Agency dropped Strapi and similar CMSes for a custom backend → Custom backend
“I'm not dependent anymore of the direction the CMS maintainers decide upon”
Strapi alternatives: where its users went, and why they left
Strapi (strapi.io) has 24 sourced reports on Friction, drawn from 102 public source threads (as of 2026-10-15), 5 of them describing a move away. This page reads them for one question: if you are leaving Strapi, what do its users say they moved to, and what pushed them out?
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Where Strapi users say they went
Switching reports that name a destination. A count is the number of reports naming it, not a market share: Friction only holds what people say in public.
| Named alternative | Reports naming it | Newest report |
|---|---|---|
| Prismic | 3 | 2024 |
| Payload | 3 | 2024 |
| WordPress | 2 | 2023 |
| Custom backend | 1 | 2026 |
| Directus (compare) | 1 | 2022 |
| Keystone | 1 | 2020 (over 5 years old) |
In their words
Strapi admin needs too much clicking, evaluator picked Payload → Payload
“too much clicking in the UX, and having to write middleware to get related data”
Strapi v4 showstoppers drove a long-time user to Directus → Directus
“Strapi is out since v4 (too many really big showstopers”
Team regrets moving from Prismic to self-hosted Strapi → Prismic
“Prismic worked great and I regret switching to Strapi”
What pushes people away from Strapi
The most-reported open problems, worst severity first. Each links to the item with its source.
Admin page sometimes loads forever after a browser refresh in production · Reliability & bugs · Blocks work · 3 people
“If you press F5 to get the entire site reloaded, sometimes you end up with an infinite loading”
Undeclared dependencies break Strapi types on strict package layouts · API & developer experience · Blocks work · 2 people
“Every consumer on a strict layout has to rediscover and work around it independently”
Publishing fails to apply reordered relations · Reliability & bugs · Blocks work
“A many-relation field's order does not update in the published version when the only change is a reorder of entries that were already connected”
Republished relation stays null in API until parent is republished · Reliability & bugs · Blocks work
“The API response for the Product shows the Category relation as `null` after the Category is republished”
SSO is gated behind an Enterprise plan · Pricing & plans · Annoyance
“Strapi also puts key features such as SSO behind an Enterprise pay wall”
Other headless cms tools on Friction, and what their users struggle with
Switching trades one set of problems for another. The same evidence, for each tool Friction covers in this category:
Directus
34 reports · 90 source threads · most-discussed area: Reliability & bugs
Counts and reports reflect people who post in public (developers and technical buyers are over-represented). A tool with fewer reports is not a better tool; it may only be discussed less. How the data is built.