Strapi vs. Apostrophe: An In-Depth Comparison

Strapi and ApostropheCMS are two of the top open-source content management systems available today. In this Strapi vs ApostropheCMS article, you will explore the key differences between the two solutions.

Recently, the CMS landscape has experienced significant growth, particularly within the JavaScript ecosystem. The Jamstack community alone lists nearly 60 open-source alternatives. With so many options, it can be overwhelming to choose the best CMS for you. Fortunately, comparisons like this can save you time and effort!

Read on to discover why ApostropheCMS is more than just another Strapi alternative.

Introducing Strapi and ApostropheCMS

First, let's start by understanding what Strapi and ApostropheCMS are and whether they are comparable CMS tools.

Strapi is an open-source, Node.js-based, backend-focused headless CMS. The official site defines it as a tool that "saves developers a lot of development time while giving them the freedom to use their favorite tools and frameworks." In particular, Strapi equips developers with a simplified API creation experience. Content created on the Strapi platform can be delivered through those APIs to any front-end framework.

ApostropheCMS is a powerful website builder platform built on top of a full-featured open-source CMS. It is a modular, full-stack JavaScript content management solution developed with modern web technologies. On the backend, it operates on Node.js, while on the frontend, it supports any framework—including React, Vue, and HTMX. ApostropheCMS can function as a fully headless CMS or a traditional CMS with website-building capabilities—similar to WordPress. Specifically, it presents an intuitive UI for content management, in-context editing capabilities, and a visual page-building experience.

In simpler terms, Strapi and ApostropheCMS are companies that develop advanced JavaScript-based CMS solutions with an open-source core. Now, let's dig into the differences between their CMS products!

What Is Their Target Audience?

Strapi is predominantly suited for developers and small companies. Instead, ApostropheCMS caters to both developers and companies of all sizes—with a focus on web agencies.

While both Strapi and ApostropheCMS have an open-source foundation, their offerings serve different audiences. Time to learn more!

Strapi Is Primarily a Solution for Individuals and Small Companies

Strapi is an open-source solution that appeals to individual developers and small companies. This is evident from its pricing structure, which prioritizes self-hosted CMS plans:

Historically, Strapi has been a go-to option for developers seeking a free and easily configurable JavaScript-based headless CMS with customizable APIs. Note that the first plan for growing companies was only introduced in early 2025—ten years after the release of Strapi 1.0. This plan, called Growth, is priced at $15 per month and includes advanced collaboration and publishing tools.

For those who do not want to handle hosting, Strapi comes with Cloud plans:

These allow you to deploy Strapi projects in minutes while the company manages the entire infrastructure for you. That is ideal for those who want to focus on building rather than maintenance. 

The Cloud plans range from $15 to $375 per project per month, depending on API usage, bandwidth, asset storage, and other limits. Keep in mind that these costs refer only to hosting and are separate from the CMS plans mentioned earlier.

Strapi’s Cloud plans appear to be especially suited for agencies using Strapi as a CMS, as these companies often prefer to offload hosting management and pass the associated costs onto their clients.

ApostropheCMS is a solution for teams of all sizes

ApostropheCMS offers a variety of pricing plans that meet the needs of individual developers, small companies, and large enterprises—with specific options for web agencies. For more information, take a look at the pricing page:

Thanks to its open-source core, the Community free-forever plan is great for individual developers or small teams seeking full control over their applications. That includes control over hosting and infrastructure management.

The Apostrophe Pro plan, priced at $199/month, guarantees access to premium features ideal for single-site enterprises, digital agencies, and small to mid-sized companies. Next, Apostrophe Assembly, priced at $499/month, builds on the features of Apostrophe Pro and adds the ability to efficiently deploy and manage a multi-site architecture from a single ApostropheCMS instance. Assembly is perfect for enterprises or large web development agencies that choose ApostropheCMS for their or their clients' projects.

Compared to Strapi, ApostropheCMS offers a wider range of pricing plans for users who need commercial features and priority support. One common aspect between the two companies is that both offer self-hosted plans as well as managed hosting plans:

Which CMS Offers the Most Features?

Strapi and ApostropheCMS are both powerful headless CMS platforms. Strapi provides greater flexibility in API configuration and development, but it lacks ApostropheCMS’s website-building features and has more limitations in other areas.

Take a closer look at the features offered by both CMS services:

• Headless API: Both solutions offer headless capabilities for creating, reading, updating, and deleting content through APIs. Strapi supports native integration with databases like SQLite, MySQL, Postgres, and MariaDB, whereas ApostropheCMS mainly supports MongoDB. Additionally, when configured as a headless CMS, ApostropheCMS exposes content management via RESTful endpoints, while Strapi supports both REST and GraphQL. In general, Strapi tends to be more customizable than ApostropheCMS in this area.

• Webhook support: Both CMS platforms support webhooks, allowing you to configure HTTP requests that trigger when specific events occur

• Custom fields: Both Strapi and ApostropheCMS allow you to define custom fields. This enables you to extend content management by adding new field types to content types and components.

• User role management: The tools offer customizable user role management. Strapi has three default roles (Admin, Editor, and Super Admin), while ApostropheCMS provides four groups for free (Guest, Contributor, Editor, and Admin). Both platforms support advanced RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) capabilities for defining unlimited custom roles through official plugins.

• Visual content management experience: The two solutions focus on providing a gratifying content management experience. ApostropheCMS offers a more refined and feature-rich UX compared to Strapi, whose UI can feel overly simplistic and sometimes lacks depth. One of the main complaints on Reddit about Strapi is its confusing interface and the excessive number of clicks required

• Plugins/Extensions: Both Strapi and ApostropheCMS support plugins/extensions. Thanks to their open-source and modular nature, the community can easily create and share extensions, expanding the functionality of both solutions.

• Localization support: The two platforms support localization, allowing editors to manage content in multiple languages. Note that Strapi’s localization capabilities were only officially integrated with the release of Strapi 3.6, in January 2023.

• Website building capabilities: Strapi is a headless CMS focused solely on the backend, requiring you to build the frontend separately. In contrast, ApostropheCMS functions as both a headless CMS and a website builder, offering built-in tools for visually designing and creating websites. It also supports in-context editing functionality to manage and update content directly within the CMS platform

Which Is Better at Content Modeling?

ApostropheCMS is the clear winner, as it comes with a wider range of data types, greater flexibility in defining custom data fields, and support for advanced field types like arrays and relationships.

As of this writing, Strapi supports 22 data model types (with an additional two for i18n management if enabled). As for custom fields, Strapi’s approach is primarily plugin-based. This means that to create a custom field, you must develop a new plugin. Other limitations in the custom field system are:

• Custom fields cannot introduce new data types—they must use Strapi's built-in data types as defined in its model attributes documentation.

• Custom fields can only be shared through plugins.

• Existing data types cannot be modified.

• Special Strapi data types (e.g., relation, media, component, etc.), cannot be used in custom fields.

On the other hand, ApostropheCMS has no such restrictions. It supports defining custom fields from scratch or by combining existing field types, making it significantly more flexible for custom content modeling than Strapi.

By default, ApostropheCMS supports 23 data schema fields—one more than Strapi. Notably, it includes:

• array: To store a list of content specified through its own field schema.

• relationship: To allow connections to one or more related content documents, whether individual content pieces or web pages.

Strapi does not natively support arrays as data types. Also, its relationship fields are limited to linking content objects, as it cannot manage web pages like ApostropheCMS.
 

Which CMS Is More Extensible?

Strapi has a larger plugin ecosystem, but its architecture is inherently less extensible and customizable than ApostropheCMS.

Strapi boasts over 65K stars on GitHub and 150K weekly downloads, indicating a large and active community. Unsurprisingly, that community has contributed to the development of many plugins. Specifically, Strapi counts 288 plugins—13 of which are maintained by the official team or backed by official partners, while the rest are community-driven. All plugins are free, but some require integration with third-party paid tools.

ApostropheCMS offers around 50 extensions, mostly developed by the official team. Some of these are exclusive to Apostrophe Pro or Assembly, such as Advanced Permissions for thorough user management, Automatic Translation for AI-powered translations, and the SEO Assistant extension.

Notable extensions include Strapi's OpenAI plugin for integration with the popular LLM provider and ApostropheCMS’s AI Helper extension for generating images and rich text from text prompts.

Regarding customizability beyond plugins and extensions, ApostropheCMS stands out with its highly extensible architecture. Developers can easily extend data types, components, page templates, and modules. It is also possible to fully customize the Admin UI where editors manage content and web pages. Achieving the same level of customization in Strapi is more difficult and requires more effort.

Which One Supports Internationalization Better?

ApostropheCMS supports more advanced and comprehensive localization and internationalization features compared to Strapi.

Strapi's internationalization feature allows users to create, manage, and distribute localized content in different languages, referred to as “locales.” In particular, the API endpoints for content retrieval and management support a special locale argument. Then, the UI enables the creation of different versions of the same content in multiple languages.

Those localization capabilities feel somewhat limited compared to ApostropheCMS. That is understandable considering that Strapi only introduced official localization support in 2023. On the contrary, ApostropheCMS has always prioritized localization and internationalization as core objectives of the company.

As a result, ApostropheCMS is widely regarded as one of the top CMS platforms for multilingual content management. That is because of the following features:

• Locale configuration: Allows developers to configure locale versions of an existing ApostropheCMS site with simple configurations.

• Dynamic content localization: Enables editors to translate pages and content directly in the Admin UI.

• Admin UI in multiple languages: Provides built-in translations for the admin interface in several languages (e.g., English, Spanish, French, Italian, and others).

• AI-powered automatic translation: Available in the Pro and Assembly tiers for faster content translation through AI, with options for manual refinement.

• Import/Export translation: Supports bulk exporting and importing translations as JSON files.

Note that both tools support the translation of the Admin UI where content is managed. To do so, Strapi requires modifying JavaScript files. In ApostropheCMS, most of the process is handled through plain JSON files. So, even human translators with no coding experience can easily handle the task.
 

Which Handles Customer and Developer Support Better?

Strapi's community support might be richer, but priority technical support is only available on enterprise plans. Instead, ApostropheCMS prioritizes support on all paid plans, with private, dedicated support.

As mentioned earlier, Strapi has a much larger community than ApostropheCMS. This means that with a free setup, you are more likely to find helpful guides, tutorials, and videos online, or receive support from other developers on Strapi rather than ApostropheCMS. Anyway, both Strapi and ApostropheCMS offer comprehensive and detail-rich documentation sites.

Regarding support for businesses and paid users, the two companies take very different approaches. Strapi offers basic customer support on all premium plans, with priority support available only on enterprise plans. Conversely, ApostropheCMS provides both technical support and a dedicated success team with any paid plan.

In other words, ApostropheCMS offers private technical support to help you achieve your goals and bring your digital experiences to life. No wonder, ApostropheCMS customers gave an average score of 9.3 out of 10 to the question, "Has the product been a good partner in doing business?" G2 on the ApostropheCMS vs Strapi comparison page, while Strapi users gave an average score of 8.7.

Conclusion

In this comparison article, you learned the main differences between Strapi and ApostropheCMS. Both offer open-source CMS solutions, with Strapi being a solid headless option. At the same time, ApostropheCMS stands out as a more complete solution in almost every aspect analyzed.

When choosing between the two platforms, you must evaluate your specific needs. Strapi has a larger community, but ApostropheCMS might be the better choice for users and agencies looking for rich website-building capabilities. Book a demo today!