I tried 5 Content Management Systems - Which One is Best?

5 Content Management Systems

A little while ago, we decided to add a blog to our website. So the question was, which CMS to choose? We tested a bunch of options and I want to share with you how we made the decision.

Wordpress

A headful CMS like Wordpress comes with a UI and everything preinstalled. I had previously worked with Wordpress and even though you can spin up something quickly, I just did not like it. You can either rely on third party plugins for everything, or develop your own extensions. But we are neither php developers nor do we have any interest in becoming Wordpress experts. And the whole third party plugins ecosystem is just a mess.

Storyblok

There are great headless alternatives to Wordpress. Headless means, you build the UI and the CMS provides you with an api to just fetch your content. Apart from having full flexibility about the UI there some more benefits like, scalability and multi platform support.

I used Storyblok in the past and liked a lot, but this is a fully managed solution and can get pricy very quickly. Also I just migrated another blog to Storyblok and I can tell you: provider lock-in with content is real! It can be a huge pain having to migrate all of your content to a different provider, so choosing a good CMS is crucial!

Strapi

There are headless Open Source alternatives like Strapi. I tried Strapi before, but coming from Storyblok I did not really warm up with it. I guess it mostly comes down to what you are used to working with... Other than that, I think self hosting Open Source tools can be a great option and with the Docker + sliplane.io combination, it becomes very manageable.

Decap CMS

Decap CMS falls into the category of file based CMSs. It's a very lean approach, that resonated with me from the beginning. You store your articles and content pieces in json or markdown files and the CMS plugs this content into html templates. This eliminates the need for a database, since you can query the content directly from the filesystem. It is a super lean and super fast alternative to get started! Although, at a certain scale, file based CMSs have their limitations...

A Git based CMS is just a version of a file based CMS where content is stored in your repository, so you can easily share it and benefit from versioning. Decap also ships with a web based editor that commits content changes directly to your repo.

Although I really liked the idea behind Decap, the repo does not seem very well maintained and for our use case there is an even leaner solution.

Nuxt Content

Nuxt Content is also file based. It's specifically made for the Nuxt framework, so it does not really fit everywhere, but since we are using Nuxt in our frontend, it was obvious to give it a shot.

Nuxt Content follows an interesting hybrid approach. You organize your content in files, but in a build step the CMS indexes your content in a SQLlite database. This has the additional benefit, that you can run some more advanced queries on your content, like searching for example.

With Nuxt Studio, they also provide a nice web based editing interface - although this is not required and we don't use it.

Biased Comparison of CMS systems

Summary

For our blog we went for Nuxt content. As we are just starting out we wanted to keep it as lean as possible in the beginning and a file based CMS is the way to go. Since we are already using Nuxt, Nuxt Content it is!