Compare 15 free headless cms tools, free tiers, and developer deals. We could not confirm today's terms for 8 of them: on 4 the page we cite did not answer, and on 4 our own read did not confirm them. Each row says why. Nothing on record contradicts our terms for Sanity, Hygraph, Prismic, Squidex 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 (45), Search (5).
We track 15 headless cms services with a free tier we hold as current. This category has been relatively stable — only 2 pricing changes recorded across all vendors.
| Vendor | Tier | Description | Read / catalogue date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contentful | Free | Headless CMS — 10K records, 100K API calls/month, 10 users, 25 content types, 2 environments. Personal/non-commercial useWe could not read the page we cite for this offer when we last looked, on 2026-11-08, so we cannot confirm these terms today. | 2026-07-25 · tried 2026-11-08, no read |
| Sanity | Free | Sanity is a structured content platform. The Free plan offers 20 user seats and 2 public datasets. It includes 10,000 documents, 1M API CDN requests a month, 250,000 API requests a month, 100 GB assets, and 100 GB bandwidth a month. Usage above these quotas requires the Growth plan at $15 per seat a month. | 2026-11-08 |
| Hygraph | Hobby | GraphQL headless CMS — 1K content entries, 500K API calls/month, 3 seats, 20 models, unlimited asset storage | 2026-11-08 |
| Directus | Self-Hosted | Self-hostable headless CMS. Core is $0 a month with 3 user seats, 25 collections and 5 flows. The Open Innovation Grant gives organizations under $5M in annual revenue and fewer than 50 employees a fully permissive license at no cost. Directus Cloud hosting is a $99 a month add-on; Team is $499 a month billed annually.Our read on 2026-11-10 found the page different from the terms we hold, and we hold no confirmation of the terms we publish. | 2026-11-10 / 2026-10-19 |
| 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 projectsThe page we cite for this offer states no amount, tier or rate we can read when we last looked, on 2026-10-10, so we cannot confirm these terms today. | 2026-10-10 / 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 CloudThe page we cite for this offer states no amount, tier or rate we can read when we last looked, on 2026-10-10, so we cannot confirm these terms today. | 2026-10-10 / 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/monthWhen we read the page we cite for this offer on 2026-10-08, we found the same terms as an earlier read we had declined to record, and we have read it again since, on 2026-11-03, without confirming the terms above, so we cannot confirm these terms today. | 2026-11-03 / 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.Our read on 2026-10-24 found the page different from the terms we hold, and we hold no confirmation of the terms we publish. | 2026-10-24 / 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.Our read on 2026-10-25 found the page different from the terms we hold, and we hold no confirmation of the terms we publish. | 2026-10-25 / 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. | 2026-11-08 |
| Solo | Free | Free AI website creator from Mozilla, shutting down: all Solo websites and data are deleted on November 30, 2026. Free custom domain, no credit card needed.
|
2026-10-06 / 2026-09-17 |
| Squidex | Free | Offers free tier for small projects. API / GraphQL first. Open source and based on event sourcing (versing every change automatically). | 2026-11-06 / 2026-08-02 |
| Storyblok | Free | Headless CMS with visual editor for developers and marketers — Starter plan is free and includes 1 space, 1 user seat (with an additional seat available for $15/month), 100GB traffic/month, 100k API requests/month, 2 locales, 25k AI credits, 200 components, 20,000 stories, 2,000 assets, 1 day content versioning retention, 500MB max asset size, and 3 webhooks. | 2026-11-02 |
| 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. | 2026-11-03 |
| 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. | 2026-10-26 |