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.

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.

As a newcomer to headless CMS, I am totally impressed with the capabilities this presents to our business in so many ways, for mobile app development, plugin development and many others. It has so far been a total joy to use and when things have gone a little off course the support has been second to none. I would highly recommend this to anyone considering the same. Having worked in backend development for many years, while I would agree at the bare metal you can get into a lot of granularity of control, I would say that all in all I fail to see how for most projects Directus won't tick most if not all boxes and more...!