Summary

Strapi is a headless content management system (CMS) - a CMS that comes with all of the boring but critical stuff (like admin, user management, database, API, etc.) but, unlike something like WordPress or Drupal, doesn't ship with a view layer to show your content. By decoupling the frontend from the backend, you can get your backend up and running extremely quickly (honestly, we had ours in a half hour) and then focus your time on a bespoke view layer using whatever technology is most suitable to your application (in our case, Next.js). As long as you're serving up static content and data, you can create custom database schemas to cover almost any kind of relational data and then serve it up however you want, whether it's a blog, store, static website or dashboard. If you're looking to do data analysis or build a software application, however, this probably isn't what you're looking for.

Strapi makes setting up custom CMS so insanely easy. There's a drag-and-drop relational database builder that can create extremely complex tables and table relations with a few button clicks. Once you have your database up and running, it has a comprehensive user and data permission system, one-click API generation and modern OAUTH security integration. The admin backend also lets you easily manage content, including markdown-based rich text, embedded images and more. Since it's available under the MIT license, you can have this up and running on your own infrastructure for free in no time at all. There is an optional commercial license to use some of the advanced commercial plugins the project is developing which include more complex, enterprise-grade permission and authentication as well as other, enterprise-focused niceties. As of July 2021, however, the core platform will remain free and MIT licensed, and all of the code is available on GitHub.