Review: three headless CMS options for a five-person team

Software Reviews · 2026-05-20 · 9 min read

By Arjun Mehta, Engineering & product

We migrated the same forty-page site into three systems and timed everything, including the parts vendors do not demo.

Headless content systems demo identically: a clean editing interface, an API, some framework starters. The differences appear in week three, when a non-technical editor needs to add a section nobody modelled in advance.

Modelling flexibility was the widest gap. One system let editors compose pages from reusable blocks without a deploy; the other two required a schema change in code, which turns every small content request into an engineering ticket.

Migration effort ranged from two days to nine, almost entirely down to asset handling and rich text. Rich text formats are proprietary in practice, so budget for a transformation script and accept that some formatting will be rebuilt by hand.

Pricing punishes success in different ways. Watch for per-seat costs that make it expensive to give occasional contributors access, and for API call limits that make a busy launch day unexpectedly expensive.

For a small team our conclusion was to weight editor autonomy above developer ergonomics. Engineers evaluate these tools and editors live in them, and the wrong choice quietly converts your developers into a publishing queue.

Tags: cms, tooling, review

Arjun Mehta — Arjun writes about web performance, developer tooling and applied AI for ESPYCRUX. He has spent the last decade building and maintaining production web apps, and most of his articles start from something that broke in one of them.