Serverless CMS Solutions You Need To Know About In 2023

Serverless, and primarily headless CMS, became a metaphorical lifeline for marketers and business owners in 2023. During the COVID lockdown, they had a challenging mission to create meaningful human interactions while not going to the offices and not communicating directly with their teammates.

This trend is here to stay. The way that audiences access content has broadened and become omnichannel. Moreover, Forbes estimates that the IoT market and smart home devices, in particular, will triple from 2016 to $174 billion by 2025.

A decoupled CMS approach is slightly losing its advantage compared to the headless one because the need to access multiple channels with ease is now more immediate than ever. Developers, marketers, and content creators - three main pillars holding content distribution channels - are working remotely but synchronically thanks to them.

This is where cloud platforms that offer secure serverless CMS solutions come in handy. In this article, we shine a little light on the core advantages of such systems and focus on those deserving particular attention.

The Best Serverless CMS Solutions

Serverless CMS solutions are ready-to-use platforms for creating, hosting, and managing your content. For a reasonable monthly price, you get the invaluable opportunity to completely forget about everything related to the back-end and devote maximum time and energy to creating blazing-fast front-end and high-quality content.

ButterCMS

Headless or Serverless? - Serverless.

ButterCMS is a content management system built primarily for blogging. Nowadays, it's one of the most affordable and the best serverless CMS for small businesses, that allows developers to work with over 20 languages and frameworks. Its mission is to get businesses of all sizes and types kickstarted with the power of outstanding content and SEO optimization.

Originally built as an alternative to the most used traditional CMS - WordPress, Butter had developed into a comprehensive CMS. It integrates with existing websites and apps and delivers content, decoupled from the website.

Once you picked ButterCMS, you got a chance to work with any framework and use plugins for Ruby, NodeJS, PHP, .NET, Python, Django, JavaScript, React, and more. The platform can also boast a media library, custom content types, a testing environment, webhooks, and other fascinating features.

Zesty.io

Headless or Serverless? - Serverless.

Zesty.io is a SaaS hybrid CMS. The platform is constructed to be marketer-friendly, generate prospects, and display all content via APIs. It includes some custom APIs as well. The first things that you note among the key features are drag-and-drop content modeling, multi-site support, automatic scalability, and many other.

The content-as-a-Service approach consists in providing a completely independent presentation layer that enables content creators to provision text-based and media assets at any development lifecycle point. It also includes the deployment of mobile experiences. Zesty.io is a solution for both website and headless apps and offers an amazing set of tools for teams, operating with them.

Instant Content API enables you to create the content once and then present it through any mobile or IoT device via JSON. The way it consumes data plays no role.

With its flexible pricing policy, Zesty.io is an option for companies of all sizes, from startups to established enterprises. Large financial organizations and international brands like Sony actively use this content management platform.

Contentful

Headless or Serverless? - Headless.

Contentful infrastructure provides custom APIs to manage, blend, and deliver content to any possible device or service.

Contentful creators stand out among other serverless CMS solution examples and define themselves as a content infrastructure or Content Delivery Network (CDN) that presents content. Contentful allows you to create your own content models and define your own schemas to be displayed exactly the way you'd like in a wide variety of apps. It is a pure headless platform that helps developer teams distribute and reuse content across any possible channel.

Contentstack

Headless or Serverless? - Headless.

Contentstack is a headless content management system most suitable for medium-sized companies and enterprises. It offers an interface optimized for no-code and low-code users, optimizes images for mobile delivery, and is totally SaaS.

To meet the needs of enterprise-level businesses, Contentstack focuses on remaining among the most scalable serverless CMS solutions, assuring system security and uptime. It also helps teams with preview, image management, workflows, etc. Automated publishing is in the features list as well.

Kentico Kontent

Headless or Serverless? - Serverless.

During the last few years, Kentico Kontent - formerly known as Kentico - evolved from a traditional coupled CMS to the Kentico Cloud and rebranded its Content-as-a-Service offering to one of the most reliable serverless CMS solutions - Kentico Kontent.

Kentico Kontent includes a content delivery API that makes your content consumable on any platform or device. A content management API, in its turn, allows sharing created content and custom elements to any third-party software.

The platform also hosts some catchy tools; an AI chatbot is just one of them.

Skoda, the University of Oxford, and Vogue are on Kentico Kontent’s client list.

Core DNA

Headless or Serverless? - Serverless.

Core DNA is a hybrid content management system that provides a platform for marketing, eCommerce, community, and other uses and combines all of your web resources into one easy-to-manage digital experience platform. It focuses on startups and mid-sized businesses that need one and only platform to manage content across all destinations.

Core DNA positions itself as a marketer-friendly environment with an advanced WYSIWYG editor, powerful analytics dashboard, and built-in email marketing platform so that marketers get everything they need.

Cloud CMS

Headless or Serverless? - Serverless.

The main benefit of Cloud CMS is its unlimited facility for creating, approving, and publishing content. Moreover, Cloud CMS allows users to organize content in separate projects, previews, scheduled releases, rules, and workflow.

With Cloud CMS, editors can use simple forms to create and preview content. Intelligent Services integrations help with translating and auto-tagging, reducing time to market.

Marketers, in their turn, can entirely focus on their responsibilities. Once created, the content is published across data centers and technologies. The opportunity to schedule updates helps meet the critical time-sensitive requirements of content, customers, and the market.

As the Cloud CMS website claims, it's the content back-end you'd build if you had enough time to do it well.

Magnolia

Headless or Serverless? - Serverless.

Magnolia gives you the freedom to host on your own servers or opt for the convenience of its cloud storage. It successfully combines in one a high performance, scalability, flexible integration, and ease of use.

Built for the needs of mid-sized and large enterprises, Magnolia's PaaS model provides more extra control than SaaS platforms of the sort. You get an environment that can be tailored precisely according to your needs and wishes using front-end coding and configuration. In short, Magnolia combines the functionality of an enterprise and the flexibility of an API-first headless solution - delivers scalability at speed.

The icing on this cake is the possibility for marketers to observe analytics data directly on a page.

Giants like The New York Times, American Express, and BMW use MagnoliaCMS to create, store and deliver their content.

Strapi

Headless or Serverless? - Headless.

Strapi is an open-source headless CMS with a focus on developers. It enables them to make flexible API structures easily using a beautiful and intuitive user interface.

It takes literally a few minutes to start with Strapi. By default, Strapi set up an SQLite connection, so you don’t need to upload a MongoDB / Postgres / MySQL instance for the development process. Strapi is database-agnostic and you can easily switch from one database to another.

Setting up all the needed permission rules to secure your REST / GraphQL APIs also happens in a matter of minutes. You do that when you need to restrict access to a specific group of users while operating with some sensitive data that must be protected and cannot be shared publicly.

Directus

Headless or Serverless? - Headless.

If you want a UI-friendly solution to build up a custom headless API - think about Directus. And if you like the idea of using an active open-source solution with multiple updates each month, consider Directus too. This headless CMS provides a powerful API layer for developers and an intuitive no-code app for non-technical users.

According to numerous feedbacks on Capterra, G2, and other resources, Directus’ UI is super friendly, the setup is straightforward to complete, and the community is impressively active which helps to solve every problem and to answer any question as soon as possible.

The Directus UX has been updated and polished for over a decade, so content management is simple and intuitive. Each interface allows you to work with content with the use of a wide variety of data types (colours, locations, currencies, ratings, and more).

Alongside this, Directus has a powerful file manager that can be used as a digital asset management system. And with a powerful thumbnail, you can automatically get images of any size and quality from a single upload.

Conclusion

In summary, this is an abridged but thoroughly selected collection of top serverless CMS solutions that will make you digitally present in a short time. With the use of provided easy-to-use tools to developers, editors, and marketers, you enter the market quickly, save costs and time, and achieve the maximum effectiveness of a simultaneous work of your editorial, development, and marketing teams.

FAQs

1. Is serverless the same as headless?

   No, they have different functions. Serverless computing is a technique for delivering backend services. You can create and run frontend code without worrying about the infrastructure. Headless enables separate code that executes frontend tasks from backend work, which may involve API calls to combine multiple heads into one body.

2. Can WordPress run serverless?

   Yes, you can deploy available WordPress sites without managing servers.

3. Which language is best for serverless?

   JavaScript followed by TypeScript is one of the most popular languages for Serverless architecture.