Strapi is an open-source headless CMS founded in Paris, France in 2015, leading its category with 65,000+ GitHub stars. Its visual content type builder auto-generates REST/GraphQL APIs with self-hosting and Strapi Cloud options.
Storyblok is a visual headless CMS founded in Linz, Austria in 2017, known for component-based content and in-page live editing, with a free Starter and Growth at $90.75/month billed annually.
Sanity is a Norway-based structured content platform founded in 2015 with over $200M in funding. Its single Content Lake supports 3+ distribution channels, making it strong for content platform modernization.
Drupal is an open-source PHP CMS created by Dries Buytaert in 2000, the third most popular open-source CMS worldwide, with 40k+ modules on Drupal.org, native multilingual and headless support, suited to complex enterprise websites.
Contentful is a headless CMS platform founded in Berlin in 2013, valued at over $3 billion after its 2022 Series F round and serving brands such as Spotify and Audi. It delivers structured content to any channel including Web, App and IoT via REST/GraphQL APIs.
Gatsby is an open-source React-based static site generator that integrates various data sources through a GraphQL data layer to generate optimized, high-performance static sites, and offers Gatsby Cloud hosting.
Zesty.io is a headless CMS and digital experience platform (DXP) founded in the US in 2014, offering REST and GraphQL dual-API content delivery, visual editing, and AWS-based SaaS hosting for multi-channel content operations.
SilverStripe CMS is a New Zealand-maintained open-source PHP CMS publicly available since 2007. Its 2-layer architecture and $0 core licensing model fit teams that value code control and long-term maintainability.
Payload CMS is an open-source headless CMS and application framework built on Next.js and TypeScript, code-first and self-hostable, used in production by Microsoft, ASICS, and Blue Origin, and part of Figma since 2026.
Orchard CMS is an open-source .NET content management system from the ASP.NET ecosystem whose modern version, Orchard Core, is built on ASP.NET Core under the BSD-3-Clause license, with 8K+ GitHub stars and 2.4M+ NuGet downloads, ideal for .NET teams building content sites and applications.
dotCMS is an open-source enterprise CMS founded in Miami, US in 2003, built on the Java stack with dual-mode traditional and headless architecture, REST/GraphQL dual APIs and multi-site management, listed as a representative vendor by Gartner.
Directus is an open-source headless CMS and backend-as-a-service platform founded in Los Angeles, US in 2014 that automatically wraps any SQL database into REST/GraphQL APIs, with 25k+ GitHub stars, ideal for data-driven projects.
Agnostic CMS is an open-source headless content management system created by Tom H. in 2020, built around GraphQL API with custom content modeling and multi-environment deployment, self-hostable at zero license cost.
Agility CMS is a Canadian enterprise headless content management system trusted by enterprise teams since 2003, offering REST/GraphQL APIs, multi-site management, AI tool integration, and SOC 2 Type II certification.
Founded by SeMI Technologies in 2019 and headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Weaviate is a CNCF open-source vector database with native hybrid search, modular AI integration and GraphQL queries, a popular foundation for RAG apps and semantic search.
Craft CMS is an open-source CMS released in 2016 by Pixel & Tonic, known for flexible content modeling, Matrix fields and native GraphQL headless mode, with single-instance multi-site and multilingual support, adopted by brands such as Netflix and Spotify.
Webiny is an open-source CMS built on an AWS serverless architecture, combining a Headless CMS, Page Builder, and GraphQL API. It shines at on-demand scaling and zero server operations for teams already on cloud infrastructure.