As part of a website upgrade project (moving from Drupal), we evaluated more than a dozen CMSes, both traditional ones like Wordpress or Drupal 9 and headless ones like DatoCMS, GraphCMS, or the industry giant Contentful. We evaluated more than a dozen criteria and built several prototypes. DatoCMS was the one our content editors liked the best due to its excellent editor experience. Out of the box, it offered a good balance between features and ease-of-use, giving a streamlined editor interface and field types that were useful without being overwhelming. Some of its competitors were either too simple (good for only plain posts/pages, not more complex models) or too dev-centric (heavy on relationships and data semantics, but difficult for non-devs to understand and use). DatoCMS hit that perfect balance.

In terms of data architecture, it allows a good amount of flexibility and relationships, allowing both links to other records and embedded "blocks" that can be reused and repeated. Records can be organized either in a flat list or in a nested tree-like structure. This makes it possible to model anything from simple blog posts to composable landing pages with fields inside sections.

On the API side, content is served via a very easy to use read-only GraphQL API fronted by a CDN. The editor/admin GUI includes a GraphQL Explorer that makes query building dead-simple. If needed, records can also be edited via a separate REST API (not GraphQL).

Images can be similarly queried via the GraphQL interface and then are served via the Imgix CDN (included), which also allows powerful on-the-fly image transformations using URL parameters.

The plugin ecosystem allows you to make custom field types (such as multi-checkbox fields or better Markdown editors), and a new plugin architecture was just announced in Dec 2021 (haven't tried it yet), which should make it even more powerful.

DatoCMS is one of the more reasonably-priced CMS options (and worth every penny), especially compared to established players like Contentful. Support is fast and responsive, and I also appreciate the developers' transparency when it comes to feature requests and which ones will be prioritized or not. Makes our own internal roadmapping easier. Updates are frequent (several times a year) and helpful, without breaking backward compatibility. Features are rolled out in a nonintrusive way and the API is versioned so as to not break existing requests.

We're about a year into building our project, and between DatoCMS and Next.js, the new stack is much easier to work with and MUCH faster than the old Drupal setup. Would strongly recommend this setup for consideration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are some minor things that maybe could be improved:

* Better field primitives (maybe a multiselect checkbox/dropdown, a built-in JSON tree editor, a better Markdown editor like Toast...)

* A proper JS SDK for the GraphQL API with built-in React hooks, pagination support, etc. would be nice. Right now you have to manually form GraphQL queries and make the request yourself and handle refetches and paginations.

* An official product roadmap and feature request estimate system would be better than the ad-hoc forum based approach we have right now.

All in all these are minor complaints, and we're very happy with DatoCMS. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The UX of both the content modeling and the content editing is much better than its competitors. On the rare occasions that I required support, their support team was super responsive and helpful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There's nothing to dislike about the platform, but it would be great if they added the ability to purchase additional bandwidth for projects on the free tier. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Super intuitive CMS and easy to use. I was able to modify content without training of any kind. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Little in the way of basic documentation - although this hasn't been too much of a problem. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the separation of a hosted CMS but sometimes they lack the features and customisation you need. I spent a lot of time trialing platforms before I chose DatoCMS. It had all the features I needed plus the overall experience has been consistently great. The team are also very helpful and have gone beyond what I would expect. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

They've done a great job of covering all bases Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Meshes really nicely with Gatsby, with very modern, simple yet flexible model editing. Editing data models is easy for devs, editing records is easy for editors. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We had a few bugs historically, but they have all been fixed so there is nothing to dislike now. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Every single feature in DatoCMS is well thought, engineered, and fine-tuned to deliver the best experience both for end-users and as well for the developers. The community is thrilling and you can always find some hint to fix a problem or some proper help from the support team. Actually, I've never experienced a faster and ultra dedicated support team than DatoCMS's.

Whether if you're a single developer willing to delve into the future of web technologies with the best-in-class headless CMS and one of the pioneers of the Jamstack philosophy, an Agency with a lot of clients to serve, or an enterprise with mission-critical requirements, DatoCMS is the cherry you're looking for. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Actually, there's nothing I dislike about DatoCMS. The rare times that I've encountered a glitch, a bug, or I got stuck for any reason I could count on the strong community support and on the kindness of DatoCMS's team that always guided me through towards the solution, sometimes even developing new features ad-hoc! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Minimum setup required to trigger deploys of the site e.g. to Vercel. Flexible type system (schema) and extendable block-based editor. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The price is too high for smaller projects with ~1000 records. The lowest-paid plan is 199€/month. The free plan is suitable for development only. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ever-evolving feature set, ease of use and extremely responsive product team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Hard to think of anything honestly. The only thing I would have said would be the lack of client isolated infrastructure, but that has recently been added. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Global distribution and 0 devops needed. And quick and nice customer support on a free tier Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Bidirectional relations missing require a little more work but it's fine. Request count went up fast, that's something to investigate. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Structured text is a perfect match for us, allowing us to create custom components on the front-end that can easily be created/rearranged/etc. by CMS users, all within a beautiful UI! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Custom assets URL is pretty involved (although documentation is excellent), benefits of Imgix & auto-tagging certainly worth it, though. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.