Netlify CMS vs. Squiz Digital Experience Platform

Netlify CMS is well suited when you have very less frequent updates to your content, maybe once a day and very few people need to access your data. You can connect it to Netlify, GitHub, or any platform and have multiple people access it and do as many updates as you wish, but the process is not well-defined and you need to build your own system for that. It is well suited for projects you need to pull off with very low cost, it is essentially free as the software is open source and free to use, and all you need to do is set up your schema correctly and find a deployment pipeline where you can build your static site/API to redeploy whenever the content changes. I personally used a GitHub Login -> Netlify CMS -> next app consumer of content -> GitHub pipelines to run next SSG -> GitHub Pages to deploy the built static site. It might not be appropriate for large teams where users themselves need no-code tools to modify the schema of the content.

Incentivized

Working with a large amount of web content where there is a need to focus on related content.

• Storing content data in customized schema without a database
• Full control over your content and infrastructure where it is deployed and stored
• Very low-cost way for building your own CMS and CDN

Incentivized

• Speed and efficiency
• Roles and content control
• Related content

• Linking between different schema types, i.e. having some relations between content
• Better ways to define content schema, like how TinaCMS would handle using a JSON

Incentivized

• User Interface was good but heavy, with Java powering the backbone I recall finding this somewhat troublesome at the time.

I don't work with Squiz any more so it's difficult to say, that said, the site is still running on the same CMS so obviously it's still considered a great platform

We really can't compare it to full-fledged CMS software, like WordPress, which has a lot of community and support with widgets, plugins, and whatnot. It's not built for that, but you can compare it to Contentful, Ghost, Strapi, etc., which provide similar functionality to a headless CMS with custom schema options, but even among them, it still lacks a lot of functionality, ease of use, and support. But Netlify CMS pros would be of the opinion that compared to other platforms where most schemas need to use their own tools and frameworks, it's very cost-effective. Something new called TinaCMS has come up to compete with Netlify CMS by covering most of its shortcomings, but it's something new being built by the same team that built Forestry CMS and comes with many modern features, yet currently only supports NextJS SSG.

Incentivized

Easier to work with

• Helped us inject dynamic content into existing site very quickly
• Wasted a lot of time to implement when something complex, such as querying content, was needed

Incentivized

• Having a single powerful CMS platform that would integrate a number of organisations that had recently merged - Squiz was a big part of bringing our web architecture together gracefully.
• Increased employee efficiency