🆚 Directus vs. Payload CMS
- 📈 Payload CMS is twice as popular as Directus.
- 🌎 Payload CMS is more popular in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
- 🌍 Directus is more popular in France, Russia, and Spain.
Type
About
Directus is an open-source headless CMS and data platform that lets developers build APIs from custom SQL data models while providing non-technical users with a friendly admin interface to manage structured content.
It automatically generates REST and GraphQL endpoints from the database schema, supports multiple SQL databases, and offers role-based access control, field-level permissions, versioning, workflows, asset management, real-time previews, and custom dashboards.
Payload is an open-source application framework and headless CMS built with Next.js that supports both self-hosting and cloud deployment.
It features automatic REST and GraphQL APIs from code-defined schemas, supports
MongoDB and Postgres databases, and provides versioning and drafts, field-level localization, over 20 field types, granular access control, live preview, and a block-based layout builder.
Headquarters
Pricing
(1 user, 5K DB entries)$180/year
(5 users, 75K DB entries)$1,188/year
(10 users, 250K DB entries)$1,188/year
Popularity
Determined by the number of sites using each technology.
Market share
Popularity by country
Determined by the number of sites detected from each country.
Awards
- ⬆️ 108th most popular in the United States in the CMS category.
- ⬆️ 57th most popular in the United States in the CMS category.
Popularity by domain category
Determined by the number of sites in each category.
Top sites
Top-ranked sites that use these technologies.
Compare alternatives
Technologies with similar characteristics.
See also
🗃️ About This Data
- We evaluate the popularity of technologies based on the number of websites where we detect their usage.
- Technologies without a detectable web footprint, and those we do not track, are not reflected in the calculated market share.
- This report is based on the analysis of 3,375,483 websites.
- Statistics were last calculated on .
- For more details, see our methodology and disclaimer.

Sanity
Apostrophe
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