and guidance, and a dedicated customer success manager. 

Read Headless vs. Traditional vs. Hybrid CMS: A Comparison

Who should choose Strapi?

Strapi is a free, easy to use, self-hosted CMS that is suited to all kinds of projects. Whether or not you should choose it depends on how much customizability you need. If your project is one that requires some very custom workflows, a custom text editor, and so on, Strapi is probably the best option for you. Still if you’re in confusion take the help from Strapi development company.

Umbraco Heartcore

The open-source Umbraco CMS has been around since 2005, and has been implemented by 5 million users around the world. 

Umbraco’s headless offering, Umbraco Heartcore, is a CMS based on the classic Umbraco CMS. This means it has all the backoffice features that Umbraco’s users have known and loved — such as a highly intuitive editor experience, content repository, and delivery service — along with all the benefits of a headless CMS. This makes it a great choice for enterprise environments, as developers and editors can both benefit from its simple and intuitive features. If you’re not in developing and editing, then Umbraco development company can also be a good choice to get things done

Like Strapi, Umbraco Heartcore uses RESTful and GraphQL APIs. It has a user-friendly content and media structure, and can be customized by adding integrations. Umbraco Heartcore comes with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) — Cloudflare — to ensure that content delivery is fast and efficient no matter where in the world the user is located. 

Creating a project in Umbraco Heartcore (Source: Umbraco)

Umbraco Heartcore can also be used in a microservices context, as a collection of loosely coupled components. The language variants feature allows editors to quickly create content in different languages, with side-by-side editing, support for mandatory languages, and other features to support multilingual editing. 

Umbraco also has a vibrant and proactive community of over 220,000 developers that regularly organize community events and meetups, add to the documentation, share tips and tricks on the community forum, and create and share new packages (plugins) in the package library. 

Users can choose between four different pricing plans, depending on the complexity of their project. Pricing begins at USD 49 per month. The managed CDN is included in all plans. The CMS’s software is also managed and updated, so all you need to worry about is creating the frontend that will consume the API. With the managed API, all the content and media is automatically exposed. 

Umbraco is used by brands such as Carlsberg Group, Domino’s Pizza, Thomas Cook, RM Sotheby’s, the National Geographic Photo Contest, and Mercedes-Benz Private Lease. 

Who should choose Umbraco?

Umbraco’s USP is that while it offers great usability, it is also not overladen with all the features that more “all-in-one” CMSs might have. This makes it nimble and lean, with enough customization options for businesses which need it, and a simple, intuitive experience for those which don’t. 

Read 7 Critical Factors to Consider When Evaluating a CMS

The verdict

Both Strapi and Umbraco Heartcore offer features like access control, version control, content blocks, and multi-language support. Both have a rich text WYSIWYG editor, while Strapi is the only one that offers a drag-and-drop editor. 

Overall, in our comparison between Umbraco and Strapi, the two open-source headless CMSs are neck and neck in terms of the features and flexibility they offer to enterprise users. Customization is Strapi’s strong suit, though, so if you have some very specific requirements, Strapi is a good choice for you. However, both Umbraco Heartcore and Strapi are extremely versatile open-source CMSs that can be used for virtually any kind of project that requires headless CMS architecture.

Read Your 10-step Checklist for Migrating to a Headless CMS