5 out of 5 stars rating — “Webhooks bundled. Not a $99 add-on.”
Adapto CMS: the Cosmic JS alternative without the $99 Feature Bundle.
Cosmic JS sells a $99/mo Feature Bundle for webhooks, localization, and backups — capabilities most CMSes ship as part of the base plan. Adapto bundles them on every tier, including Free Evaluation.
↳ No add-on for the basics
Works with your framework
Where Cosmic JS starts to hurt
Cosmic JS ships fast. The pricing structure is the catch.
Cosmic JS has a genuinely good developer experience for fast-shipping JS teams. The trade-off is the Feature Bundle: webhooks, localization, and backups sit behind a $99/mo add-on on top of whichever tier you're on. Adapto folds those into the tier price.
- Cosmic JS pain
Webhooks, localization, revision history, and backups live behind a $99/mo Feature Bundle on top of your Cosmic JS tier.
Adapto CMSWebhooks, localization, and manual backup + restore are on every tier, free included. The tier price is the bill.
- Cosmic JS pain
Cosmic JS has a $250/mo gap between Builder ($49) and Team ($299) with no mid-tier — outgrowing Builder means a 6× jump.
Adapto CMSFive tiers: $0 → $29 → $69 → $249 → $449. No $250 jumps; the next price is always a sensible step.
- Cosmic JS pain
Per-seat charges of $29/mo per extra seat on top of the tier price — content team headcount becomes a budget line.
Adapto CMSUnlimited team members on every plan. Hire your tenth editor without touching the CMS bill.
- Cosmic JS pain
Asset storage is bucketed and metered ($0.069/GB overage); image processing isn't first-class without the bundle.
Adapto CMSBundled Media CDN with URL-based transforms. One source upload, any size/format/quality on the fly.
I've got convinced by the bundled media CDN and the pricing predictability. The biggest improvement was a loading speed gain of around 60% after moving to Adapto. We rebuild server-side generated pages whenever new content is published on the CMS via a webhook.
I think Adapto can accommodate both early-stage projects and larger applications or web pages.
First project live in a few hours.
The math, at common team sizes
Tier price + bundle vs flat tier.
Cosmic JS's tier + Feature Bundle math vs Adapto's flat tier. Same capabilities on both sides.
| Scenario | Cosmic JS | Adapto CMS |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing site (1 bucket, basic webhooks needed) | Cosmic JS Cosmic JS Builder — $49/mo + $99/mo Feature Bundle for webhooks = $148/mo. | Adapto CMS Adapto Hobby — $29/mo. Webhooks bundled. |
| Production product (multi-locale + webhooks) | Cosmic JS Cosmic JS Builder $49 + Feature Bundle $99 = $148/mo, OR Team at $299/mo with the bundle included. | Adapto CMS Adapto Startup — $69/mo. Localization and webhooks bundled. |
| Content-heavy company (mid-tier scaling) | Cosmic JS Cosmic JS Team — $299/mo. Next jump is Contact Sales. | Adapto CMS Adapto Scale — $249/mo flat. |
*Pricing referenced from www.cosmicjs.com/pricing
No add-ons, no feature gates, no surprises
Every CMS primitive a dev team needs. On every plan.
Content modeling, REST API, CLI + AI + Webhooks, Media CDN, localization. The same surface on Free Evaluation as on Professional — the only thing that scales is usage.
A CLI built for AI agents, not just terminals
Adapto ships a first-class CLI designed to give AI agents — Claude Code, Cursor, or any LLM toolchain — direct, structured access to your content.
Manage collections, trigger builds, and automate publishing from a terminal or from an agent's context. Most CMSs treat agents as an afterthought; Adapto treats them as a primary user.
One platform. One bill.
CDN, image optimization, webhooks, and content API in one product. No Cloudinary contract.
No separate media host. No glue code. Organize work by organization, invite as many contributors as the project needs, and run unlimited projects under one account.
Centralized asset library across every project
Upload once, reuse everywhere. Manage images, videos, and documents from a single library shared across collections in your project.
Ship in every language without a pricing penalty
Translate content into as many locales as the project needs without watching the tier requirements creep up.
Other CMSs cap included locales (some cut theirs to five recently) and charge per extra language. i18n is included at every tier — scale languages with usage, not with line items.
SEO Site Checkup has an audience of almost 1 million users per month. Their marketing site runs on Adapto CMS.
Nearly a million SEO professionals visit SEO Site Checkup every month — an audience that scrutinizes load time, structure, and Core Web Vitals professionally. They wouldn't keep coming back to a slow site. Their marketing site runs on Adapto CMS.
~1M / mo
Audience
SEO Pros
Audience type
Adapto CMS
Stack
Webhooks and GitHub Actions that plug into any automation tool
Trigger builds, sync to third-party services, or fire workflows on every content change.
Webhooks and GitHub Actions integrate cleanly with n8n, Make, Zapier, and any HTTP-receiving automation — so content events can rebuild a site, notify Slack, sync to a search index, or kick off a custom pipeline. Included from the free tier, not gated behind a higher tier.
Image transforms via URL — no pipeline, no build step
Resize, convert, and compress images on the fly by appending URL parameters and the CDN handles it at the edge. No build step. No image pipeline. No separate processing server.
Most setups force you to pre-generate every variant at build time or pay for a third-party transform service; Adapto serves any size, format, or quality from a single source upload.
Custom collections without unlocking a higher tier
Define exactly the content shapes the project needs — blog posts, products, landing pages, case studies, anything — with custom fields and relationships.
Available from the free plan up, not gated behind a "Pro" tier or sold as an add-on.
Techarena runs every speaker, sponsor, stage, and venue feed from a single Adapto CMS source of truth.
Scandinavia's largest tech event manages every speaker, sponsor, stage, and venue feed through Adapto CMS. One source of truth across every screen, schedule, and signage system. When 11,000 attendees from 125 nationalities show up over two days, let me check another tab is not an option.
+11,000
Attendees
Tech Event
Category
+125
Nationalities
Pricing for Cost predictability
They raise prices. We don't. The flat-rate stays flat.
Add editors. Expand to new markets. Turn on webhooks. Your plan doesn't change. Adapto scales by content volume and API usage — not headcount, locales, or features. Get 2 months free on annual billing.
Free Evaluation
For developers learning the API or testing Adapto before committing.
- 500 total records
- 5,000 API calls/mo
- 2 GB bandwidth/mo
- All features included
Hobby
For side projects, personal sites, and small production builds that need real limits.
- 10,000 total records
- 150,000 API calls/mo
- 50 GB bandwidth/mo
- All features included
Startup
PopularFor freelancers or small business owners running a single high-quality production site.
- 50,000 total records
- 300,000 API calls/mo
- 100 GB bandwidth/mo
- All features included
Scale
For growing teams and agencies shipping multiple production projects.
- 300,000 total records
- 500,000 API calls/mo
- 300 GB bandwidth/mo
- All features included
Professional
For agencies and product teams managing portfolios of high-traffic applications.
- 750,000 total records
- 1,500,000 API calls/mo
- 1 TB bandwidth/mo
- All features included
Migrating from Cosmic JS
Already on Cosmic JS? Export is straightforward.
Cosmic JS exports content via its Cosmic CLI and API as JSON. A one-off Node script reads from your bucket and writes into Adapto via our REST API. The mental model translates cleanly — Cosmic 'object types' map onto Adapto Custom Collections. Reach out and we'll walk through the bucket-to-project mapping.
A note from the founders
Greetings, we're Vlad and Alex.
Before Adapto, we ran an agency. For years we tried every CMS we could find a reason to recommend. Webflow until a client needed three locales. Cosmic JS until the pricing changed and our smaller clients didn't fit. Sanity for the larger builds, until the per-seat math made onboarding editors a conversation we didn't want to keep having.
Same pattern every time. A reasonable starting price. A feature behind the next tier. A renewal call where the number doubled. A quarterly explanation to the client about why the invoice changed again.
So we stopped looking and built the CMS we wished existed. Flat pricing. Every feature included. Content, media, and image delivery in one product.
Once it was running, migrations went quiet. Client bills stopped surprising anyone. The "what does this cost next year" question finally had a real answer.
We're opening it up because if you've been on the same hamster wheel, you already know the problem.
Step off the wheel. Try it. Let us know what breaks.
Gratefully,
P.S. Adapto CMS is completely free to start .
Questions and answers
Pricing, features, limits, migrations, and what happens when your usage grows. If your question isn't here, reach out to us at contact@adaptocms.com