When comparing ProcessWire vs KeystoneJS, the Slant community recommends ProcessWire for most people. In the question“What are the best web content management systems?” ProcessWire is ranked 1st while KeystoneJS is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose ProcessWire is:
You will always find one to respond politely in the forums. Sometimes even the creator Ryan Cramer himself.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Nice and helpful growing community
You will always find one to respond politely in the forums. Sometimes even the creator Ryan Cramer himself.
Pro Custom Fields on steroids
ProcessWire is heavily based on custom fields. All objects (Pages) inside ProcessWire are based on extensible templates comprised of fields that can be easily defined. Many useful fields come prebuilt and they can be extended with modules.
Pro Easy to learn
Processwire is extremely easy to learn. Consider this:
echo $pages->get('title=Hello World')->title; // "Hello World"
echo $pages->get('title=Hello World')->parent->title; // "Home"
echo $pages->find('Template=Category')->count; // 126
echo $pages->find('Template=Category')->each('title'); // ['Audio', 'Video' …]
Selectors are so powerful but yet so easy.
Check out the cheatsheet.
Pro Powerful and easy API
The API is jQuery like;
// find some pages:
$pages->find('template=skyscraper, architect=john, sort=title')->limit(4);
// mutate
$pages->get('title=Hello You')->set('title', 'HelloWorld')->save();
$pages->get('title=Old')->trash(); // trash page
// check user…
$user->isLogedin();
echo $user->name; // guest
$session->login($name, $pass);
$session->logout();
// redirect
$session->redirect($url);
Pro Powerful selector engine
The way you fetch, access and manipulate objects (Pages) in ProcessWire is extremely powerful and easy. You can receive any page and its custom fields, filter, travers, add…
Pro Template Engine Agnostic
By default, ProcessWire comes with 0 assumption on how you handle the output. You have 100% freedom on how you want to develop the frontend. Want to plain output stuff, go ahead. Want to use any number of Templating Engine, do it. Just use as Headless-CMS, okay!
Pro Extensible
Either using the modules already available or writing your own module, using the jQuery-like API.
Pro Open source
Source available on GitHub.
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 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.