Directus Reviews & Product Details

DIrectus thought of everything to make an extremely versatile tool! I have had the most amazing experience dealing with the team, they've supported us through and through and offered a product that is literally a blank slate for any use case, but with the bells & whistles unmatched by other products out there on the market for a fraction of the cost. I love using the data model, the flows, and of course the flexibility of extensions and configurations of not only the app but what it can power. We've been able to support almost anything our internal stakeholders can dream up which has levelled up our innovation and efficiency. Thank you, Directus. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The self-hosted install was a bit tricky to get setup but the incredible support team was able to get us through the issue. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Directus offers a highly intuitive interface backed by a strong API-first approach. I appreciate how easy it is to create relational collections, manage permissions, and integrate with modern frontend frameworks like Vue. The roles and permission system is one of the most flexible I’ve seen, allowing for granular control of data access. I also love that it works on top of an existing SQL database without locking you in. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While Directus is powerful, the documentation could be more thorough, especially for advanced use cases and self-hosting with Docker. Some features like workflows or relational filters need further refinement. The system can occasionally feel too technical for non-developers despite its clean UI. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Directus has significantly sped up our team's development, particularly thanks to its built-in CRUD endpoints, authentication, storage, and a robust row-level and field-level permission system. We thoroughly enjoy Flows, which have proven incredibly powerful and reliable when building complex integrations. Additionally, we appreciate the ability to create custom endpoints, which have expanded the standard Directus and enabled seamless interaction with external systems. Given the size of our database, comprising over 400 tables, working with Directus has been a tremendous asset in efficiently managing and interacting with our data. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Directus is continuously evolving based on the contributions of its community. This is a positive aspect, but it can also be problematic when dealing with a large codebase like ours. Often, introducing new features leads to breaking changes, requiring significant refactoring to maintain compatibility with the latest version. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

After developing two in-house CMS systems, we decided to take another look at what's new in the CMS landscape and started evaluating potential vendors. It's impressive to see so many different options and feature sets in the products.

What made Directus stand out to us was the flexibility of the system (in terms of features and deployment options) and the ease at which we can integrate it into our system. While Directus does not have all of the other bells and whistles of their competitors, its solid architecture and design more than makes up for them.

We have also been impressed by their customer success team and the engagement with the organization in general. It's quite impactful when a CEO joins a sync-up call to go over their roadmap or when the CTO schedules a meeting to hear about our unique needs when it comes to content versioning, environments and deployment processes.

At the end of the day, our relationship with Directus is less of a vendor/client one and more of a partnership. This distinction has been pivotal since we are staking a good portion of our project functionality into the Directus and having a strong partner as we migrate onto a new system will be key to the success of our project and business. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The majority of our feedback from our internal users has been around Directus' content editor user interface. The UI can be clunky at times (editing children collections in a side drawer or the lack of collection relationship information resulting in us getting lost in our component hierarchy), we have confidence in the development team to continue making improvements and addressing these issues in the future. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We've had a great experience using Directus as a tool—it has proven to be highly flexible and intuitive. One of the standout aspects is its support for a wide range of use cases, whether we need to structure data for internal tools or build custom workflows. The platform offers excellent support, both through documentation and community channels, which has made troubleshooting and learning straightforward.

What we especially appreciate is the flexibility in tailoring the data model to fit our exact needs without requiring heavy backend customization. It allows for rapid iteration and empowers both technical and non-technical team members to collaborate effectively.

Overall, Directus has become a valuable part of our stack thanks to its balance of structure and freedom. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The search is kept even when refreshing the screen Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We’re currently evaluating Directus and it stands out well above the other CMS' we've tested so far. We genuinely love it, because it really is flexible, open (which is great for a technology team who want to expand and improve for our teams), and doesn’t force any specific way of working.

We are self-hosting, which is simple and well-supported. You're not tied into any platform or service. We had it running in our own infrastructure quickly, with no surprises. It's relatively easy to configure, and we stay in control of our data and stack.

Forking and extending the platform works exactly how you'd want. We’ve already thought about a few internal tools we're likely to build. The structure looks like it's easy to understand and modify without having to rewrite anything major, which again is key for us, we don't want to reinvent the wheel.

The flexibility is on another level. You can build the data model to suit your actual project, not try to jam it into someone else's idea of how content should work, again, the fine-grained control of the data is so good.

It's API first, so it's great if you want something that's headless by nature, not transformed into a headless solution.

The admin interface is clean and configurable. You can change how things are displayed, create roles and permissions easily, and set it up for technical and non-technical users alike. Our marketing team like the look and feel and find it easy to produce content. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I wouldn't say we dislike anything, but things we'd love to see changes on, would be:

The APIs are simple to work with. they’re powerful, but not always intuitive. Some operations feel more complex than they need to be, especially when dealing with nested data or filters, once we got the hang of it, it was fine, but took some time.

Query strings can get excessively long. Particularly with more complex filters or relational data. It’s not unreadable, but not the cleanest either, it can be easy to make mistakes if you're not careful.

Image handling could be better. Files are always delivered as separate requests, we get the ID back only, but it's not the end of the world,

we’d just prefer if images / urls could be returned directly in the initial API payload. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Getting up and running quickly (especially with Directus Cloud)

- Stellar support (friendly and technical)

- Keeping ownership of data, with little to no vendor lock-in

- Rapid prototyping & turnaround via intuitive schema builder, no/low-code automations (Directus Flow) and powerful custom code (Directus Extensions)

- OOTB REST & GraphQL API

- Solid permissions management

- Built-in DAM Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Admin UI can be a bit slow with large data views (500+ rows per page)

- Large CSV data imports can be cumbersome

- Type-safe code extensions via Typescript is incomplete (but can be solved for) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Directus is incredibly flexible and integrates perfectly into our tech stack. One standout feature is how easy it is to build and deploy custom extensions (especially with VueJS and TypeScript) which allows us to tailor the UI and functionality to specific workflows and use cases.

Flows are another highlight. We’ve automated many backend processes without needing additional services or infrastructure. From simple field updates to complex branching logic, the visual Flow builder is intuitive and powerful, saving us countless hours of development and maintenance time.

Using the cloud version means we don’t worry about infrastructure, while still retaining full control over data structures, roles, and permissions. The API-first approach makes frontend integration seamless. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One pain point is syncing changes between environments. Schema and Flow migration from staging to production still requires a lot of manual effort.

Additionally, while Flows are powerful, debugging can be tricky due to limited visibility into execution logs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The data studio is easy to use and works really well on mobile which is an underrated feature.

Directus offers great digital asset management features, data model and backend-as-a-service features, and CMS features. It's very flexible, so businesses can tailor to the use cases they have.

At Destify, we're looking to first use Digital Asset Management capabilities to deliver world-class image optimization for our galleries and carousel images.

We also hope to use it for hotel and room metadata, eliminating a home-spun admin system to do the same. It will provide easy REST and GraphQL access to pull the fields we want.

The RBAC scoping is top-notch and that's a difficult thing to do!

I can't say enough good things about this product, explore it for any use cases you have for low-code, BaaS, CMS, or DAM usage. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Consider the cloud offering ramping up in price when you scale to meet that growth. A generous free tier of users and/or request quota would be better than a row limit. It's difficult for Team Leads to know just how big Directus will get because it has so many use cases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Directus accomplishes all of our content management needs. Has all the features you would expect out of a CMS with an easy-to-use user interface. There is plenty of documentation for Directus which made setup and configuration easy. Directus has a lot out of the box components to use to build your data model. If there isn't something available for you, you can create your own through extensions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have yet to come across any major dislikes with Directus.

The process for data migration between multiple instances of Directus could be improved, specifically if you want to migrate a data model from a development instance to production.

Directus has a really powerful API but building out the specific URL to get only the data you need can be time consuming, especially with nested relationships. Directus could benefit from a tool to build out those complex URLs through the UI. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.