# Payload CMS Reviews **Vendor:** Payload **Category:** [Headless CMS Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/headless-cms) **Average Rating:** 4.9/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 59 ## About Payload CMS Payload is a free and open-source Headless CMS built with React and TypeScript. It's the happy medium between application framework and CMS, boosting your development process, while staying out of your way as your apps get more complex. ## Payload CMS Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users appreciate the **active and supportive community** on Discord and GitHub for quick help and collaboration. (3 reviews) - Users value the **ease of use** of Payload CMS, facilitating swift development and smooth workflows for projects. (3 reviews) - Users value the **easy integration** of Payload CMS with Next.js, enhancing development speed and flexibility. (3 reviews) - Users value the **seamless integrations** of Payload CMS, enhancing development speed and simplifying processes remarkably. (3 reviews) - Users value the **excellent developer-friendly documentation** of Payload CMS, enabling quick and efficient project setup. (2 reviews) - Easy Creation (2 reviews) - Easy Integrations (2 reviews) - Easy Setup (2 reviews) - Users value the **flexibility** of Payload CMS, enabling quick adaptations and robust project sharing across various applications. (2 reviews) - Intuitive (2 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find a **lack of customization** in Payload CMS due to the reliance on community-made plugins for functionality. (1 reviews) - Users note the **limited community support** for Payload CMS, leading to potential maintenance issues with plugins. (1 reviews) - Users experience **slow loading** times both during site building and live navigation, affecting overall usability. (1 reviews) - Users experience **slow performance** during website building and navigation, affecting overall efficiency with the CMS. (1 reviews) - Users express concerns about the **update issues** due to reliance on potentially unmaintained community plugins, impacting long-term planning. (1 reviews) ## Payload CMS Reviews ### 1. Payload: The Next-Gen CMS You've Been Waiting For **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Louis M. | Software Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 27, 2025 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** The documentation was clear and effective, there were many examples that could be found on their own GitHub, and they have a very active discord community that are always willing to help when you run into problems. Extremely fast turn around time from blank slate to production. The ease of use, one command and you're up and running. Having Typescript across the project helps to not shoot yourself in the foot. It's a very modern and sleek workflow, and can solve many of the required tasks out of the box. Their hosting solution was very easy to use and at an affordable/fair price. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** Nothing at this time, they have a great roadmap of future implementations that solve all niche issues as well. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed a quick solution that would allow a content admin to control content for a multi-faceted marketing site. The flexibility to create new pages and re-use content across the site. It allowed us to develop a custom solution tailored very closely to the customers needs with ease. ### 2. Code-first and flexible, giving devs full control without sacrificing editor experience. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Parker O. | Software Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 22, 2025 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Payload CMS has excellent, developer-friendly documentation that makes it easy to get started and build fast. With the release of Payload 3.0, it now runs on Next.js, which significantly boosts development speed and pairs perfectly with Vercel for smooth, quick deployments. The system is highly extensible, making it simple to create reusable, templated projects that can be shared across multiple applications. Additionally, the community is very active and supportive in areas like the Payload Discord and GitHub, making it easy to find answers or get help when needed. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** My experience with Payload has been great overall. If I had to nitpick, it would be the reliance on community-made plugins. While they're helpful, you have to keep in mind that if the original author might not be actively maintaining them—especially during major version updates—you may end up having to patch the plugin yourself or rework your solution entirely. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s something to consider when planning long-term projects. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Payload CMS solves the problem of inflexible content systems by giving developers full control through a code-first, TypeScript-native approach. It speeds up development, simplifies deployment with tools like Next.js and Vercel, and still delivers a solid editor experience. ### 3. Customizable, Continually Improving and Easy for Non-Developers to Use **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dena M. | Digital Marketing Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 26, 2024 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Our web developers have been able to tailor Payload to suit our specifc needs, without exception. Anything we ask, they are able to make Payload do just that - not an experience we've had with our previous platform. Our website is tremendously easy to edit and add pages to, without the help of web developers, which has significantly lessened the time and resources spent on maintaining our site. We were also able to integrate our Digital Asset Management software into Payload, which has streamlined processes signficantly further. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** In the website buiding stages, it was a bit slow and now that the site is live, still is a little slow when navigating the back end. It's also quite new, which hasn't been an issue thus far, but I don't necessarily have the peace of mind I would like when things are in beta. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is a supported platform, which our old platform was not. It utilizes the latest in development technology. While the back end can be a little slow sometimes, our public facing website itself is much faster than before. It is tremendously easy and intutive to edit and add pages without the assistance of web developers. It has streamlined our web management, and the time and resources spent on it, significantly. ### 4. One of the best CMS I have ever used as a developer. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Krishna S. | Software Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 23, 2024 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** I loved the default Nextjs additions into payload. It has massive perform improvement and easy to use as a user and too fun to impletent / develop for developers. It has become my goto CMS for major projects. I also appreciate the payload team for discord support channels. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** Everythings seems fine after v3 stable release. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** It gives us freedom to make our platform as we wish with lots of customizations. I generally starts with the website template and modifiy with requreiments. It becomes very handy with Nexjts and shadcn/ui. ### 5. Payload used on multiple projects by web agency **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Charlie H. | Founder & Digital Strategist, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 14, 2024 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Show + Tell is a UK based Payload Agency... we've used payload as a web agency on multiple projects now as the feedback from IT & Marketing teams client side have been hugely positive. Client have found the content management process fare quick and more flexible to their needs meaning time saved in their day to day role. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** The Enterprise is expensive from smaller companies however the product is great and well worth it for larger Enterprise level clients. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** The previous CMS we used was Wordpress for client projects and as it's 20 years old it comes with a lot of bloat, performance & security isssues. Payload solves this. ### 6. Our new go-to CMS /backend framework **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sandro W. | CEO, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 31, 2024 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Endless extendability, modern tech stack, very fast end user experience, open source & no vendor lock in **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** Payload still lacks some features that are available by default on other systems. This is not a dealbreaker however, since you can either build it yourself or find most of them in the open source community **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We mainly build highly customized online platforms, therefore most competitors didn't fit our requirements. You always end up hitting some limitations and features you can't build. We've been using Payload for over a year now, and it never got in our way while developing new features. ### 7. The best headless CMS we've tried **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jay H. | CEO, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 14, 2024 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** It's open source, and its developer and content manager experience are unmatched amongst other Headless CMSs we've tried. Quick to deploy, great features and an easily reachable and helpful support team. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** It requires a bit of know-how if you're transitioning from a traditional CMS like WordPress, and its dashboard interface can feel a little sparse for new users. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Payload is providing us a modern CMS to offer clients that allows us full control, an extensive feature set, and an opportunity to roll out headless websites on our own terms. ### 8. Rapid development, easily extendable, and a friendly community **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mark B. | CTO, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 15, 2024 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Incredibly simple to extend, can be used for virtually anything, not just websites. Building small, medium, and large applications is a breeze and takes a lot less time than developing them from scratch. The Payload Discord community is incredibly friendly and helpful, and the team actively engage with the community. Payload is also feature rich, with a wealth of community plugins available to drop into your app with minimal configuration. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** It is not always simple to extend existing payload components, or modify them to better suit your use case. Sometimes you have to replace components entirely though this is rare. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is helping us build websites faster for our customers ### 9. Best amongst headless CMS **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Hrithik U. | Chief Executive Officer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 14, 2024 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Payload must be the easiest to implement and use in today's market. The team is super friendly and offers tons of support and the feature loaded platform is just the right fit for almost everything. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** Looking forward to see even more integrations and marketplaces. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We wanted a Headless CMS that is user-friendly, scalable and easy to implement for our clientele and Payload fits the bill. ### 10. Efficient and User-Friendly Content Management Tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Design | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 14, 2024 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** I appreciate the intuitive user-interface and the comprehensive features that make it easy for us to setup and for our clients to manage their content. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** N/A. Payload was the perfect solution for us. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** A modern and flexible CMS. ### 11. A powerful cms for the future **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jon Kristian N. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 10, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** PayloadCMS is an impressive content management system that strikes a perfect balance between flexibility and ease of use. Why? Because as a developer I can dictate precicely what the cms should provide for my clients. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** I would love for it to support frameworks like svelte and astro so that I can use local api and bundle everything. I would love to see features like what gutenberg provides for WordPress, more visual ways to build content. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I come from WordPress which often can get very clunky. With Payload I can eliminate the clunky-ness and provide a tailored experience for my customers, no more ugly semantics. ### 12. The Headless CMS every Dev has been waiting for **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jennifer E. | Full Stack Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 31, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Payload CMS was a total gamechanger for my development experience. I have been researching a Headless CMS that is easy to customize and extend for over a year until I stumbled upon Payload. From the get go the documentation was very extensive, getting a hang on it was very easy and now the process of creating a CMS that is fit to the customers need is done in a fracture of the time. Easy WordPress replacement. Also the response times within the Community are very fast if you have questions and the founders are always there for a chat and take recommondations thoughtfully **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** While extension of the UI is possible, a layout builder with Drag and Drop features (eg. as a Plugin) would be great. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** - Easy Setup - Low Cost environment - Custom Structures - Hook Implementation - API implementation - Faster development times due to its easy and straightforward usage ### 13. No other CMS even comes close. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Josh M. | Founder, Design, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 18, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Free and open source. Need I say more? One of the things I like most about Payload CMS is its full customizability. The collection models are code-based, which means that you have complete freedom to create any type of data structure that you need without the UI getting in the way. This makes it easy to build complex applications that require a lot of data. But the thing that truly sold Payload CMS for me was access control that was determined by my code. Us developers should have full control over the security structure that our application needs, and most other CMS do not give us this control and limit us by simple role-based access control. Another thing I like about Payload CMS is its community involvement. The developers are very active in the community, and they are always willing to help users with questions or problems. This makes it a great place to learn about Payload CMS and get help when you need it. Finally, I like the developer experience that Payload CMS provides. It is straightforward and easy to use, but it does not take any cheap shortcuts. This makes it a great choice for developers who want a powerful and flexible CMS that does not get in their way. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** Payload CMS is currently limited to MongoDB. This is a minor issue, but it would be nice to have the option to use other NoSQL databases. Overall, I think Payload CMS is a great choice for developers who are looking for a powerful and flexible headless CMS. Payload CMS is a very powerful and flexible CMS, but it can be a bit difficult to learn. This is because it is not a traditional CMS, and it does not use a lot of the same concepts that you might be familiar with. If you are not a developer, or if you are not familiar with Express or MongoDB, then you might find it difficult to learn how to use Payload CMS. (and their documentation is kinda messy right now) **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Payload CMS is our primary solution for website content management. It gives our clients a user-friendly way to manage the content of their websites. Migrating from another headless CMS solution, we saw that Payload CMS drastically improved our clients' user experience when editing their websites. This is because we have the ability to customize our UX to fit the needs of our clients. ### 14. THE Developer-First Modern Headless CMS **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Duncan V. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Payload has become more than just a developer-first headless CMS. It's become an entire web application framework that I will be using as the foundation of every modern web application I create in the future. It manages databases, APIs, admin panels, access control, types, schemas, authentication, and more. Payload solves every problem about web development I find challenging and allows me to focus on developing what actually matters. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** There's nothing that I personally dislike about Payload. It is, however, developer-first, so it's not like anybody and their mother can pick it up and start using it effectively; you have to come in with at least some web development experience. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's solving every single thing that I personally find difficult about web development and CMSs in general. My company tried multiple headless CMSs to integrate into our modern tech stack and settled on Paylaod because it's the most extensible and customizable and can solve any content-related problem we come across. ### 15. Most dev friendly CMS out there **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rafał J. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 22, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** It has great developer experience. It is build with MongoDB database engine as default data container, and writing Payload itself reminds a little like working with ORM and building data model, but in effect you get not only the model, but robust CMS and API structure in a flash. It enables fast iterations between versions of what you are building. It is also lightweight, and able to deploy with lowcost server configurations for production. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** Current versions are kind of forcing typescript on developers, which I understand but then again, I like having options. The text editor default for RichText fields is unstable and lacking, but there are future plans to create options of changing it to something new so... **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Managing content platform for websites, apps and products. It also serves as a tool for editing MongoDB collections, that my clients use for different purposes. ### 16. Awesome **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ariel T. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Payload is everything I was looking for in a CMS for the last couple years. It is such a pleasure to use a tool developed with so much care in user and developer experience. This platform strikes an unprecedented balance between having essential features out of the box and not being bloated with unecessary code. On top of all that, it is open source and both the team behind it and the community around it are totally wholesome. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** Some features, like media batch upload and WYSIWYG are still missing. But they're in the roadmap, which is transparent and well documented. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Payload provides a solid base for our company to add features as needed. In opposition to other CMSs that come with a lot of unnecessary features that you have to get rid of before even beginning. ### 17. A giant in the making **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jonas H. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** The biggest strength is also one of its weaknesses: a toolset to build anything you want, on top of a solid foundation: strongly typed, endlessly extensible, great managed cloud hosting (although still in beta) and not to forget a vibrant community on discord. With the high velocity in development one can one imagine where the product will be a year from now. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** The admin ui is very basic form scratch. Plan some time to add features or just adapt it in a way so content editors don't get lost. It's highly customizable, but it takes a bit of effort. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Payload enables you to build complex data structures, promote content reuse and serves as an extensible foundation for any web project. Strong type support including type generation for your data types makes integrating it a breeze. ### 18. Excellent CMS for developers who want easy customization **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Eric J. | Digital Production Associate, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 23, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** It is developer-friendly, being code-first and written entirely in TypeScript. It is easy to self-host and deploy. The documentation is excellent and allows developers to add customizations and develop their own plugins. Unlike many other CMS's, Payload is relatively unopinionated. And their developer team is very responsive to issues raised on their GitHub page. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** There isn't much that I dislike about it. Because it is unopinionated, it is also a bit skeletal, so you do have to do a bit of work to get something you want up and running. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Payload provides a very fast, lightweight CMS solution that I can self-host for free and customize as desired. It works well with modern web frameworks like NextJS as well, which makes it a good headless CMS option or people using that framework. ### 19. Very pleasant developer experince **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Martin C. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 19, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** I really like that you can self host it. You are not vendor locked in. There are several ways how to fetch data. You can use REST API or GraphQL which is a big plus contrary to what other headless CMS provide. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** I think that sometimes the documentation is lacking, however the community and developers are very helpful in providing help or solution. This may be due to the CMS growing at a fast pace. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Payload CMS has solved an implementation of a company website that I as an agency created for the client. The development process was very easy, as the choices how Payload CMS works were very well made by Payload CMS team. Payload has benefited me with an easy and fast development and ease of use for the client. ### 20. Seamless Control and Effortless Customization **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shubham K. | Full Stack Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 27, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** I've been using PaylaodCMS for my website development, and I must say it's been an incredible experience. As an Express.js user, having full control over my application is essential, and Paylaod CMS delivers just that. It strikes the perfect balance between low-code convenience and customization, allowing me to create and manage my web applications. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** I've encountered some challenges with Paylaod CMS's loading time during development. To enhance the development speed, I would love to see it replaced with a more modern solution like Vite.js. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Paylaod CMS has significantly accelerated our backend development process, cutting the time in half. I rely on Paylaod CMS primarily for creating admin dashboards and backend prototyping for large-scale applications. It has proven to be a reliable tool for streamlining development and boosting productivity. ### 21. The best CMS to come out yet **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Paul P. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 18, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Super intuitive to get started with, built on top of common Node packages such as Express, it was very easy to get started with and do advanced integrations with the platform.It's open source and has full typescript support. It also has an easy to use admin interface. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** There are a few features still missing out of the box at this moment, such as content moderation and real time collaboration however you could build these out on your own. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** It provides us with an easy to sell solution for most technical problems. With Payload we can roll out full fledged applications, SaaS, use it as a backend for mobile and desktop apps as well as have it power marketing and ecommerce sites for our clients. ### 22. I'll never use WordPress ever again **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Brandon H. | Lifeguard and Swim Instructor, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** The freedom to have full control over the structure of our headless cms is something that payloadcms strives at. The option to fully self-host is also extremely nice when comparing payload to other modern cms options such as Sanity and is what drew us to using it. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** I think the slight barrier to entry in terms of having to know some programmingis a slight downside. I also think the documentation in regards to deploying on platforms besides payload cloud and the serverless version could be better. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Payload is replacing the current wordpress site that we used t use. This is allowing a safer, faster, and cleaner experience for the teams at our company posting content and a cleaner experience for users as well. ### 23. Fast paced development, with little to none configuration **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gabriel L. | Software Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 20, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Payload has helped me quickly develop customizable MVPs for my business. It has so much plug-and-play functionality it makes it so easy to start. I love their documentation; neat and understandable. Also, the community has been beneficial when I find any blockers. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** I've encountered some edge cases where the standard implementations with Payload are not the best solution, so I'd have to design a workaround. Most of these were discussed with the community and easy to find a solution. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Fast pace development of MVPs for my business. It is so easy to set up a new CMS and start working with it; it feels like magic. We've found a 3x increase in productivity since we started using Payload. ### 24. Finally a developer focused CMS **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Cameron P. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Payload has the perfect balance between user customizability and developer experience. The advantage of a CMS is it does a lot of things for you but most CMS do that by compromising the Dx by locking out certain features. Payload doesn't do this and allows you to change every aspect of the site while keeping your users happy. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** I think the biggest disadvantage to PayloadCMS is its young age. There are not as may enterprise-grade features built-in and there is a lack of third-party plugins compared to something like strapi or contentful **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Payload CMS helps us have a common structure between all of the sites that we manage and allows us to customize it for clients. ### 25. PayloadCMS is an excellent headless CMS with massive potential **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chris M. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** PayloadCMS has become an essential tool for both my personal and work projects. Building out a dynamic website that a client can update themselves is a painless task with PayloadCMS, and I plan to continue building awesome projects with it. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** Honestly, it's hard to think of anything I dislike about PayloadCMS. For the sake of this review, I think the only downside of PayloadCMS is that it is still new and evolving its ecosystem. I expect amazing things to come from the project and team. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** PayloadCMS allows me to quickly create a project with dynamic capabilities. From creating a simple blog to a full-blown e-commerce website, the pattern stays consistent - define your data model and begin to benefit. ### 26. Great up-and-coming CMS **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Scott L. | Senior Software Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** I LOVE how customizable it is and that it works very well with NextJS. I have it side-by-side with my front-end code and it is easy to switch back and forth since they're both in TypeScript. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** I ran into a technical issue that took some time to resolve. The support team was able to help me and it was an issue with my reverse proxy config, but it was difficult to track down. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** The most popular solutions in the CMS space are not as easy to customize and are built with a non-technical user in mind. Payload CMS is built for a developer to be able to customize it to fit the exact business need you have. ### 27. The most developer-friendly & customizable headless CMS for free **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Avin D. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 22, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Highly customizability of user roles and content types is the major fact I find Payload CMS has got; Yes, some other headless CMS options have also got custom user roles and content types, but Payload CMS have the customizability over the boundries. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** The lack of enough community support for the product is the major drawback I found on the product. I wish the product will get enough community support in the future. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** The issue of not having customizable headless CMSs was the most significant problem Payload solved for us because, as a small organization, we need to manage our content in our way, which makes it comfortable for us to handle. ### 28. CMS for JS developer with a flexible an enjoyable experience **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Arthur L. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 20, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** I like the fact that's this a CMS that's for developers : I like the plugin ecosystem and also the Discord community. It's like having a AAA cms that we developer can expend or tweak easily to match our feature needs. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** NextJS + PayloadCMS exemple repository was quite new when I tried it for a client POC. Was quite hard to handle new features but right now the documentation is way better and there are multiple NextJS example repositories. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Headless CMS that can be tweaked or enhance easily for developers, to create value quickly. The user interface stay clean and the more time passes, the more friendly the interface is for editors. ### 29. Best Headless CMS i have used so far **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Online Media | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** The best thing about Payload is that it is very flexible- So you can use it for any kind of Project. Everything you need comes out of the box but you can also expand it as you like. You can create everything in code and you do not need any kind of GUI to create a Schema. Also everything is in Typescript so it makes the developement process really easy and fast. As a Big Compny you can easily White label it and customize it as you whish. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** The only thing is that it is pretty new on the market so you will not find many ressources - but that is not really a prolem because the documentation is really good and their discord server and the community behind it is even better. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am using it in a federal organization and currently for a project where you can create templates via forms. It helped a lot because the setup was very quick and we could focus on the development and the Editors on the content. ### 30. Best Headless CMS **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Brendan S. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 20, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** It's well thought out, limitations that I find in other headless CMSs, I haven't run into with Payload. It doesn't tie you down as much with things like cloud hosting. Most importantly, it's actually affordable! There's so many options out there for headless CMSs right now, I've tested a ton of them and found this one fills the role the best. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** It's still a young product so there's not as much community support behind it yet. The documentation is lacking in some areas. I've run into a few bugs while working with it, but again, it is a young product and I can see the team is working very hard to build it! **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** It fills the role of headless CMS, which is basically to manage data and provide an intuitive dashboard that allows non-technical and technical people alike to easily manage ### 31. PayloadCMS is an intuitive and well thought CMS! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michael B. | Software Development Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 22, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** - very easy to set up and get started - great user access and grant management with third-party SSO integration - easily define similar document structures with the ability to completely customize the visual presentation **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** While using MongoDB No-SQL database as the document database, it's sometimes tempting when changing data types of already defined fields. But besides that, I haven't experienced any pains when using Payload so far! **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Payload CMS is concentrating on what a Headless CMS is best at: structuring and saving content only while giving the ability to completely define the types of content and it's representation as one needs ### 32. A Flexible and Promising headless CMS **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Yauhen M. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 22, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** TypeScript-first, with proper built-in types and your models exports Models defined in code and auto-synced Proper GQL and Rest APIs Built-in versioning and drafts **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** The cloud platform seems a bit limiting at the moment. Not enough customizations for my ideal use-case, and the tech stack is not transparent yet influencing me as the user (example: I cannot CNAME the custom domain registered with CloudFlare) **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our content team can use it to provide the content fo the web site while the dev team can work on the code parts independently. Yet we have full types support via TS. ### 33. Great headless CMS **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Oscar L. | System Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 26, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Payload is fast and intuitive to extend and adapt. I've tried other options like Strapi, Payload does the same job with much better developer experience. The best thing about payload is that it is pleasant and fun to work with. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** Payload is a younger project compared to some competitors. Besides the obvious, some features that exist in other established products may not yet be implemented into payload. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** A centralized content management- and delivery system that can be used through multiple applications. Being able to reuse essentially anything for multiple projects increases performance and reduces overhead. ### 34. It helps us accelerate website development for our customers. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Zsolt S. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 29, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** We have tried many headless CMS projects, but Payload was the first that was easy to develop, and easy to extend and tailor it to the customers specification. It helps us build our projects faster and easier than other software. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** It only supports MongoDB at the moment, which is not always optimal, but they are working on supporting other databases. You need to have basic JavaScript/TypeScript knowledge to get started. It is not a con for us, but it may be for others. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps us develop our sites faster than before. We do not need to code every CRUD page and it helps us to focus more on the custom elements that are necessary for the customers. ### 35. My escape from Wordpress **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jacob W. | Web Development Technical Lead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** I no longer truly need to recommend Wordpress as a cheap solution to manage content for a website. ACF and Gravity forms are now just baked into what I can offer. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** Most people don't realize you can get a theme for any Next.js /React website to save on design costs. They're very used to Wordpress's community of themes. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Various clients who need a simple way to manage content on their website to clients with more complex needs that require admin customizations to facilitate. ### 36. Payload is the CMS we didn't know we needed and now we have it! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chris R. | Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** It's been built by devs for devs. The Payload team and the community are amazing. My agency now uses PayloadCMS exclusively. There's no competition now. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** I don't dislike anything about Payload CMS. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** My agency provides custom-made, often complex, solutions for clients. So when it comes to complex issues, in the past, we've had to really think about how we might approach/design a solution. Payload CMS lowers that barrier completely, and we can crack on with the work. ### 37. Amazing experience with Payload CMS! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lou V. | CEO, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Payload is all we can want in terms of balance between developer experience and editor experience. The backend is extremely easily extendable, the administration panel UI is clean and easy to use. We love the tool and we truly believe this is the future of open-source CMSs. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** At the moment the CMS is only limited to MongoDB databases but we know the team at Payload is hard working on a Postgres adapter that will ceil the deal for us. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Payload CMS makes a clear cut between the developer side and setup of the different fields and entries and the editor experience. It feels extremely nice to share the stack we work with between the frontend and the backend. ### 38. Finally a Node.js CMS that doesn't give me a headache **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Oscar N. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** It's not Wordpress or Strapi. It's simple and straight-forward, and actually saves us time on development - because we can add custom functionality in Express without messing with the CMS. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** It's still quite young and the plugin ecosystem and community needs some more time to mature. But it's not that much work writing one. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Saving time, code-first development. Easy to implement in our Next.js frontends and it's not hours, it's minutes to set it up for our React Native apps. ### 39. My new go to CMS **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Payload, the headless CMS, is a developer's dream come true. With its programmer-friendly design, seamless MongoDB integration, smooth Next.js connection, unmatched flexibility, and empowering features, Payload stands out as an exceptional choice for building web applications and more. What sets Payload apart is its flexibility.With robust API and plugins, Payload empowers developers to extend functionality and build sophisticated applications. Payload is the ideal choice for developers seeking a headless CMS that offers simplicity, flexibility, and power. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** In terms of the admin panel, one potential limitation of Payload is the absence of a built-in feature for adding graphs. However, the community of Payload has addressed this by developing plugins that enable the integration of graphs into the admin panel. While a native option for graphs is lacking, the availability of community plugins showcases the extensible nature of Payload CMS and the collaborative efforts to enhance its capabilities. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** The problem that Payload CMS solved was the dependency on wordpress. ### 40. Awesome developer experience, great UI and endless flexibility! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** The developer experience is really nice which makes our development team more productive when working on our content infrastructure. The fact that we can use our own react components and host the CMS on serverless on Vercel is a game changer for us. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** There is nothing I really dislike about Payload, Only thing that comes to mind is that the rich text editor is somewhat limited by default, but you can easily add functionality to it. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Payload CMS as source for our content heavy website, payload allows us to model our content model with ease and integrate it with our NextJS website using their Rest API / GraphQL API. ### 41. Finally a good headless CMS **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jan E. | Softwareingenieur, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** High focus on developer experience, minimalistic design, extremely easy customizable logic. Very dedicated and friendly support! **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** Sometimes it's kinda difficult to customize the design, but that's not really a big deal since it's used as a backoffice anyway. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Especially for customers who do not yet know exactly where they will end up, it is the perfect headless CMS due to its flexibility. ### 42. The best CMS for developers **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Enrico B. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 23, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** I was looking for a great CMS to use for small to medium sized websites and came across Payload CMS. In the vast landscape of content management systems I think Payload best meets the needs of developers. It's open source, scalable, quick to learn, and very customizable. I recommend it to all developers looking for a new CMS! **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** There aren't many plugins yet, but there is an awesome community! **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using Payload CMS to manage the page content and collections for our websites ### 43. An excellent CMS for hobbyists **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Payload is highly a highly customizable CMS that provides a ton of flexibility when it comes to creating custom collection types. The ability to theme the Admin UI to match the UI of your website (swap out the logo, change the color palette, add custom components, etc.) is definitely a nice touch. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** I find it difficult to say anything negative about Payload, but if I had to pick something, I would say that the scarcity of available plugins might be a negative for some projects. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** It allows me to update blog posts and site content without storing them in the codebase. ### 44. Having fun building websites again **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mark B. | Owner, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 22, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** From a developer POV, having front and back integrated and just being able to keep writing TypeScript is a big plus. So happy to finally ditch WordPress. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** So far, I launched one project using Payload. I have yet to discover downsides. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** The development process is sped up significantly. Not having to switch between frontend and backend languages is a blast. ### 45. The headless CMS we need **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Azamat K. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 22, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** It provides flexibility, custom content structuring and grouping fields. I love an easy-to-use API, SDKs, and comprehensive documentation. Extensibility! Developers can create custom plugins and hooks. User-friendly interface! And awesome design :) **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** It supports only mongodb as data base, and it would be awesome to have postgres as an option. Growing community: Payload's community and ecosystem are still developing. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** As a startuper I need to quickly build MVP, test it real life, make quick changes and repeat it. Also, It doesn't limit me, cause I can add custom plugin, trigger required hooks or add additional api endpoints. ### 46. No brainer **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Austin D. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 22, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Love the community. The documentation is very straightforward the value proposition for Payload is clear. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** Just waiting for the ability to preview draft changes against a hosted UI using something like Next.js **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** API first approach to content management. It helps our business provide fine-grained access control so that everyone at the company can take part in content curation ### 47. Powerful CMS and great support & innovation from the Payload team and community **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Taun H. | Freelance Video Production, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 21, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** The freedom and flexibility to code to your preferences and provide a simple and elegant user experience for clients. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** Compared to other CMSs, Payload is currently fresh and therefore doesn't have as many resources for learning if you're someone who enjoys binging tutorials, though there is more than enough content to get going, and the community and team is very supportive. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Fully customizable and simple backend functionality to manage content simply, without the bloated and extra features. Payload also has a good pricing model, allowing for multiple admins at no extra expense. ### 48. Just amazing **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jean W. | Développeur freelance, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 22, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** It's simple. You can easily learn and get something running in a matter of hours. The API's are perfectly designed and snappy, and the flexibility is crazy. We switched from Directus after 1 year of use in less than a week. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** The cloud is a little unstable, but it's still in beta for the moment. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** It solves the ability to be flexible with content, and keep it structured for us developpers. We can easily allow or content team to add anything while we are sure that the underlying schema is predictible. ### 49. Properly customisable CMS with a real internationalization model **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sanna J. | Co-Founder, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 31, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** Their internationalization model excellent **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** There is no way to generate an admin thumbnail for uploads which are not images. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Payload has helped us immensely in providing a dashboard for our clients where they can easily edit content according to the product specificiation. ### 50. Finally a customizable CMS that is easy to work with **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Apparel & Fashion | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 29, 2023 **What do you like best about Payload CMS?** I'm still new to payload, but I was surprised at how easy it was to customize to whatever I needed. Combined with easy to use startup templates, it's a really easy CMS to work with. **What do you dislike about Payload CMS?** At this time, I haven't discovered anything that I dislike. **What problems is Payload CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Other CMS services are either very pricy, structured in a way that is not how you usually work with or not having both cloud and self hosting options. Payload solves all these problems. ## Payload CMS Discussions - [What is Payload CMS used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/payload-cms-what-is-payload-cms-used-for) - [What is Payload CMS used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-payload-cms-used-for) - [View Payload CMS pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/payload-cms/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-12+02%3A53%3A23+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=87ea6c7b-977f-4db1-ac23-a05485c7c77c&secure%5Btoken%5D=069ebcb333b69b1f834720645093b527d190325c1b9dc8e0ce3a9ba9d67b0398&format=llm_user) ## Payload CMS Features **Content** - Content Authoring - Rich Text Editor - Versioning - Plug-ins/Widgets/Apps - Approval Process - Content Scheduling - Asset Management - Internal Search - Content Repository **Publishing** - Automated Publishing - Multi-language - AR/VR Capability **Headless Commerce** - Decoupling - REST APIs - Data Orchestration - Customization - Extensibility **Design** - Breadth of Pre-Built Templates - Mobile - Branding/Themes - Customization **Development** - Image Management - Reuseable Content - Unlimited Environments - Form Builder **Generative AI** - AI Text Generation - AI Text Summarization **Platform** - User Community - SEO - Flexible Navigation Structures - User, Role, and Access Management - Enterprise Scalability - Internationalization - Dashboards and Reports - API / Integrations **Analytics** - Personalization - Content Performance **Agentic AI - E-Commerce Platforms** - Autonomous Task Execution - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making **Agentic AI - Web Content Management** - Cross-system Integration - Natural Language Interaction **Agentic AI - Headless CMS** - Cross-system Integration **Merchandising/Marketing** - Storefront Design Tools - Product Visualization - Recommendations / Personalization - Promotions and Discounts - Shopping Cart Abandonment - Product Reviews - SEO **Product Catalog** - Content Management - Product Configuration - Product Search and Filtering - Intangible Products **Order Process** - Checkout Process - Shipping Options - Tax Display and Processing - Payment Processing - Order Management - Returns / Refunds - Inventory Management - Multi-Channel Fulfillment **Multi-Channel Support** - Omnichannel - Mobile - Social Commerce - Customer Service - Store Locator - 3rd-Party Store Integration - B2B **Platform** - APIs - Customization - Integrations to Add-on Tools - User Management - Reporting / Analytics - Security - Multi-Site Management - Admin Access Rights - Test-to-Product Migration - Internationalization - Cross Browser Support - Performance and Reliability ## Top Payload CMS Alternatives - [Sanity](https://www.g2.com/products/sanity/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (901 reviews) - [Strapi](https://www.g2.com/products/strapi/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (201 reviews) - [Contentful](https://www.g2.com/products/contentful/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (311 reviews)