Alternative to Strapi

Strapi solves the content backend. It does not solve what matters most to a university communications team: seeing the page before publishing it.

That visual editor exists in Strapi today, but it arrived later and from outside — as a beta Vercel integration, or as a third-party marketplace plugin. For a university running 15, 30 or 60 sites that change every week, that difference is not a technical detail. It is the difference between marketing publishing on its own and marketing depending on IT for every layout tweak.

This comparison is not an argument that Strapi is a bad CMS. It is about what happens when you compare it with Griddo point by point — including the points where Strapi genuinely wins.

A flexible content model. Content types, fields and relationships are defined quickly, with no licence cost to slow down experimentation.

Genuinely API-first. REST and GraphQL from day one, with an active plugin ecosystem and a large community that answers questions fast: ~71,000 GitHub stars, over 22,600 Discord members and 5.5 million monthly npm downloads.

One of the lowest entry costs in the sector. The Community core is free under an MIT licence, without usage limits, and self-hosts from $5-10/month of VPS. For an engineering team that wants full control of the code and the database, that is a real advantage and it deserves credit.

Self-hostable with no proprietary runtime. Strapi does not force a dependency on a third-party SaaS for storage.

The problem appears at the next step: what happens when that content has to become a page carrying your university’s brand.

Strapi separates the backend from the frontend completely. That is exactly what headless architecture promises — and exactly what produces the problem the industry calls editing in the dark: the marketing team fills in form fields without seeing the final result, and depends on a developer for any layout change (CMSWire, 2024).

Strapi has acknowledged the gap. That is why it announced Visual Editing powered by Vercel — an external, beta integration that connects Strapi to another vendor’s rendering engine. That is the right signal: it confirms the market needs this layer. But it also confirms the pattern: in Strapi, in-context preview is not born inside the platform. It is added afterwards, from outside, through a third-party integration or a marketplace plugin (Page Builder, Plasmic, TeleportHQ).

For a university, that translates into three concrete points of friction:

1. Every new module requires two systems synced by hand. The schema is defined in Strapi; the component that renders it lives in a separate frontend application, built and deployed by a different team. Until both sides match, marketing cannot use the module.
2. Preview depends on an added piece, not on the editor itself. If the Vercel integration does not cover your stack or your case, you are back to publishing in order to see the result.
3. Brand governance lives outside the CMS. Keeping 20 microsites visually coherent when the editor and the renderer are separate products requires manual review — precisely what an embedded Design System prevents by design.

None of this friction means Strapi “has no” visual editing. It has it, added. The real difference is architectural: bolted on afterwards, versus born integrated.

Here the argument stops being about features and becomes architectural. Strapi has no native multi-tenant architecture, and its own documentation recommends one instance per tenant. The DXP Scorecard (2026) scores its multi-brand governance at 24 out of 100 — 38th of 40 platforms evaluated.

For a portfolio of 20 or 30 university microsites, that means 20 or 30 separately administered deployments, with permissions, approval workflows and billing that do not talk to each other. Syncing content, component libraries or user management between instances requires custom data pipelines.

The alternative is a federated ecosystem: different sites, single governance. One Griddo client runs 60 websites in 8 languages from a single instance. Universidad Europea operates five brands and schools — IPAM, IADE Portugal, IADE Spain, UDDI and Centro de Estudios Garrigues — with 16 people working across all five instances.

The Community core is genuinely free, and that is a legitimate argument. But that price does not include visual editing, multi-site governance, personalisation, forms or compliance — all of which have to be built or bought separately.

Some examples of what sits outside the list price: approval workflows, audit logs, content locking and field-level RBAC are reserved for the Enterprise plan. The SSO add-on costs $50/seat/month separately, even without a full Enterprise contract. And personalisation scores 12.5 out of 100 in The DXP Scorecard (2026) — the lowest in the whole evaluated category; version 5.42 removed even A/B testing from the command-line assistant.

Griddo was born as a platform where content management and web publishing are the same thing, not two systems someone has to keep in sync. The result, measured in real production:

• 13+ universities use Griddo actively today, with 0% customer churn since launch.
• Across one month of measured activity on 11 production university instances, institutional teams performed 4,571 page module configurations themselves, with no ticket to IT. 90.8% of all productive activity and 96.9% of publications were carried out by the universities’ own teams, not by the vendor.
• The atomic module system (Hero, Carousel, Form, Testimonials, Programme Card, FAQ and more) is not exclusive to Griddo — Strapi can also offer reusable blocks via plugins or in-house development. The difference is that in Griddo the module you define is, at the same time, what you see and what you publish: there are no two systems to sync.
• Griddo is an AWS Qualified Software Partner, having passed AWS’s Foundational Technical Review (FTR), with a 99.99% availability SLA on the Enterprise model.

This comparison draws on Strapi’s public and technical documentation, its official plugin marketplace and The DXP Scorecard’s independent evaluation. The numerical scores cited (48/100 overall, 24/100 for multi-brand governance, 12.5/100 for personalisation) come from that single analyst source, not from a market consensus.

For the full argument on why the presentation layer decides the outcome at a university, the article is here: Headless is not enough: why the presentation layer decides at a university. If you have other headless platforms on the table, there are comparisons for Payload, Contentful and Storyblok.

Strapi is a registered trademark of Strapi, Inc. Griddo is not affiliated with Strapi.