Free Open-Source Headless CMS for Your Static Site Generator
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
When there is a very low-cost solution needed for managing content on the website and the users are not really tech savvy, but they have a need for a WYSIWYG editor with some basic features. Many other solutions might exist for this problem but you might also need a customized schema for the content being stored and more control over infrastructure and access to data, and also a free and open-source implementation.
Pros
- 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
Cons
- 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
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
