I am exploring options for a headless CMS for a community website where a non technical admin will post details about events in the community like a meeting or volunteering done by the community. They don't have funding. What is the cheapest option out there?

The answer isn't headless WordPress. It's WordPress.

You're building something for a volunteer community, which means at some point you'll be gone and somebody will be wondering how the heck to manage the site with this "custom" setup that they can't figure out with chatgpt or a youtube video.

Set them up for the future, not for the now. WordPress. Just WordPress.

Reference: 26+ years in hosting, 4 years in WordPress-only hosting.

I wouldn't be setting up a static site + headless CMS for a non-technical organization. This is basically asking for a constant headache.

Just set them up on a website builder like Webflow/Framer/Ycode/Squarespace/etc that has a CMS built in.

Keystatic[1] is awesome. It's local-first by default and made for static site builds, so you can keep costs low by not using a server.

I've used it alongside Astro for both my personal blog[2] and two company sites[3][4]. It's worked amazingly well each time.

[1] https://keystatic.com/

[2] https://github.com/skeptrunedev/personal-site

[3] https://github.com/devflowinc/trieve/tree/main/website

[4] https://github.com/patroninc/patron/tree/main/website

I really enjoyed sanity.io a year ago. It had the best data structure flexibility by a mile, with the ability to have multiple user draft states and merge conflict resolution.

Other Headless CMS felt restrictive, with shared drafts or the requirement for all published items to have changes go live instantly.

Once you're set up with your schema, the UI is easy enough for non-developers (and you can customize it for them if needed).

Why headless ? If non technical admin will post details about events, you can find a WordPress plugin for it and setup a WP site. Headless makes sense if you want to really customize the experience but you want "cheapest option" so I would assume they cannot pay for customizations anyway.

We recently landed on Strapi. There’s an open source version but we use the hosted one (for now). All in all good. There are a few quirks in the UI (sometimes smaller changes weren’t saved - although this might be a user issue from my side) and the markdown editor could be more user friendly.

We are sticking with it for now because it’s indeed good enough and I haven’t found any better options (give the price).

I’m building my personal blog with 11ty as a static site builder and Decap[0], previously known as Netlify CMS, to manage content.

Basically it provides a UI and all changes are pushed to GitHub which will launch the release process back in Netlify.

Seems it might fit your requirements too.

0. https://decapcms.org/

You have twenty good tips already, but nobody seems to have mentioned that you can run WordPress fully headless.

https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/glossary/headless-wordpress/

Drupal works very well as a headless CMS now

https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/decoupled-drupal https://www.lullabot.com/resource/decoupled-drupal

Drupal has a really strong community behind it, and was completely rebuilt a number of years ago with modern PHP. It uses Symfony, composer, etc.

Wagtail CMS, built on top of django. https://wagtail.org/

Used directus[0] (v9) for a customer project[1]. I needed to sync the CMS content with meilisearch[2], so I had to write a custom extension that registers some hooks[3] for that. I discovered some weirdness in the API, since the payload of a hook behaves differently whether the CMS change gets triggered via UI event, API request, or CSV upload. Was a bit annoying, but got it working in the end. Don't know if that improved in later versions, but I honestly also didn't keep up with development since the license change.

[0]: https://directus.io/

[1]: https://genopedia.com/

[2]: https://www.meilisearch.com/

[3]: https://directus.io/docs/guides/extensions/api-extensions/ho...

From a publishing perspective, the choice of headless CMS often depends on how you plan to scale and distribute content:

- Strapi→ great balance of flexibility + control, good for small-to-mid projects. - Contentful→ solid for enterprise-level publishing, but cost is higher. - Sanity→ strong for structured content, especially for editorial teams. - Ghost (headless mode)→ works very well for content-heavy publishing.

As a software publisher, I’ve seen Strapi and Ghost perform particularly well for indie and startup-level launches. I recently published a project where Strapi helped reduce time-to-market significantly.

Curious what others here are using in 2025!

Craft CMS - https://craftcms.com - is superb and still seems to be under the radar, I often wonder why it’s not more widely used

We have been building an open source CMS based on TypeScript for a while now at https://github.com/deco-cx/deco

Now we are adding the ability to deploy workflows and agents. It can _also_ code websites: https://decocms.com

But alas its not ready yet - pre launch this monday.

I work for a headless CMS, but I think that's a poor fit for your use case. Many of our small customers start off in your situation, where a helpful dev makes them a headless site. A couple years later, the dev moves on, and the client has no way to update their site with new features or sections, and no way to fix it if anything breaks. And we have to explain to them what headless is and why they're in this situation. It sucks for everyone involved.

Go with a regular CMS, like Wix or Squarespace or WordPress. The $10 or $20 a month is still cheaper than having to pay a dev later to fix their broken headless site with old deprecated packages and frameworks that nobody uses anymore.

Headless is a developer optimization, not a client feature. It only makes sense if the dev is a part of the customer's own team, or in an ongoing agency relationship with them. It's a poor fit for freelancers and volunteers because the client ends up with essentially abandonware.

Headless is a constraint you added as a developer for yourself - it's definitely not a thing the users will care about. Ghost is a great, simple, batteries included non-headless CMS for things like you describe. Self-hosted or as a service.

If you have a registered nonprofit, like a 501(c)(3), you can often get a substantial break from some SaaS companies.

Some will give you the service for free (rate-limited, probably), while others may not give you a break at all.

I will say Caveat Emptor. If you keep your backend on Someone Else's Machine, they can hold your data hostage. Hosting should be fine, but some SaaS companies have a nasty habit of considering any data they have access to, to be "theirs." May be fine, until they sell the company, at which time, bend over and squeal.

Source: Been doing nonprofit development work since last century.

I know this is for a non-technical admin, but I just wanted to give Zola [0] a shoutout.

I love the single binary approach, and it being so simple. Got my blog up and running in minutes with absolutely minimal configuration. Helps me focus on the writing rather than tinkering with the tool I think this coupled with Keystatic [1] could be a nifty little lightweight setup for most.

[0] https://github.com/getzola/zola

[1] https://keystatic.com/

Dev budget under $25k: Statamic [1] or Wordpress (with ACF [2] & Acorn [3])

Professional work above that: Sanity [4] or Hygraph [5]

[1] https://statamic.com

[2] https://www.advancedcustomfields.com

[3] https://roots.io/acorn/

[4] https://www.sanity.io

[5] https://hygraph.com

If you're hell-bent on headless, I can personally recommend 11ty (https://www.11ty.dev/) and hugo (https://gohugo.io/). That said, for non-technical admins, you probably want a user interface. For that, Ghost (https://ghost.org/) and Grav (https://getgrav.org/). Or Wordpress!

Im using directus (https://directus.io/) for my personal website with a vacation blog and some posts…

So far it works pretty well and my gf is also able to use it on her own, so you could say its non-tech user approved haha

I also did some websites using hugo and DecapCMS from netlify. That also worked but the ui isnt to fancy and it gets a bit confusing on complex pages. But it can directly push to a git repo so you have version control out of the box

Wordpress? Why does it need to be headless though?

I use Craft CMS’ GraphQL capabilities with my Eleventy site. Works well and helps me keep my page loads static. I would also recommend Directus for this, as it has some nice quality-of-life benefits.

To manage deploys, I have used Cleavr, which does a good job at it without being too user-unfriendly. That’s a paid service, about $6/month.

Cheapest? The most expesive part is going to be paying the person or company who sets it up, maintains, and documents it. I'm an expert at Drupal, so for my companies, Drupal is cheap and it can be adapted to grow and change over time as new ideas for the application are discovered; you don't know what your website will need next year so it's nice to have a CMS that is based on having the ability to adapt over time. Wordpress is only cheap if your ambitions for the site aren't big. Trying to do too much with it is a developer's nightmare. Peace.

> They don't have funding.

Well how are they then going to pay for their web hosting? Tell them to scram.

In my experience, the cheapest way to serve content on the web is static, for convenience rendered with a static site generator.

It's admittedly more editor-less than headless, but anything that constantly needs to runs on a server will cost more, in the end, even if it's a freemium service, right now.

Editing content with Obsidian and rendering it with Hugo is no too bad, btw. (see eg. https://www.nickgracilla.com/posts/obsidian-is-my-hugo-cms/ for a setup).

Ghost (my preference, to avoid security concerns around WordPress), or WordPress, if you can deal with the occasional security issue or use managed hosting.

Basically forget the “headless” bit and use a bog-standard CMS.

Wagtail: https://docs.wagtail.org/en/stable/advanced_topics/headless....

Sorry I know you said headless, but have you considered wordpress? Its unsexy, but the ecosystem is really well suited for this and hosting is dirt cheap.

Because its so popular and been around for so long, theres tons of free themes, plugins and videos which will reduce your support burden - plus your admin could get help easily as its not something you rolled.

Other than that, decap on gitlab is easy to run for free, and will provide the admin with a ui for editing content. Astro is also great and stable for this type of thing.

I think a hosted solution is best, unless you know for sure that they’ll always have a developer willing to volunteer their time to manage their server and keep everything up to date.

The cost is peanuts compared to the hourly rate of a developer to personally manage and keep secure their website for them.

As for static site, you think a non technical person can handle a static site generator and deploying to GitHub Pages? I doubt it.

Often times it gets very expensive to cheap out on things.

I'd recommend the following options. Both platforms offer enterprise solutions, but also provide free starter plans:

https://www.storyblok.com/

https://www.datocms.com/

From own experience, the developer experience is awesome. Both are based in Europe, which is probably why those were not mentioned here before :)

You could use notion if you want forms (event sign ups or tracking stuff like inventory). There’s a way to make notion pages a “website”.

It’s something a little easier than Wordpress for non technical people. Nothing is super simple but at least notion can be figured out more easily than code or admin panels. When you’re not there, they won’t be completely in the dark.

Just my 2c.

There are plenty available: https://jamstack.org/headless-cms/ Keystone mb?

You may also want to check things like Appwrite for hosted solution (free plan available) or PocketBase for self-hosting on any VPS (fly.io does not charge below 5$). Those are more developer-focused, but also should be much less restrictive.

Have no real experience with any of them.

CityDesk if it was 24 years ago. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/12/what-does-citydesk...

Still not much that was easier to create a website for a non-tech user.

CraftCMS is an actual CMS, the single user version is free.

Highly recommended.

I think it depends a little on what your intended head is? Headless CMS is just CRUD UI for a database that has an API.

PayloadCMS seems really interesting, I’ve used it successfully for a small blog but I feel it has a lot of potential. It’s not fully open source, if you want additional features like SSO you have to pay for premium version.

Maybe https://getpublii.com/ it's a static site generator as an app for non technical people

Checkout Sonic - https://github.com/lane711/sonicjs

Contentstack is pretty good in this regard. Headless, provides Personalization, Hosting, Analytics, Marketplace etc.

I am travelling right now. I wonder if I had used Wordpress for my blog because it has a fully functional mobile app.

i've been super happy with Ghost for our blog http://mixpeek.com/blog

Not immediately practical -- I've been looking into using Pharo (smalltalk) to build a web authoring / static site generator that non-devs can use, and something that devs can quickly customize or extend.

A gmail account and a public calendar and embed widget.

Ghost for work.. bearblog.dev for personal use

Payload CMS Is the best out there. Its free to host yourself.