What is the best Node.js-based CMS?

Question

18

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Considered

1.2K

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Nov 7, 2023

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

15 Options Considered

Best Node.js-based CMS	Price	Language	Database
88 Factor	-	-	-
86 KeystoneJS	-	NodeJS	Mongo and Postgres
83 Ghost	29.0$	JavaScript	-
73 Strapi	-	-	Mongo, MySQL, Postgres, MariaDB, SQLite
68 ApostropheCMS	0	JavaScript	MongoDB

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score 108 · Answer 1

Factor

Top Pro

More advanced extensions

Top Con

Needs a Node server

StudiousCinteotl's Experience

Was impressed w what I could do w plugins. Trying to convince my team to move to Vue and this could be a reason. See More

Top Pro

Free

Top Con

MongoDB only

It's good if you like mongo... See More

Happy Robot's Experience

Nice and clean wordpress replacement in Vue and Typescript See More

Top Pro

Clean UI

Top Con

No static generator mode

Couldn't find it in the docs See More

Top Pro

Simple and in Vue

Top Pro

Forum, Blog, Comments System

The plugins Favtor has are awesome See More

Top Pro

Easy themes and plugins

Top Pro

Easy to start

Factor makes it easy to start. Install to deploy in 10 minuteS See More

See All

score 260 · Answer 2

KeystoneJS

Top Pro

Out-of-the-box Admin UI

Keystone comes with an auto-generated Admin UI, which makes things very easy for any task that can be completed using Keystone. In any way Keystone is used, the Admin interfaces saves a lot of time and makes any job easier. See More

Top Con

It does not have a built-in roles system

Although registering a new user is very easy, there is not any roles system out-of-the-box. There is only a check box "Access keystone" which gives a user full administrative power. Adding different kind of users is only possible by editing the user data model. See More

CromulentAnaideia's Experience

Basically a dead project See More

Specs

Language:NodeJS

Database:Mongo and Postgres

Price:0

Top Pro

Keystone comes with Express already configured

Express comes out of the box already configured from Keystone or it can be treated like any other Express Middleware. See More

Top Con

Horrible documentation; Keystone5 is unfinished and the team dumped it for a whole (stripped down) new version

Team even admits to a lot of areas being undocumented. Just spent 5 months implementing Keystone5 just to have it marked for deprecation. Next version removes DB Adapters (the entire reason for us implementing it). This project is poorly managed, and extremely difficult to extend due to incomplete documentation. See More

NiceAkmon's Experience

it Truly is FREE, See More

Top Pro

Keystone has easy form processing

Using the data models defined by the developer, Keystone can validate forms automatically without any more setup. Form validation doesn't get easier than this. See More

Top Con

No auto-reload and no good support for RDBMS

Does not have auto-reload in its backend. Hard to debug. Features found in document, absent in code. No enough support to PostgresQL, no automatic migration See More

HappyCacus's Experience

Great CMS with auto-generated admin, schemas... See More

Top Pro

Many cool features

Great CMS with auto-generated admin, schemas... See More

Top Con

No default option to add pages in admin panel

ExcellentAbassi's Experience

Does not have auto-reload in its backend. Hard to debug. Features found in document, absent in code. See More

Top Pro

Easy to install and use

KeystoneJS is very easy to install and use. See More

Top Con

It's hard for front-end developers with no MVC experience setting up views

Keystone follows MVC practices in managing routes, views and templates. Back-end developers with experience in working with MVC frameworks will find themselves at ease since the beginning, but developers who work on the front-end only will have a hard time finding what they are supposed to do to set up templates and such. See More

NiceXochiquetzal's Experience

Easy to Configure See More

Top Pro

Easy email management features

With Keystone it is easy to set up an email management system for an application. It has template-based emails and it's also integrated with Mandrill (Mailchimp's transaction email sending service) See More

Top Con

Some working knowledge of JavaScript, NPM and Databases is needed

MongoDB is required to be up and running and a Yeoman generator is used to generate the application. Although the prompt based start-up in the command line helps you a lot, it still can be hard for someone inexperienced with NPM and Yeoman. See More

EnterprisingMictlantecuhtli's Experience

stale project See More

Top Pro

Keystone uses MongoDB through Mongoose

Keystone allows the usage of MongoDB since it comes with Mongoose, the most popular ODM for node and Mongo, this means that anything that is built using Mongo can be built with Keystone. See More

Top Con

Packaging externals libraries is tricky

Unless you want to import every JS. See More

Top Pro

Numerous amounts of templating engines are supported

Keystone supports almost all templating engines out there. Although it uses Jade directly after a fresh install and it points to using it further, other template engines can be installed and used instead. See More

Top Pro

Effective session management

Keystone has advanced and effective session management and authentication features. Logging in and signing up is easy and it even has password encryption out of the box. See More

See All

score 185 · Answer 3

Ghost

Top Con

Quite expensive for a FREE tool.

Basic $29, standard $79, business $199 per month, billed annually. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use split-screen editor and Markdown support

Writing content in Ghost is very easy. It supports Markdown for formatting your posts and has a split screen editor which has the Markdown code on the left and a live preview on the right side. This is nice because Markdown is already used in many areas of the web, but with the preview on the right you don't need any previous Markdown experience to ensure your content looks good. See More

Capuccino 's Experience

Lightwieght, Simple, and no gotchas. That's how a blog site should be, and Ghost delivers it in full colors. Beware, if you expect Postgres support, then you're out of luck. See More

Specs

License:MIT

Language:JavaScript

Template Engine:Handlebars

Top Con

No Developer API for APP or Module Integrations

Ghost is straight up Blog and really nothing else. Currently there is no manageable way to create and integrate additional functionality like you would using other CMS frameworks. There does not appear to be a roadmap to get there with Ghost in the future although it has been hinted at recently. If all you want it a dirt simple blog with no bells or whistles or extensibility then this is a great Blog CMS. See More

Top Pro

Extremely simple

It only does a few things but it does them well. Unlike WordPress, with which you can build a universe, a blog or anything in between, Ghost is simple. See More

AffableNegun's Experience

much better than wordpress See More

Top Con

Limited number of models & fields fileds in model

CMS provide just fix modal like Posts, Pages, Tags, Users and fields for them is fixed without chance to provide some custom fields. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Anyone can view code of Ghost. See More

AdventurousQetesh's Experience

sad See More

Top Con

Although very simple to use, its simplicity can be hindering

It's very easy to add content and customize themes or find free or paid themes for ghost. But that's it; it's very easy to use but also so simple that it can be underwhelming. It can be frustrating to try and tackle ghost's limitations. See More

Top Pro

Managing content is very easy and quick

Ghost supports a split screen design, reminiscent of an email inbox throughout it's admin dashboard. This makes browsing posts (and editing them) very simple. See More

Jesse's Experience

Self Hosting is quite easy. I thoroughly enjoy v3. By far perhaps the cleanest and easiest to use site platform for dev/content creator use with very little issues. See More

Top Con

Limited number of models & fixed fields in model

CMS provide just fix modal like Posts, Pages, Tags, Users and fields for them is fixed without chance to provide some custom fields. See More

Top Pro

Posts can have multiple authors and user management in general is very good

Ghost has arguably done what many other CMS have tried and failed. It has one of the, if not the best user management features out of the box. Posts can have multiple authors and every user can have a well defined role. This makes ghost perfect for large multi-author online magazines or blogs. See More

PersonableHeqet's Experience

Can't be hosted on multiple instances because there is no common DB See More

Top Con

No custom field types

Adding computed fields or other custom field types would make strapis experience way better to integrate as much business logic as possible into the backend. See More

Top Pro

Great admin dashboard

Ghost's admin dashboard is one of the most beautifully designed out there. By removing unnecessary plugins and by adding them directly to the core ghost application, the dashboard is very minimalistic, displaying only the most useful data, such as social data or analytics and other important data that any blogger or developer needs. See More

Top Con

Lots of dependencies that won't compile on Windows

Problems with npm sqlite3 and others. See More

Top Pro

Customizable

Themes may be uploaded, as can logos and covers. See More

Top Con

Current theme design is currently lacking

While ghost has a theme marketplace and many free and paid themes, it still is lacking in this department. A lot of designs are not very good, but still, good designs can be found. See More

Top Pro

Real-time preview

You can see markdown on one side of the pane and the result on the other, while writing. See More

Top Con

No native mobile app

Ghost has a decent mobile web app that works through the browser only, at least for now. While it is good, it still is not as good as a native mobile app. So in that regard, ghost still has way to go. See More

Top Pro

Ghost is very easy to use for beginners

Ghost was built to be a simple and fast blogging platform. There are countless themes in the theme marketplace, both paid and free which can be installed. Everything unnecessary was stripped away and only the most important things like SEO, social sharing and other plugins were installed right into the core. This results in very little configuration and makes ghost the easiest CMS out there. See More

Top Con

Postgres support is development-only

While pg support does exist, the Ghost team dropped official support on it by 1.x series. The only support it has is by development only. See More

Top Pro

Self-host & paid Ghost(Pro)-host options

You can download the source code and set it up yourself (just make sure your hosting provider supports node.js). Alternatively, you can use their Ghost(Pro) service to let them host it for you. Paid plans start at $10/mo. See More

Top Con

Finding Ghost host sites can be difficult

If wanting to host elsewhere, some of the other ghost hosting sites are hard to find, and once found they vary in features and functions. There isn't a single standard of service across the board. See More

Top Pro

Markdown support

Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax designed so that it can be human-readable and easily converted to HTML. Markdown allows HTML code for complete flexibility. See More

Top Pro

Ghost(Pro), the official hosted version of ghost is very customizable

Ghost provides a simple way to deploy and develop a blog or news site using the ghost platform. It allows you to host it on their site with everything ready and configured, but unlike other CMSs which do the same, ghost provides more something like a hosting environment instead of a massive multi-site install. See More

Top Pro

Theme marketplace

A built-in way to get and set up themes. See More

Top Pro

Custom domain support

Setting up a custom domain is effortless - fill the in the form and change DNS entries. Done. See More

Top Pro

Desktop app

While having no Mobile app seems a bummer to you, get your hopes up, a Desktop app exists. After all, you should be doing most of the blogging in a laptop, right? See More

See All

score 84 · Answer 4

Strapi

Top Pro

Auto-generate REST APIs

With strapi you can create your own data schema, that when generated, lets you create, read, update and delete your data. You also can paginate, sort and filter your results in a matter of seconds with simple but yet specific parameters. See More

Top Con

No custom field types

Adding computed fields or other custom field types would make strapis experience way better to integrate as much business logic as possible into the backend. See More

PracticalGunAna's Experience

piad plugins See More

Specs

License:MIT

Template Engine:All

Database:Mongo, MySQL, Postgres, MariaDB, SQLite

Multi Language Support:Yes

See All Specs

Top Pro

Built-in admin

Top Con

Docker/Kubernetes unfriendly

Strapi comes with a stateful docker setup, which makes it unusable for distributed deployment. See More

DaringSemele's Experience

Too many bugs. Using Postgresql as the backend, I think that for a very large site, the generated tables could need some attention from a DBA for performance purposes. Also some of the structures (foreign keys do not refer to the generated table ID column) are not intuitive or accepted practice. Additionally, I kept having to restart my project from scratch, due to bugs. The admin Gui could also be more user friendly. It has great potential though. The technology stack is right there with where the market is going, as is the GraphQL API We eventually ended up creating our own CMS., for what we needed it worked out far quicker to create a Postgres database with standard DB design / admin tools, and then use Postgraphile to automatically expose this content (images, markdown, products, categories, etc) via GraphQL. We created a quick and dirty front end using a DB forms tool, that was still more user friendly than Strapi, which will be replaced by a VueJS front end down the road. See More

Top Pro

Users, groups and permissions

Manage user settings, login, registration, groups and permissions on the fly. Strapi delivers all those essential features out-of-the-box. See More

Top Con

Missing migration tooling

There is currently no tooling to migrate an existing strapi schema into a new database or from an existing database to strapi. See More

DignifiedSangarius's Experience

Awesome! See More

Top Pro

Plugins system

Top Con

Current version is alpha and quite buggy

Controlling your content with the web admin tool doesn't work very well at the moment. See More

Herman Orlando Morales Lopez's Experience

this CMS is super amazing See More

Top Pro

Out-of-the-box administration panel

Easy way to manage your application. This panel allows you to add/edit/delete entries for your APIs, manage your users, groups and permissions. In the future, it will be such as WordPress-like administration panel dedicated to your application. See More

Top Con

Admin tool could be a bit more user friendly and have a better UI

NonchalantBulucChabtan's Experience

Best to use as inventory managing and cms See More

Top Pro

GraphQL integration

Modern Javascript and apis with GraphQL See More

Top Con

Custom roles with routes

Martin Muzatko's Experience

Strapi does what it should do. Quickly build See More

Top Pro

Separate configuration for each environment

Strapi has separate configurations on database, request, response, security and server for development, staging and production environments. See More

Top Con

Incomplete permission system

Permissions are based on a resource collection level, individual permissions for a user-based item creation is not built-in. Right now you need to work around by adding your own policy. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use

Top Con

Better documentation would lead to users not having to restart projects.

Top Pro

Agnostic frontend

Agnostic frontend you can use Angular react etc See More

Top Con

Lack of documentation

Little to no documentation of advanced features like server-side rendering, hooks and middleware integration. See More

Top Pro

Extensible APIs

All generated APIs can be easily extended with new routes, policies and See More

Top Pro

Easy management of relational data

Relations are easily added and organized. With different modes (one to one, one to many, many to many, etc) See More

Top Pro

Quick setup

Strapi comes with CLI tooling to quickly get started. See More

Top Pro

Automatic Documentation of API

With the Open API standard, an interactive documentation for all API endpoints is generated. See More

See All

score 128 · Answer 5

ApostropheCMS

Top Pro

Content types support joins

Content types can be joined to others, and joins can be edited via the provided admin UI. See More

Top Con

Project feels quite raw

The project feels quite raw, there's not great documentation, the need to dig into the source code to go beyond the simple examples is quite exhausting. Community is pretty small. hence don't expect to find a lot of answers to your questions. See More

Carsten Jaksch's Experience

Apostrophe is the only Node.js CMS I know of, that has a frontend admin interface. It is modular, everything added to Apostrophe will be a module. The features are well thought out like in-context editing with areas and singletons, widgets, pieces and the official modules apostrophe-blog, apostrophe-workflow – and so much more. A well crafted content management system from the awesome folks of P’unk Avenue, who know the needs of website creators and owners alike. See More

Specs

License:MIT

Language:JavaScript

Template Engine:Nunjucks

Database:MongoDB

See All Specs

Top Pro

In-context, on-page editing

Content can be edited directly on the page in a WYSIWYG interface with very little learning curve. See More

Top Con

No Themes available

There is not a marketplace or any themes available for download, which makes it hard to get a good looking site going quickly if you are not a good UI designer. See More

Top Pro

Under active development

P’unk Avenue provides great support and steady updates to Apostrophe and the official modules. The community is growing and contributes actively. See More

Top Con

No possibility to edit content types without coding

Top Pro

Supports approval-based workflow

The optional apostrophe-workflow module can be used to add approval-based workflow to the in-context editing system. See More

Top Pro

Internationalization and localization

Content can also be internationalized and localized with the apostrophe-workflow module, including the ability to export just the recent changes in one language to the latest draft of the same document in another language. See More

Top Pro

Full blown CMS

All sorts of websites (and probably more) are possible with this flexible and modular CMS. See More

Top Pro

Developer friendly

It's very developer-friendly. The documentation is great and it's built using widely-known paradigms which makes customization easy. See More

Top Pro

Content types: "pieces"

Content types are called pieces – easy to create and easy to manage. See More

Top Pro

MongoDB as database

Intuitive content management with schemas, filters and more good stuff from MongoDB. See More

Top Pro

Full-blown demo project available

While the CMS is intended primarily for developers who plan on creating their own designs, a fully-baked sample project is available with all source code (apostrophe-open-museum) and can be used as an easy starting point for similar work. See More

Top Pro

Option to use Elasticsearch

Works with both built-in MongoDB full text search and, if you want it, Elasticsearch via the apostrophe-elasticsearch module. See More

See All

score 52 · Answer 6

enduro.js

Top Con

Hardly any github commits since fall '16

See: https://github.com/Gottwik/Enduro/graphs/code-frequency See More

Top Pro

Minimalistic

No clutter and useless features. See More

ArtisticProvidentia's Experience

what exactly u got in this moment See More

Specs

License:MIT

Language:JavaScript

Template Engine:Handlebars

Service integrations:nODE

See All Specs

Top Con

No support for databases

Top Pro

Beautiful admin panel

Clients are always amazed how smooth and good looking the admin interface is. See More

Top Con

Community size

The community around the project looks quite small. Anyone to confirm my thought ? See More

Top Pro

Productive

Currently, probably the most productive CMS around. There is almost no setup, admin is auto generated, 100% development in code editing, shared backend/front end templates, and shared javascript code. See More

See All

score 24 · Answer 7

Node.js CMS

Top Con

Up to 5 apps only for 6.99 EUR / month

AdventurousAuseklis's Experience

redirect to the Cloud-Service See More

score 13 · Answer 8

Payload CMS

Top Pro

Code-first

All schemas are configurable in code and can be checked into version control. See More

Top Pro

Localization support

Support for multi-language content is built in and highly configurable. See More

Top Pro

Saves dev time

Backend and admin UI saves a ton of dev of time, and is super polished out of the box. See More

See All

score 22 · Answer 9

HashBrown CMS

Top Pro

Modular

Strings, numbers and booleans are the basic building blocks for any site, but the fun really starts when you're building with arrays, structs, date pickers, media references, tags and dropdowns. HashBrown comes with 16 built-in field types, and gives you the power to combine them any way you please. See More

Top Con

Main domain not have SSL certification

Top Pro

Consistent

HashBrown is built on Node.js, sharing data models with the client side code. MongoDB is used to store site data, as a document database most accurately reflects the content of a complex website. This means that the content is always format consistent, and there is no incompatible serialisation and deserialisation happening between client and server. See More

Top Con

Main domain not have SSL certification

Top Pro

Pluggable

Even though HashBrown is already a very flexible system out of the box, you may want to increase the flexibility even further to suit your needs. You may also want to add your own connection type, to allow publishing of your content to some obscure front-end that you wrote 15 years ago. It's all possible through the power of plugins. See More

Top Con

No session management

Your site needs to handle user sessions by itself. See More

Top Pro

Multilingual

With built-in support for languages, you can easily create a multilingual and multicultural website. There is no need for you to create your content trees multiple times for every language, nor is there a need for you to pay any particular attention to it when you create your fields. A simple "multilingual" switch is all you need, and you're good to go. See More

Top Con

Relatively new to the game

With only 3 years in development, HashBrown hasn't had the amount of field testing that other seasoned CMS'es benefit from. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

There are no fees, binary blobs, restrictive policies or asterisks. See More

Top Pro

Multitasking

If you've ever found yourself running multiple copies of your CMS for development, staging and production environments, dumping and restoring databases to migrate content between them, and pulling your hair out over how tedious and error prone that is, look no further. HashBrown is built from the ground up as a multi-site, multi-environment system. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

Despite being a very sophisticated machine, HashBrown could run on your toaster. As HashBrown only needs resources when you're changing your website's content, it's mostly idle. This makes it the cheapest CMS for hosting purposes, as well as enables you to run it on that Raspberry Pi you've been neglecting. See More

Top Pro

Secure

By storing your website's content separately from the site itself, you are not only making it hard for attackers to bring down your site, you are also rendering the effort completely pointless. There is simply no database on your website from which to steal information and hold ransom. You can secure HashBrown behind a VPN and still have a publicly accessible site, consisting of statically generated HTML. See More

Top Pro

Connectable

HashBrown won't tell you how to do your job. It is and always will be exclusively a content management system, and not a rendering engine. This means you can plug it into any web solution you want, whether you're running GoLang, PHP, Node.js, .NET, Ruby or Python on your end doesn't matter to HashBrown at all. You are free to develop with your preferred tools at all times. See More

See All

score 6 · Answer 10

Markdown

Add Video or Image

score 10 · Answer 11

ButterCMS

Top Con

Very expensive

Costs $100 per month for it to actually edit pages. See More

Top Pro

Integrate with any language/framework

Top Con

Poor documentation

See All

score 12 · Answer 12

Zoia.js

Add Video or Image

score 8 · Answer 13

Calipso

Top Con

Has been inactive for long

The last update on GitHub was several months ago. See More

Top Pro

Calipso runs with MongoDB and Express in the background

Calipso uses MongoDB through Mongoose as a database and it runs on top of Express, the most popular framework for Node. Making it very simple for anyone experienced in Express and used to working with Mongo. See More

Top Con

Installation may be a little hard

Because of Calipso's modular approach, it can be a little hard to get everything ready because if some modules are missing, it can cause trouble. See More

Top Pro

Calipso is built using a modular approach

Calipso delivers it's functions by using a modular approach. All of the core features that you would expect from a CMS, excluding theming and forms are provided by modules. See More

Top Pro

Calipso supports the use of stylus in CSS

Calipso also supports the use of stylus for stylesheets and themes. This means that customizing themes with Calipso is very easy. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 14

Contentflow

Add Video or Image

score 5 · Answer 15

Factor JS

Top Pro

Extension based

Top Pro

MEVN Stack

15 Options Considered

My Recommendation for Factor

My Recommendation for Factor

More advanced extensions

Needs a Node server

Free

MongoDB only

Clean UI

No static generator mode

Simple and in Vue

Forum, Blog, Comments System

Easy themes and plugins

Easy to start

My Recommendation for KeystoneJS

My Recommendation for KeystoneJS

Out-of-the-box Admin UI

It does not have a built-in roles system

Keystone comes with Express already configured

Horrible documentation; Keystone5 is unfinished and the team dumped it for a whole (stripped down) new version

Keystone has easy form processing

No auto-reload and no good support for RDBMS

Many cool features

No default option to add pages in admin panel

Easy to install and use

It's hard for front-end developers with no MVC experience setting up views

Easy email management features

Some working knowledge of JavaScript, NPM and Databases is needed

Keystone uses MongoDB through Mongoose

Packaging externals libraries is tricky

Numerous amounts of templating engines are supported

Effective session management

My Recommendation for Ghost

My Recommendation for Ghost

Quite expensive for a FREE tool.

Easy to use split-screen editor and Markdown support

No Developer API for APP or Module Integrations

Extremely simple

Limited number of models & fields fileds in model

Open source

Although very simple to use, its simplicity can be hindering

Managing content is very easy and quick

Limited number of models & fixed fields in model

Posts can have multiple authors and user management in general is very good

No custom field types

Great admin dashboard

Lots of dependencies that won't compile on Windows

Customizable

Current theme design is currently lacking

Real-time preview

No native mobile app

Ghost is very easy to use for beginners

Postgres support is development-only

Self-host & paid Ghost(Pro)-host options

Finding Ghost host sites can be difficult

Markdown support

Ghost(Pro), the official hosted version of ghost is very customizable

Theme marketplace

Custom domain support

Desktop app

My Recommendation for Strapi

My Recommendation for Strapi

Auto-generate REST APIs

No custom field types

Built-in admin

Docker/Kubernetes unfriendly

Users, groups and permissions

Missing migration tooling

Plugins system

Current version is alpha and quite buggy

Out-of-the-box administration panel

Admin tool could be a bit more user friendly and have a better UI

GraphQL integration

Custom roles with routes

Separate configuration for each environment

Incomplete permission system

Easy to use

Better documentation would lead to users not having to restart projects.

Agnostic frontend

Lack of documentation

Extensible APIs