When comparing HashBrown CMS vs KeystoneJS, the Slant community recommends KeystoneJS for most people. In the question“What is the best Node.js-based CMS?” KeystoneJS is ranked 2nd while HashBrown CMS is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose KeystoneJS is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pro Free and open source
There are no fees, binary blobs, restrictive policies or asterisks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pro Many cool features
Great CMS with auto-generated admin, schemas...
Pro Easy to install and use
KeystoneJS is very easy to install and use.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Cons
Con Main domain not have SSL certification
Con Main domain not have SSL certification
Con No session management
Your site needs to handle user sessions by itself.
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.
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.
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.
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

Con No default option to add pages in admin panel
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.
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.
Con Packaging externals libraries is tricky
Unless you want to import every JS.
