Payload CMS

Payload CMS is an open-source, code-first headless CMS and self-hosted alternative to Contentful, Strapi, and Sanity for building content backends with full TypeScript support.

vs Contentful: Contentful is a cloud-only SaaS headless CMS with pricing that scales steeply by record count and API calls, becoming expensive at scale. Payload runs on your own infrastructure with no usage-based fees -- hosting costs only. Contentful has a mature ecosystem, managed CDN, and polished editor UX; Payload gives developers complete control over data models via TypeScript configuration and ships with its own admin UI, REST API, and GraphQL API out of the box.

vs Strapi: Strapi is the most direct open-source comparison -- both are self-hosted Node.js headless CMSs. Payload differentiates with first-class TypeScript support built into the core from v2, a code-first configuration model that version-controls schemas naturally, and deep Next.js integration. Strapi's GUI-driven schema builder is more accessible for non-developers and has a larger plugin ecosystem; Payload is preferred by engineering teams who want schema-as-code and type safety throughout the content layer.

vs Sanity: Sanity offers a hosted content lake with a generous free tier, real-time collaborative editing, and a flexible GROQ query language. Payload is fully self-hosted, giving teams complete data ownership with no dependency on a third-party content API. Sanity's hosted CDN and live collaboration features are hard to replicate with self-hosted Payload without additional infrastructure investment, but Payload is the better choice when data sovereignty or offline operation is required.