Compare 15 free headless cms tools, free tiers, and developer deals. Verified pricing for Contentful, Sanity, Hygraph, Directus, Strapi and more.
What this name holds: Editorial stores with an authoring UI in front of them, read over an API.
2 other names here answer “where do I put the data and query it”, and each holds a different list: Databases (44), Search (6).
We track 15 headless cms services with a free tier we hold as current. This category has seen some movement — 6 pricing changes recorded across vendors.
| Vendor | Tier | Description | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contentful | Free | Headless CMS — 10K records, 100K API calls/month, 10 users, 25 content types, 2 environments. Personal/non-commercial use | 2026-07-25 |
| Sanity | Free | Superseded: As of 2026-08-28, sanity.io/pricing reads: Free: $0 forever. Includes: Up to 20 user seats, 2 permission roles, 2 datasets (public only), Unlimited content types and locales, Content Agent, Agent Context, Compute and Agent Actions, Hosted, real-time content database, Live previews and visual editing tools. We are not publishing our stored Sanity terms beside it — our own pricing change record, discovered 2026-08-28, names them as the previous ones. Read what we recorded ↓ | 2026-07-23 |
| Hygraph | Hobby | GraphQL headless CMS — 1K content entries, 500K API calls/month, 3 seats, 20 models, unlimited asset storage | 2026-08-27 |
| Directus | Self-Hosted | Self-hosted free (BSL license, free for <$5M revenue). Cloud free tier discontinued Nov 2025 — Cloud starts at $15/mo | 2026-07-28 |
| Strapi | Free OSS | Free OSS (MIT). Self-hosted headless CMS with REST and GraphQL APIs. Content types builder, RBAC, webhooks, i18n, media library. 200K+ active projects | 2026-07-30 |
| Payload CMS | Free OSS | Free OSS (MIT). TypeScript-first headless CMS with code-based config. REST and GraphQL APIs, access control, hooks, live preview. Self-hosted or Payload Cloud | 2026-08-25 |
| Cosmic | Free | Headless CMS — 1 project, 2 users, 1,000 objects, 10K API requests/month (100K cached), 1 GB storage, 1 GB API bandwidth, 3 AI agents, 300K AI tokens/month | 2026-08-14 |
| Crystallize | Free | Headless PIM with ecommerce support. Built-in GraphQL API. Particle plan (free): unlimited users, 100 catalog items, 25 orders/month, 5 GB bandwidth/month, 25K API calls/month. | 2026-08-12 |
| DatoCMS | Free | Offers free tier for small projects. DatoCMS is a GraphQL-based CMS. On the lower tier, you have 100k/month calls. | 2026-08-01 |
| Prismic | Free | Headless CMS. Content management interface with fully hosted and scalable API. The Community Plan provides unlimited API calls, documents, custom types, assets, and locales to one user. Everything that you need for your next project. Bigger free plans are available for Open Content/Open Source projects. | 2026-08-02 |
| Solo | Free | Free AI website creator from Mozilla, create a beautiful website for your business from a few simple inputs. Free custom domain, no credit card needed. | 2026-08-28 |
| Squidex | Free | Offers free tier for small projects. API / GraphQL first. Open source and based on event sourcing (versing every change automatically). | 2026-08-02 |
| Storyblok | Free | Headless CMS with visual editor for developers and marketers. Free Starter plan: 1 space, 1 user seat (max 2 with +$15/mo add-on), 100K API requests/month, 2 locales, 200 components, 20K stories max, 2,000 assets, 100 GB traffic/month, 25K AI credits/month, 10 datasources, 3 webhooks, 2 preview URLs. No credit card required. | 2026-08-24 |
| TinaCMS | Free | Replacing Forestry.io. Open source Git-backed headless CMS that supports Markdown, MDX, and JSON. The basic offer is free with two users available. | 2026-08-06 |
| WPJack | Free | Set up WordPress on any cloud in less than 5 minutes! The free tier includes 1 server, 2 sites, free SSL certificates, and unlimited cron jobs. No time limits or expirations—your website, your way. | 2026-09-09 |
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