18 min read

Headless CMS Platforms Compared: WordPress, Sanity, Contentful and Strapi

Varun Dubey

Founder, Wbcom Designs · Published Nov 11, 2026 · Updated Nov 11, 2026

A headless CMS is a content system that stores and edits your content but does not build your web pages. Instead it hands the content to any front end, such as a website, an app or a kiosk, through an API. Headless CMS platforms differ mostly in who hosts them, what they cost as you grow, and how pleasant they are for the editors who use them every day. In short: WordPress is free software you host yourself and can run headless through its built-in REST API, Sanity and Contentful are hosted services you pay for by seat or by plan, and Strapi is open source software you can host yourself or rent from the vendor.

This guide compares those four platforms for a business owner or a project lead who has to choose one, with developer detail clearly marked. Prices come from each vendor’s own pricing page, read on 11 November 2026. Vendors change prices often, so use the numbers as a snapshot and check the linked pages before you commit. We run headless WordPress in production ourselves, so the WordPress sections are first-hand. For the other three we describe what the vendors publish, not hands-on experience, and we say so.

Headless CMS platforms at a glance

	WordPress	Sanity	Contentful	Strapi
Hosting model	Self-hosted, or on a WordPress host	Hosted service. The editing Studio can be deployed by you	Hosted service (software as a service)	Self-hosted, or Strapi Cloud
Licence	GPLv2 or later, open source	Studio is MIT-licensed; content hosting is Sanity’s service	Proprietary	Community edition is MIT-licensed open source
Starting cost	Software is free; you pay for hosting	Free plan, then $15 per seat per month	Free plan, then $300 per month	Free to self-host, then $45 per month for Growth
How cost grows	With server size and traffic you handle	With seats, plus usage overages	With plan tier and extra spaces	With users (self-hosted) or per project (cloud)
API	REST built in	Hosted content APIs and query language	REST and GraphQL	REST and GraphQL
Best fit	Content-heavy sites with existing editors and plugins	Developer-led teams that want a custom editing studio	Larger organisations that want a managed enterprise product	Teams that want open source and control over their own data

The rest of this post explains each column and then gives a decision table. If you only read one section, read the part on editors, because the people who log in every week usually decide whether a headless project feels like a success.

What a headless CMS is, in plain words

A traditional CMS does two jobs. It stores your content (pages, posts, products), and it also builds the web pages that visitors see, using themes. A headless CMS keeps only the first job. The second job moves to a separate piece of software called the front end. The two talk to each other over an API, which is a standard way for programs to ask each other for data.

Think of a restaurant kitchen. A traditional CMS is a restaurant where the kitchen and dining room are one building. A headless CMS is the kitchen only, sending meals out to a dining room, a delivery app and a food truck, each designed separately. You gain the freedom to serve in many places. You also now run several operations instead of one.

Why do people choose it? The common reasons are speed (the front end can be very light), reuse (one set of content for a site, an app and a screen), security (the public site does not run the admin software) and freedom for developers to pick modern tools. The common costs are more moving parts, more developer time, and the loss of things a traditional CMS gives you for free, such as live preview, themes and many plugins. We have written about those trade-offs before, so we will not repeat them in full here. Start with Headless WordPress with Astro: What It Is, and When It Is Worth It and, for shops, Headless WooCommerce: When It Is Worth It for a Store, and When It Is Not. If you are still deciding whether to leave WordPress at all, see Is WordPress Still the Right Base for Your Site? Six Routes and How to Choose.

This post answers a different question. Once you have decided that a headless approach fits, which platform should hold the content?

The questions that decide it

Before you compare vendors, answer these five questions. They narrow the field faster than any feature list.

Who writes the content, and how many of them are there? Seat-based pricing punishes big editor teams. Usage-based pricing punishes busy sites.
Do you want to host it yourself? Self-hosting gives control and a smaller bill at scale, and it also gives you updates, backups and security to look after.
How much content, in how many languages? Plan limits on records, documents and locales are where bills surprise people.
What do editors already know? Moving a team from a familiar editor to a new one is a cost that never appears on a pricing page.
How long must this last? A licence you can read and run yourself is a different risk from a service you rent.

WordPress as a headless CMS

What it is

WordPress is released under the GPLv2 or later licence, which means you may use, change and host it yourself at no licence cost. The WordPress REST API lets outside programs read and change a site’s content as structured data in the JSON format, and it ships with WordPress core. That is what makes WordPress usable as a headless CMS: your front end asks the REST API for posts, pages, images and custom content, and renders them however you like.

What it costs

The software has no price. You pay for hosting, and for developer time to build the front end. There is no per-seat charge, so a team of two editors and a team of fifty cost the same in licence fees, which is zero. Costs grow with traffic and server needs, and with how many commercial plugins you add for things like forms, SEO or custom fields. We cannot give a single monthly figure, because a small host and a large managed host differ by an order of magnitude, and we will not invent one.

The editor experience

This is the strongest card WordPress holds. Many editors already know it. The block editor, media library, revisions, scheduled posts, user roles and a huge plugin catalogue are there from day one. In a headless setup you give up some of it. Live preview of the real front end needs work, and plugins that print things on the page (sliders, form embeds, some SEO output) do not appear unless the front end reproduces them. Plan for that before you promise editors that nothing changes.

What we run, first-hand

We run WordPress headless in production. Four of our own sites (vapvarun.com, buddyxtheme.com, reigntheme.com and brndle.com) render their blogs at request time. The front end is Astro, deployed on Cloudflare Workers. A Worker fills a page shell from Workers KV, a key-value store, and on a miss it fetches the post from the WordPress REST API, stores the result in KV and returns it. The full account, with numbers, is in Headless WordPress request-time rendering. The facts that matter for a platform choice are these.

Size. Those sites hold between 586 and about 2,500 posts. Our own company site, wbcomdesigns.com, already used the same model with about 8,000 posts. A full static rebuild on every edit became too slow, which is why we moved to request-time rendering.
Freshness. Post entries stay fresh for 6 hours and list pages for 10 minutes, with stale copies served while a fresh one loads. Publishing clears the right keys, and a new post appears in about a minute.
Content still lives in WordPress. Posts are written and published in WordPress, and the front end reads them from its REST API, so the content model did not have to be rebuilt in a new system.
What went wrong along the way. A cached REST response from before publication made a live post return a 404 for up to a day, until we added a cache-busting value to every request. Two sites read the wrong SEO plugin’s field, so titles were silently missing for a time. A build token expired on 28 September 2026 and new posts stopped appearing on three sites until someone noticed. None of these are WordPress faults, and all of them are the kind of surprise a headless setup creates.

The lesson for a buyer: WordPress headless works well, and it needs someone who owns the front end, the caching and the monitoring. If that person does not exist on your team, the free licence is not the cheap option.

Who should choose it

Choose WordPress when you have a lot of existing content, editors who already know it, and a need to keep plugins for things like membership, commerce or community. Choose it when a zero licence cost and the ability to host and read the code yourself matter. Think twice if you want a product with a vendor accountable for uptime, or if your editors need a heavily customised content model with real-time collaboration, which the hosted platforms below do natively.

Sanity

What it is

Sanity’s documentation describes Sanity Studio as an open-source tool for real-time team editing. Developers define the content structure in JavaScript, and the Studio builds an editing interface from it that can be customised with React. The page says you can deploy the Studio yourself or use Sanity’s hosted option. The Studio repository is under the MIT licence. Sanity’s pricing page meters datasets, documents, API requests and bandwidth, which tells us that your content itself sits on Sanity’s servers. That is our reading of the pricing page, not a statement from Sanity.

What it costs

From the Sanity pricing page, read 11 November 2026:

Free: $0, with 20 user seats, 2 datasets (public only), 10,000 documents, 250,000 API requests and 1 million API CDN requests a month, and 100 GB of bandwidth.
Growth: $15 per seat per month, with up to 50 seats, 2 datasets (public or private), 25,000 documents and the same request and bandwidth allowances.
Enterprise: custom pricing.

Growth overages listed on the page include $1 per additional 25,000 API requests, $1 per additional 250,000 API CDN requests, $0.30 per additional GB of bandwidth, $299 for each additional 50,000 documents and $999 per additional dataset. A dedicated support add-on is listed at $799 a month. The page shows no pricing date, only a 2026 copyright line.

A worked example: ten editors on Growth would be about $150 a month in seats (10 times $15), before overages. That is easy to plan. The risk is a large content library: past 25,000 documents you pay extra, and the documents count includes every item, not only pages.

The editor experience

Sanity’s strength is a Studio shaped around your own content, with real-time editing by several people at once. That is excellent for a team that wants a custom workspace, and it means the quality of the editing experience depends on the developer who builds it. A plain, well-built Studio is pleasant. A neglected one is awkward. Compared with WordPress, editors lose familiar page-building habits and gain a tool designed around structured content.

Who should choose it

Sanity fits a developer-led team that treats content as structured data, wants a custom editing studio, and is happy to build the front end from scratch. It is a weaker fit for a site that depends on existing plugins, or for a non-technical owner who wants to change things without a developer.

Contentful

What it is

Contentful is a hosted, proprietary content platform sold as a service. Its pricing page lists a Content Delivery API, a GraphQL API, a Content Management API, webhooks, an app framework and client libraries. Projects live in units called Spaces, each with its own quotas. We did not test it. What follows comes from its pricing page.

What it costs

From the Contentful pricing page, read 11 November 2026 (the page returned an error to our automated fetch, so we read it in a normal browser):

Free: $0 forever, with 10 users, 2 roles, 2 locales, 100,000 API calls and 50 GB of CDN bandwidth a month, and one Starter Space.
Lite: $300 a month, with 20 users, 3 roles, 3 locales, 1 million API calls and 100 GB of bandwidth a month, plus comments, task management, scheduled publishing and live collaboration.
Enterprise: custom pricing, with unlimited API calls, custom users, roles and locales, an uptime service level of up to 99.99%, and dedicated customer success staff.

The Starter Space on Free and Lite allows 10,000 records, 25 content types and 2 environments. A larger Lite Space can be added for $850 a month and is limited to one; per the page it allows 50,000 records, 50 content types and 4 environments. Free has no overages, so you stop at the limit, while Lite allows paid overages. We did not find a price for Enterprise, which is normal for that kind of plan. Third-party price sites disagree with each other about Contentful, so we rely only on the vendor’s own page.

A worked example: a team of fifteen editors with a modest site fits in Lite at $300 a month. A site that outgrows 10,000 records needs the $850 Lite Space on top, which brings the monthly total to $1,150. That jump is the most important number on the page for a growing site.

The editor experience

Contentful offers a polished editorial interface, with scheduled publishing, comments, tasks and live collaboration on the Lite plan. The trade-off is that editors work inside Contentful’s model of Spaces, content types and references, which is structured and strict. Editors who think in pages may find it abstract at first, and a good setup includes preview links so they can see their work on the real site.

Who should choose it

Contentful suits organisations that want a managed enterprise product with support commitments, many locales and governance features, and have a budget to match. It is a heavy choice for a small marketing site, and the cost jump from Lite to a larger space is worth modelling before you start.

Strapi

What it is

Strapi’s documentation calls it an open-source headless CMS where developers build custom applications and editors manage content through an admin panel, using a Content-Type Builder to define the structure. Content is queried through REST and GraphQL APIs. The pricing page says the Community edition is open source under the MIT licence. It does not state the licence for the paid Growth and Enterprise editions, so we do not either.

What it costs

From the Strapi pages, read 11 November 2026 (neither shows an effective date):

Self-hosted Community: free forever, with role-based access control, REST and GraphQL APIs, unlimited usage and community support only.
Self-hosted Growth: $45 a month, with 3 users included and $15 a month for each extra user, plus Live Preview, Releases, 14 days of content history, basic support and 1,000 AI credits a month.
Self-hosted Enterprise: contact sales, adding single sign-on, review workflows, audit logs and a SOC 2 report.
Strapi Cloud (pricing): Starter at $35 per project per month with 100,000 API requests and 50 GB of storage, Pro at $90 with 1 million requests and 250 GB, and Business at $450 with 10 million requests and 1,000 GB. Entries are listed as unlimited on all three.

A worked example: ten editors on self-hosted Growth would be $45 plus 7 extra users at $15, which is $150 a month, plus your own hosting. Community is free, but Live Preview and content history are Growth features, and Community lists no support. That matters, because live preview is the feature editors miss most in a headless setup.

The editor experience

Strapi gives editors an admin panel built from the content types a developer defines. It is straightforward for structured content, and like the others, the experience is only as good as the setup. Self-hosting means your team, or your agency, keeps the server, the database, upgrades and backups healthy.

Who should choose it

Strapi suits teams that want open source, want to keep data on their own infrastructure and are comfortable running a Node.js application, or paying a host to. It is a good middle path between a fully hosted service and WordPress’s long history, with the catch that you inherit the running work.

Side by side on cost, for the same team

To make the numbers comparable, take one example: ten editors, a content library of fewer than 10,000 items, modest traffic. Using only the published prices above:

Platform	Plan that fits	Monthly software cost	What you still pay for
WordPress	Self-hosted, free	$0 licence	Hosting, front end build, plugins you buy
Sanity	Free (20 seats, 10,000 documents) or Growth	$0 on Free; $150 on Growth (10 seats)	Front end build and hosting; overages if usage grows
Contentful	Free (10 users) or Lite	$0 on Free; $300 on Lite	Front end build and hosting; the $850 Lite Space if you pass 10,000 records
Strapi	Community, or Growth	$0 on Community; $150 on Growth (10 users)	Your own server or a Strapi Cloud plan from $35 a month; front end build

Notice what the table does not show. The software line is small next to the cost of building and running the front end, which is the same bill whichever platform you pick. We deliberately do not put an agency price on the front end here, because it depends entirely on the site.

Use cases: which platform fits which job

Your situation	Usual best fit	Why
Established WordPress site, big archive, trained editors	WordPress, headless or not	Content, editors and plugins already exist
Marketing site plus mobile app sharing one content set	Sanity, Contentful or Strapi	Structured content designed for reuse
Developer-led product team, custom editing studio	Sanity	Studio is code you shape
Large organisation, many locales, governance and an SLA	Contentful Enterprise	Managed product with support commitments
Open source required, data on your own servers	Strapi or WordPress	Both can run on infrastructure you control
Membership, community, courses or commerce on the same site	WordPress	Plugins for those jobs already exist
Very small team, no developer, simple site	Not headless. A normal WordPress theme	Headless adds running work this team cannot absorb

The last row is the most honest one in this post. Many sites that ask about headless do not need it. A well-built theme with caching and a good host is faster than most people expect, and cheaper to run.

Editors first: a checklist before you sign

Preview. Can an editor see exactly how a draft will look on the real site before publishing? If not, budget for building it.
Roles. Does the plan give you the roles you need? Contentful Lite lists 3 roles; Free lists 2.
Media. Where do images live, and what happens to bandwidth costs as traffic grows?
Languages. How many locales does the plan include? Contentful Free and Lite list 2 and 3.
Scheduling. Can editors schedule posts? It is a listed Lite feature on Contentful and part of WordPress core.
Migration. How will existing content move across, and who checks it?
Exit. Can you export everything in a form another system can read?

The hidden running work, whichever you pick

Headless trades one system for several. Whichever platform you choose, someone must own these jobs.

The front end. A separate application with its own hosting, updates and security fixes.
Caching and freshness. Deciding how long content stays cached, and what clears it when an editor publishes. We learned in production that this is where the confusing bugs live.
Redirects and SEO. Titles, schema, sitemaps and old-URL redirects have to be rebuilt in the front end, not inherited from a plugin. When we moved four sites we checked every old URL from sitemaps, backlinks and Search Console against the new site and wrote redirects for those that moved.
Monitoring. A silent failure, such as an expired token that stops builds, looks like a quiet week until someone notices missing posts.
Forms, search, comments, members. Anything that a WordPress plugin used to do on the page now needs a service or custom code.

How Wbcom can help

We build and run headless WordPress, and we have lived through the problems above on our own sites, so we are a practical partner if you are weighing these platforms. We can help in three ways.

Choose. We look at your content, your editors, your budget and your developers, and give you a plain recommendation, including when the answer is to stay on a normal WordPress theme or to pick one of the hosted platforms.
Build. We build the front end, the caching, the redirects and the preview your editors need, and migrate content with checks on every old URL.
Run. We can monitor the whole chain after launch so a silent failure is caught the same day.

If you are choosing a platform, talk to our team about a WordPress consultant session. Bring your site, your editor team size and the pricing numbers above, and we will tell you which route we would take and why. For a wider look at the options beyond WordPress, our piece on Astro-based CMSes pitched as WordPress’s successor covers two newer entrants.

Common questions

What is a headless CMS?

A headless CMS stores and edits content and delivers it through an API, leaving the website or app design to a separate front end.

Is WordPress a headless CMS?

It can be used as one. WordPress ships with a REST API that returns content as JSON, so a separate front end can build the pages. It can also run the traditional way, with themes.

Which headless CMS is cheapest?

WordPress, Sanity Free, Contentful Free and Strapi Community all cost $0 in licence fees at small scale. Real cost depends on hosting, usage limits, seat counts and the front end you must build.

Which headless CMS is open source?

WordPress (GPLv2 or later) and the Strapi Community edition (MIT) are open source. Sanity’s Studio is MIT-licensed, while its content hosting is a paid service. Contentful is proprietary.

Do I need headless at all?

Often not. Headless pays off when you must reuse content across several channels, or you need a front end a theme cannot give you, and you have people to run it.

What we could not verify

Anything about hands-on use of Sanity, Contentful or Strapi. We describe their published pricing and documentation, not our own projects.
Where Sanity stores content. We infer it from its pricing metrics, and Sanity’s documentation page we read does not say.
The licence of Strapi’s Growth and Enterprise editions, which the pricing page does not state.
Effective dates for the Sanity and Strapi prices, which their pages do not show.
Contentful’s Enterprise price, which is custom, and third-party prices, which disagree with the vendor page.
A figure for WordPress hosting, which varies too much to quote honestly.