You're evaluating three headless CMS platforms for a new project. All three have REST APIs, GraphQL, webhook support, and multi-locale. The feature comparison spreadsheet looks nearly identical. But one platform will fit your team significantly better than the others, and the difference shows up in how long it takes to onboard a new developer, how predictable the monthly bill is at scale, and whether your content editors actually use the platform or keep emailing developers for help.
Start With Your Team's Workflow
Before looking at features, map your team's content workflow. Who authors content? Who reviews it? Who publishes? Who builds and maintains the frontend? The answers determine which platform attributes matter most.
- Engineering-led teams prioritise TypeScript SDK quality, API performance, content environment (branching) support, and schema-as-code capabilities
- Marketing-led teams prioritise the editor experience, structured fields that guide writers, and the ability to publish without developer involvement
- Agency teams prioritise multi-project support, per-client permission isolation, and predictable pricing across a portfolio
Evaluate Developer Experience Concretely
Don't read the documentation. Use it. Set up a free account on each platform you're evaluating, define a content model that matches your project, and fetch content in a test Next.js or Nuxt app using the TypeScript SDK. Time how long it takes. Note where you get stuck.
Specific things to test:
- How long from sign-up to first successful API query?
- Does the TypeScript SDK generate types from your schema, or do you write them manually?
- How do content environments (staging, production) work in practice?
- How clear are the error messages when something goes wrong?
Model Your Real Pricing at Scale
Don't compare starter plan prices. Compare what you'll pay at your expected scale. Find each platform's pricing page and calculate the cost at your projected number of editors, API calls per month, and number of projects or locales.
ContentGrid's pricing of Free, Builder ($49/mo) and Studio ($149/mo) is roughly 80% lower than Contentful at comparable feature sets. For startups and agencies, that gap is the difference between a sustainable infrastructure cost and a line item that grows faster than revenue. Calculate the cost at 2x your current scale, not just where you are today.
Check the Lock-In Risk
- Can you export your full content model and all content entries in a portable format?
- Are there proprietary API formats that would require custom code to migrate away from?
- Does the SDK use standard patterns, or does it require platform-specific abstractions throughout your codebase?
- Is the content schema defined in a standard format like JSON Schema?
Make the Decision With a Spike
After your evaluation, pick the top two candidates and run a one-week spike: build a real slice of your project on each platform. At the end of the week, you'll know which one your team works faster in, which editor your content team prefers, and which pricing model fits your budget. No comparison spreadsheet tells you as much as a week of actual use.
The right headless CMS is the one your team ships fastest with, your content editors use without frustration, and your finance team doesn't complain about at the end of the year.
Try ContentGrid yourself?
The headless CMS with AI built in: a content API, AI-assisted writing and publishing in multiple languages.