Git-based CMS or API-first CMS - main differences and benefits

A Git-based CMS stores your content as files in your own Git repository, and gives editors an interface over those files. An API-first CMS stores your content in the vendor’s database and hands it to you as JSON over an API. Pick Git-based when your content belongs with your website in the repo, versioned, reviewed like code, and readable by any tool or AI agent you point at it. Pick API-first when the same content has to feed several different applications at once.

On June 1, 2026, Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Contentful, the API-first CMS used by more than 4,800 brands. A year earlier, the Payload team joined Figma, where the open-source project is being folded into Figma CMS for Figma Sites. Contentful had already removed its free community tier in Q2 2025.

None of that makes API-first CMSs a bad choice. But it does make the question of where your content actually lives a practical one rather than a philosophical one. If your content is rows in someone else’s database, you find out what that means during an acquisition, a repricing, or a sunset notice.

What is a Git-based CMS? # Direct link to this section

A Git-based CMS keeps your content in your Git repository as plain text files, usually Markdown with YAML frontmatter, plus YAML, JSON, TOML, or CSV for structured data. The CMS syncs with the repo, presents an editing interface, and commits changes back.

The repository is the source of truth. Your templates, your content, your configuration, and your build pipeline all sit in the same place, under the same version control, with the same history.

Options in this category include CloudCannon, Decap CMS (the community successor to Netlify CMS, which Netlify handed over in February 2023 and which has moved slowly since), Sveltia CMS (a ground-up rewrite of the same idea, in public beta), TinaCMS, and Keystatic.

What is an API-first CMS? # Direct link to this section

An API-first CMS, often called headless, stores your content in the vendor’s own database, structured according to a content model you define. You request that content over REST or GraphQL and get JSON back, then render it however you like.

The rendering layer is entirely your problem, which is the point. The same content can feed a website, a mobile app, a kiosk, a smartwatch, and a set of digital signage displays without any of them knowing about each other.

The main names in 2026 are Sanity, Contentful, Strapi, Payload, Storyblok, Directus, and Hygraph.

What’s the actual difference? # Direct link to this section

Where the content sits when nobody is looking at it.

With Git-based, it’s a folder of text files that you can clone, grep, diff, and open in any editor. With API-first, it’s a database you reach through an endpoint, exportable but not directly ownable.

Everything else follows from that.

What are the advantages of a Git-based CMS? # Direct link to this section

You own the content outright. It’s in your repository. If you stop paying for the CMS tomorrow, the site still builds, the files are still there, and the full history of every change is still attached. There’s no export step, because there’s nothing to export from.

Review workflows come free. Content changes go through branches and pull requests, the same way code does. A junior editor’s draft can sit on a branch until someone approves it. If a change breaks something, git revert fixes it. Most API-first CMSs have built up equivalents, but they’re vendor features rather than something the storage layer gives you for nothing.

Developers already know how it works. No new mental model, no SDK to learn, no rate limits to reason about. It’s files in a repo.

It keeps working when the CMS doesn’t. Your CMS having an outage is annoying. It isn’t a site outage, and developers can keep committing from their own machines.

AI tooling reads it natively. This benefit is new since I last updated this article, and it’s turned out to matter more than I expected. Large language models are trained overwhelmingly on Git repositories. Markdown, frontmatter, YAML, folder structures, and diffs are their first language. Point Claude Code or Cursor at a Git-based project and it sees the templates, the content, the config, and the build setup all at once, and can trace how a copy change affects a layout.

Point an agent at an API-first CMS and it works through endpoints. Strapi and Payload both ship official MCP servers now, and they’re good, but an agent calling getEntries() can’t see the template that renders the entry. It has the content and none of the context.

What are the advantages of an API-first CMS? # Direct link to this section

One content set, many front ends. This is the real reason API-first exists. If the same product description has to appear on your website, in your iOS app, on in-store displays, and in a partner’s marketplace listing, a content API is the correct architecture and files in a repo aren’t.

Structured content at scale. Deep relational content models with thousands of interlinked entries are what these systems are built for. Referential integrity, bulk operations, and querying across relationships are all first-class.

Real-time collaboration. Several editors working on the same document simultaneously is a solved problem in Sanity and Contentful. It’s an awkward one in a Git-based system, where two people editing the same file means a merge conflict.

Localization at volume. Managing fifteen locales of the same content set with translation workflows and per-market overrides is much better handled by a purpose-built content platform than by a directory tree.

Content that isn’t a website. Email templates, in-product copy, chatbot scripts, printed catalogs. If your content’s destination isn’t primarily a set of web pages, the file-per-page model stops making sense.

What are the disadvantages of a Git-based CMS? # Direct link to this section

I work at a Git-based CMS company, so take this in the spirit it’s offered: there are things we’re not the right tool for.

Concurrent editing is the honest one. Git’s model is ’take a copy, change it, merge it back’, and that’s currently a poor fit for two people typing in the same paragraph at once. Very large content sets get unwieldy too. A repository with 200,000 content files is a slower repository, and (despite Hugo’s often touted build speed) no amount of tooling fixes that.

Genuine omnichannel is the other. If your content needs to reach six destinations that have nothing to do with each other, you want a content API, and you should use one.

I’d also be careful with content that changes many times a minute. A build step is a build step, even a fast one.

What are the disadvantages of a API-first CMS? # Direct link to this section

The editor experience is the recurring complaint, and it’s structural rather than a failure of design effort. The backend intentionally knows nothing about the frontend, so editors work with abstract form fields and have to imagine how field seven maps to the third section of the homepage. Vendors have put real work into visual preview to close this gap, and it’s better than it was, but it’s a bolt-on rather than the default.

Cost is the other. Pricing tends to compound across seats, API calls, and record counts, all of which grow together. Contentful’s entry paid tier is $300/month, and enterprise conversations start in the low six figures once entry count and API volume rise. Sanity starts around $15/month per seat with usage add-ons. Strapi and Payload are free to self-host, which is a genuinely different proposition, and increasingly why teams pick them.

And then there’s the ownership question I opened with. Neither acquisition is a disaster, and Figma has committed to keeping Payload open source. But both are a reminder that a database you reach through someone else’s endpoint is subject to someone else’s roadmap. Contentful is becoming a content layer for Agentforce. Payload is becoming the engine under Figma CMS. Those are reasonable directions for the acquirers. Whether they’re the direction you wanted is a separate question, and not one you get a vote on.

How do you choose? # Direct link to this section

Ask what shape your content actually is.

Go Git-based if your content is essentially one website, your team includes developers who live in Git, review and approval matter, you want editors working visually on real pages, and you want AI tooling that can see your whole project. Marketing sites, documentation, blogs, agency client work, corporate sites.

Go API-first if the same content genuinely has to reach several unrelated destinations, you have deep relational content models, several people edit the same documents at once, or you’re managing serious localization volume.

Use both if that’s what the work needs. There’s nothing stopping you from running a Git-based CMS for your marketing site and pulling product data from a content API at build time. Plenty of teams do exactly that. The static site generator fetches the JSON during the build, and the resulting site is still prebuilt HTML.

The failure mode I see most often isn’t picking the wrong one. It’s picking API-first for a site that is, and will only ever be, one website, and then spending three years explaining form fields to a marketing team.

Why does CloudCannon use Git? # Direct link to this section

CloudCannon is a Git-based CMS, and the reason is the part I keep coming back to: the repository is the single source of truth for developers, editors, and now AI agents at the same time.

Developers keep their normal workflow, their static site generator, their branches, and their build and hosting config. Editors get a Visual Editor where they click on a heading and change it, with no Git knowledge required. Agents get the whole project as readable files and contribute through the same review process as everyone else.