Payload Reviews

Seamless adoption by web agency

Comments: There's always a nervousness when adopting a new platform but looking back there was nothing to be nervous about. It's been an easy & seamless process and gaining support as an agency partner has been great. We look forward to a bright future with Payload!

Pros:

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. From development perspective the whole development team enjoy building on the platform and now dread if they have to develop on any of our legacy CMS systems we still support. It's been a big thumbs up from a programmers perspective.

Cons:

The Enterprise is expensive from smaller companies however the product is great and well worth it for larger Enterprise level clients.

Payload - The best application framework on the market

Comments: Been using Payload since summer 2022. The platform can be used as a CMS, or as an application framework. You can turn Payload into anything, either a rapid prototyping framework, or a content management hub

Pros:

Developer experience, speed of development, and ease of extendability

Cons:

Bundle size can be quite large for small scale projects

Highly customisable CMS with a great i18n model

Pros:

Payload's i18n model is incredible for large scale projects, and managing complexity. Additionally the admin panel is highly customisable and can be tailored to any kind of business.

Cons:

There is no way to generate admin thumbnails for files other than images. Mangling of node.js environment and browser environment pose a bit of an issue, but manageable.

Our go to framework

Comments: For us, Payload strikes the perfect balance between providing everything you need to not start from scratch while still being completely customisable for our requirements. We've built everything from websites, online shops to management platforms and our clients love it!

Pros:

- No limitations for extending functionality - Super fast experience for the end user, low resource requirements especially compared to Wordpress - Open source, easy to self-host

Cons:

Some convenient functionalities are still missing, e.g. bulk upload, display where media elements are used across the system, locking documents for other users while being edited/live collaboration. I assume they will be available at some point in the future, currently you'd just have to implement them yourself

Payload: An open source Headless CMS you'll love

Pros:

Payload offers the best developer and content manager experience of all the headless CMSs we've tried. It's open source, and the Payload team are very supportive and easy to reach.

Cons:

Like all headless CMSs there's a learning curve compared to a traditional CMS like WordPress. It's dashboard UI can be a little underwhelming for users first trying the product.

The best option for developers

Comments: It has been a pleasant experience to use Payload as my backend option. Only one place to configure my DB, API, and CMS in a simple way. It's awesome to have a backend so fast and easy.

Pros:

Developer friendly. It's very useful and beneficial that we can customize and extend almost anything. We can define rules for each collection or field and create our own endpoints. The admin panel is easy to use and nice-looking.

Cons:

I'm waiting for that Postgres adapter so we can have a relational database alternative. I believe Payload would be almost perfect if we could also customize the admin panel with Svelte components instead of React components.

Seamless Control and Effortless Customization

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

No more WordPress

Comments: Very quick adoption. A couple small snags here and there. Generally very pleased.

Pros:

It provides the most useful aspects of WordPress out of the box and does away with many of the aspects that holds WordPress back.

Cons:

While it has been around for a couple of years, it still has plenty of ways to improve. As a result, there is definitely more time necessary to investigate what is possible to do with it. However, the codebase is purposefully left as non-abstracted as possible which makes understanding it that much easier.

Best Headless CMS on the market

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Best Headless CMS

Comments: I've tried MANY headless CMS options, and Payload has been the best so far

Pros:

I'm able to customize every single aspect of this CMS. Support is amazing

Cons:

Limited support for alternative databases, although more will be added in the next releases.

Modern way to build website with headless CMS

Pros:

Payload has many great features and amazing and fast support. The advantage is that the project is open source and some people are creating amazing ideas. The Payload team is very reliable and tries to answer and accommodate everyone. Project is very active and always releases amazing new versions, which usually don't cause any problems with older versions.

Cons:

I would have expected more examples in the documentation, some things are missing or incorrect. Payload also doesn't use concepts that some may be used to. If you're not a developer, sometimes it can be harder to understand or learn some features. But despite this, Payload CMS is a very powerful and flexible CMS.

Efficient and User-Friendly CMS

Comments: My overall experience with Payload has been very positive. The tool is user-friendly and provides a robust set of features that greatly facilitate content management. Its speed and precision are impressive, making it a reliable choice for our needs.

Pros:

I appreciated the intuitive user interface and the comprehensive features that made it easy to manage content.

Cons:

N/A. There's nothing that I don't like about Payload

Best Headless CMS

Pros:

The packed-in features, robust scalability and support from the Payload team outperform every other option!

Cons:

I do not have anything to pinpoint as such, but there are absolutely more features to come in and once it does, Payload is going to be the top option for many.

The Headless CMS every Dev has been waiting for

Comments: Overall it will be my go-to backend for any kind of software.

Pros:

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

Cons:

While extension of the UI is possible, a layout builder with Drag and Drop features (eg. as a Plugin) would be great.

The CMS that everyone was waiting for!

Comments: Overall, the cms is great and easy to use for website backends, but also as apis or internal tooling.

Pros:

Payload is the most user friendly and developer oriented cms I’ve used so far. Its customisability and ease of use while keeping the express app fully accessible works great for us. Also the localisation is a lot better, since it works perfect in combination with generating routes necessary for NextJS dynamic routes.

Cons:

Honestly, the only thing I’ve heard from our users is that the admin interface looks to basic. I rather see that as a good thing. It’s clean and easy to understand.

One of the best if not the best CMS I ever used.

Pros:

I tried many CMSes but non of them were as good as Payload. It's developer-friendly, very customizable, easy to understand and oh my god, it looks incredible! Really loved using it and I won't stop using it in the nearest future for sure!

Cons:

What I don't like about Payload is that not so many people know about it and I think it is a mistake.

PayloadCMS - A headless CMS that still has brains.

Comments: Excellent. I use PayloadCMS for personal and work projects. It has become my go-to and it's hard to look back.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Amazing experience with Payload CMS!

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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. It might even not be the case anymore when you read this review.

Unrivaled CMS experience both for website admins and for developers

Comments: Absolutely everything, from the community, to the actual product.

Pros:

The developer experience which enables anyone who knows javascript to customize both how the admin panel looks and how the backend works is just mind blowing. We've recently went on a journey to find the perfect CMS for our react/next based websites and I can with 100% confidence say that absolutely nothing compares to Payload.

Cons:

When not using Payload Cloud, hosting Payload can sometimes be pretty confusing, having everything set up perfectly. But once you do it once or twice, it's a piece of cake. Other than that there are no negatives.

Best Headless CMS

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Great headless CMS

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Excellent CMS for developers who want easy customization

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

A powerful cms for the future

Pros:

PayloadCMS is an impressive content management system that strikes a perfect balance between flexibility and ease of use. Its intuitive interface and robust features make it a top choice for businesses and developers looking to create and manage dynamic websites efficiently.

Cons:

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.

Finally a developer focused CMS"

Comments: Payload CMS helps us have a common structure between all of the sites that we manage and allows us to customize it for clients.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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 contentfulReview collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Finally a CMS that doesn't suck

Comments: We love it. We've migrated from previous CMSes and didn't take long. We can build custom functionality without messing or risk ruining the CMS.

Pros:

Coming from Strapi and Wordpress, they're decent CMSes. But Payload is a breeze to work with and it's surprisingly stable considering how young it is. It's minutes, not hours to set up a CMS and deploy it.

Cons:

It's still young, so the plugin and 3rd party services hasn't matured yet. But it's not that hard to write your own plugins for Payload