Directus

Avantages

Directus peut s'adapter à tout les environnement de développement et permet ainsi de mettre en place très rapidement un outil de gestion de contenu.

Inconvénients

La fonctionnalité flux n'est pas encore en place.

Avantages

It is free, if you are able to host it yourself!
It is completely white-label, which makes your employees love it even more.
It is perfectly customizable.
In case you miss something, you can easily jump on the train and add it for your project - or all Directus users (contributing in the open-source community).
If you want it fully managed, there is a cloud-version at a fair price (cheap compared to others) too.

Inconvénients

Potential con for some people: The PHP version got more or less deprecated. There might be one version again, but focus is definitely with NodeJS. If you want to host it yourself and are not able to run Node or Docker, you might run into problems.
File management could be better and more customizable (in terms of conditional rules how uploads get processed per collection and field).

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Directus

Avantages

After reviewing and trying a few headless CMS’, we selected Directus. We found that Directus was a comprehensive, feature rich, well supported and intuitive. The main differentiator for us was their implementation of a multi tenancy solution. I would highly recommend this platform to anyone who is looking to deliver a single CMS product across multiple organisation with discrete and granular controls and permissions.

Inconvénients

They’ve increased (not by that much) their lowest tier pricing. For us the previous pricing was a low barrier for entry for a lot of rich features. However saying that for the new pricing you are still receiving a lot of value.

Avantages

I love the concept behind Directus: the idea to freely create a database in an easy way, organizing the content as you need or as you imagined it. I come from Kirby CM and Craft CMS and doing websites in which the custom design is the key, it's important to us to shape our content as we want.

It's easy to install, the Slack support is friendly and helpful. In the search for the perfect headless CMS solution, it was my choice, also because it's open source and at the moment the pricing of others options is over budget for our clients. We were ok paying a fee for a license, but not a perpetual subscription.
Moreover, a key point in the decision to adopt it is the self-hosted solution: we wanted to avoid every possible lock-in.

Finally, the stack: working in a communication agency, we are not software engineers: PHP + Vue.js it's a perfect combination. React and node.js onthe server was a switch too big to take another leap.

Inconvénients

Above all, the bugs: being open source and free it's normal, but it is frustrating in the measure we decided to use it for clients works.

Second: the lack of documentation for the interfaces or for the detailed use of the JS SDK.

Moreover, sometimes I felt overwhelmed by the technical details of the interface. I don't have competence in relational databases and to me too much things doesn't have a meaning. But I'm mainly a front-end developer that try to be "independent", so I think that it's normal.

Finally: the lack of a good repeater. At the moment it's impossible to use a file field in it, or to repeat a group of field. For us it's almost a strict requirement for clients projects.

Avantages

You can manage your collections and content through good looking administration, you create (even complex) relationships between the collections, there is a support to manage localized content. Your content is served through REST or GraphQL API that is simple learn. Good support of roles and permissions who can consume the content through API. There is a good extensions support for both APP and API. Easy deployement with Docker.

Inconvénients

Performance of API calls for more complex data (relation) can be a bit sluggish, but it can be solved by setting up cache. There are bugs that take a long time to solve. GraphQL API has still lacking features compared to REST API.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Directus 

Pourquoi passer à Directus

Avantages

This is Free and Open Source Software at its best. Directus has a great, well tended community, excellent developers, many options and lots of friendly answers to real questions. I have not found any other headless API I can self host in amazon or wherever I want. This makes for a local development cycle, short time to market, very easy to prototybe setup for example for react/gatsby apps.

Inconvénients

The app where you manage the database still needs a bit more documentation. It does not lack features, but some features lack propper documentation. I hope to help on this in the future!

Avantages

It's community support, open-source, and features. Nothing to envy from really expensive proprietary CMS.

Inconvénients

Breaking changes in updates, lack of Many to Any support on App, failures updating large datasets with relationships, lack of a tool to perform migrations between environments and long URLs to consume. All of which are getting addressed at the moment :)

Avantages

The interface is very friendly, and as the product matures, the installation is becoming better.

Inconvénients

This is not an enterprise-level application, yet. It has a number of tiny gotchas that one has to learn about. One can still do most anything they desire.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Directus 

Pourquoi passer à Directus

Avantages

Directus will allow you to create instant database with all security layers you may need for an api (auth, ...)

Inconvénients

The data ownership by users is quite a pain (e.g : You want to create an item through a webhook and attribute it to a specific user) and user registration through api require some custom code to follow your expectation.

Avantages

I'll start with the flexibility, you can create and edit every table in real-time and in an easy-to-use GUI. Best part is this can be clamped onto any SQL database and it will just start working then you can setup the table existing into the software.

Inconvénients

Well I mean it's not quite and intuitive as something like WordPress but point people in the correct direction and they soon get the hang of it

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Directus 

Pourquoi passer à Directus

Avantages

It's really easy to setup and encourages to learn new technologies

Inconvénients

It's not really done yet, I mean Directus is switching from PHP to Nodejs and this is a long proccess that is still happening and the documentation is not complete yet.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Directus 

Logiciel antérieur 

Pourquoi passer à Directus

Avantages

We used it on a few projects as easy to setup API for the various projects. Overall it's a good product, some issues are solved by the new versions.

Inconvénients

Recent price changes make it very expensive for small projects.

Alternatives envisagées 

Avantages

Extremely pleased and surprised that this a open-source software. The features provided out of the box is extremely robust and reliable. I've never had an issue with it and have been onboarding a lot of clients to switch to Directus from other CMSes for the past few years.

Inconvénients

There are pretty much no cons except that we have to set it up ourselves, but it's not too difficult once you get the hang of it.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Directus 

Logiciel antérieur 

Avantages

Directus is Open-Source and provides an easy-to-use interface that allows myself and my users to navigate the system and update data and content as needed. The Rest API is well-documented making integration into any system very easy! I love being able to get setup with a new project in minutes rather than hours.

Inconvénients

There's nothing I don't love about Directus, there's always something that could be added to make the product better, but it all requires financing and I can't complain when it's free

Avantages

The admin panel has an intuitive interface for managing database relationships (collections), users, fields for your data types. I feel excited to present my non-technical media producers with a way to add their media files, tag them appropriately by creator, relate them to 'topics' stored another table, and be able to update and add new topics with no technical expertise.

Inconvénients

I had some challenges in setup that came down to outdated or incomplete documentation, but that may also be lack of experience on my side. Perhaps some things that were not explicit were actually expected knowledge that I was lacking.

Avantages

I am impressed with the continuous development of Directus and the commitment to deploying frequently. There are always new features and fixes and the team releases at a pace that would make a commercial team sweat, let alone an Open-Source team.

Inconvénients

The only challenge I faced while setting up Directus was a little confusion about the config of setting up multiple projects on the same install. However, the documentation was thorough and the Slack talkative, and I was soon up and running with a shared instance that eliminates the maintenance of multiple instances.

Avantages

1. Documentation has been on point.
3. The easie in which it is to get started is excellent with multiple alternatives like docker, 1click digital ocean setup etc.
2. I love the "project" aspect that allows you to connect multiple database instances within the same Admin App.
3.The Admin App is written made in VUE . Its super easy to pull it locally and connect it to your existing api if you need to fiddle with it. It also has a very modern design which is appealing.
4. Easy to add custom extensions in both the API and Admin App.
5. Good code design. For example the Admin App makes use of the same API endpoints intended external use. Anything the Admin App can do you can replicate with your own API calls. I use this as a cheat sheet when i'm too lazy to look at the documentation.
6. New release come regularly, and it's really getting better all the time.
7. Can import databases that were not created within the CMS

Inconvénients

1. Support for only mysql. MongoDB support would have been magical. I have seen it in the roadmap, so let's hope it comes soon.
2. API response time. It's not bad, but its not great. I know they are working on it.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Directus 

Pourquoi passer à Directus

Avantages

Directus, as a Headless CMS pioneer, offers entirely free software that within a few minutes can have a full API, an easy to travel and learn app, and available with an SDK to easily develop applications. The GraphQL has been a great addition to the latest technology, and additionally, the community support is one the best I have had experienced. As I said, you will love it!

Inconvénients

The latest version is written on NodeJS but uses a snake case compared to camelcase which is a JavaScript standard.

Avantages

I really appreciated the potentialities to adapt the CMS to many various environments and contexts.

Inconvénients

It it sometimes cumbersome to understand the logic when discovering Directus. It lacks a comprehensive support for beginners, for usual and advanced use scenarios.

Avantages

I really liked the headless aspect and how easy it is to build up the overall construct for your data. The API is nice documented and easy to understand.

Inconvénients

In version 6 the API is really slow when your database is quite huge. The issue was reported but couldn't be solved in this version so we had to upgrade the whole project (loading time for a site was 6s+...)

Avantages

I like that Directus is free and open source, with an active community over Slack and that the software evolves very quickly. I also *love* the fact that you can access the whole SQL DB schema besson Directus.

Inconvénients

New versions sometimes introduce critical bugs. The Directus team is responsive on GitHub and Slack, but it needs some time to validate new versions before upgrading production DBs.

Avantages

Directus is quite impressive about the potentials it have from a business point of view.
The software is easy to configure and the community is very active continously improving the available functionalities and solving known issues

Inconvénients

Some features are still not fully working (i.e. forgot password and reset password needs some work)
PHP in my opinion is not very flexible for developer, so it require lots of components to be added

Avantages

Directus covers almost entirely the needs of the project. Many improvements are currently being developed that help make things easier, in addition to new features

Inconvénients

There is a lack of regression tests that validate when new features are developed, that everything is still working correctly. Sometimes some new developments break previous ones.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Directus

Avantages

The interface is so user friendly and has a solid and highly customizable backend for all the needs.

Inconvénients

The new version is fully functionnal but still has some issues that can appear during the implementation.

But the team is phenomenal and is pushing updates and fixes all the time and have a helpful community to guide you to use properly the platform.

Avantages

The best thing about Directus is the community. It is great to be able to ask questions and get a real person to walk you through a solution.

Inconvénients

Difficult to get started. Documentation is a bit lacking / confusing.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Directus 

Pourquoi passer à Directus