5 out of 5 stars rating — “One invoice, zero on-call rotation.”
Adapto CMS: the Strapi alternative without the on-call rotation.
Strapi self-hosted is free in dollars and expensive in engineering time. Strapi Cloud bills for what Adapto bundles. Adapto is managed-only — hosting, CDN, image transforms, webhook retries, all in one flat invoice.
↳ One bill, zero on-call
Works with your framework
Where Strapi starts to hurt
Strapi got you started. Adapto takes you to production.
Strapi is excellent open source. The honest comparison is what it costs once you add hosting, a CDN, media processing, webhook delivery, and on-call — or once you sign up for Strapi Cloud and meet the bandwidth meter.
- Strapi pain
Self-hosting Strapi means you own the database, the CDN, the image pipeline, webhook retries, and the 2am on-call when a Postgres connection pool fills up.
Adapto CMSManaged-only. We run the servers, the database, the CDN, the media transforms, the patches. Your team writes content and ships.
- Strapi pain
Strapi Cloud is fair-priced, but bandwidth is metered and image processing is metered separately — the bill moves with traffic.
Adapto CMSBandwidth and media CDN are bundled in the tier price. Approach a limit and we email you — no silent overages, no traffic-spike surprises.
- Strapi pain
Strapi plugins are powerful but each one is another major-version-break risk on every Strapi upgrade.
Adapto CMSNo plugin layer to maintain. Webhooks + CLI + REST give you the integration surface most plugins provide, without the upgrade tax.
- Strapi pain
Image optimization on Strapi means a separate Cloudinary contract or a homegrown Sharp pipeline.
Adapto CMSMedia is on Adapto's CDN. Append `?w=800&format=webp&quality=85` to any image URL — resize, encode, cache, done.
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
Real scenarios, both bills.
Strapi self-hosted needs your infra + your time. Strapi Cloud is fair-priced but metered. Adapto is one flat number with everything bundled.
| Scenario | Strapi | Adapto CMS |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing site (1 dev, 1 environment) | Strapi Strapi self-hosted — $0 license + ~$25-50/mo for a Render/Fly instance + S3 + Cloudflare CDN + your time. | Adapto CMS Adapto Hobby — $29/mo. Hosting, CDN, and media bundled. |
| Production product (managed, 3 environments) | Strapi Strapi Cloud Pro — published rate plus bandwidth metering. Verify on strapi.io/pricing-cloud. | Adapto CMS Adapto Startup — $69/mo flat. No bandwidth meter. |
| Self-hosted at scale (you own ops) | Strapi Strapi self-hosted + your DevOps team. Infra spend + on-call cost. | Adapto CMS Adapto doesn't compete here — self-hosting is out of scope by design. |
*Pricing referenced from strapi.io/pricing-cloud
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 Strapi
Already on Strapi? The migration is short.
Strapi exports cleanly via its REST API — you own the source. A one-off Node script reads from your Strapi instance and writes into Adapto via our REST API. Most marketing sites migrate in a weekend. Our team will walk you through the data model translation and the webhook rewiring at no charge.
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