Cosmic vs. Netlify CMS

The purpose of this Headless CMS comparison page is to outline the differences between the Cosmic headless CMS and other available content management solutions. By comparing technology, maintenance, security, features, and cost analysis, it is our goal to show you the benefits and tradeoffs to help you decide if the Cosmic Headless CMS is the right solution for your team.

About Netlify CMS

Netlify CMS was created by the static website hosting company Netlify and describes itself as an open source content manager for your Git workflow

Monolithic vs Headless CMS

Netlify CMS, as a git-based CMS comes with a coupled front end application layer that requires additional development and maintenance. Cosmic is a Headless CMS meaning that the content API and presentation layer are decoupled which gives your team greater flexibility when it comes to where your content can go.

Cosmic provides everything your team of developers and content creators need: powerful and intuitive APIs for developers, and an easy-to-use dashboard for content creators. We've removed all complexity and CMS maintenance, so your team can focus on building great products faster, together.

Is Netlify CMS a Headless CMS?

In short, no. Netlify CMS is not a true headless CMS as it doesn't expose any API for scalable content delivery. So along with your application, you will still need to maintain the CMS itself, adding more development costs and taking away focus from what really matters: creating great content and user experiences in your main website or app.

	Cosmic	Netlify CMS
Technology	A global edge compute network and high performance CDN.	Git. Front end tech: HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
Scalability	All components are infinitely scalable. Built on global edge cloud technology.	Does not scale easily. Limited by your servers, hosting provider, and budget.
Security	We manage the security for you. Data encryption at rest with 256-bit SSL encryption in transit. Two-factor authentication included free.	You manage the security yourself. No default data encryption at rest or in transit.
CMS maintenance	We maintain everything for you so you can focus on what matters most: building great content and user experiences.	You deploy, host, and maintain everything yourself. Along with your application and content, you need to maintain updates and security for your CMS system.
Global caching	High-performance global caching layer included.	No caching included out of the box.
Media CDN	Global media CDN built-in.	No CDN included out of the box.
Image processing	Image optimization and processing service included.	Manually manage your own image sizes and optimizations.
Extendability	Templates and integrations offered.	Templates and plugins.
Frontend	BYOFE (Bring your own front end) Front end code is decoupled from CMS.	Front end is coupled with backend CMS. Not Headless.
Number of projects	One login, unlimited projects.	One login, one website.
Annual costs	Save time and money on developer resource spending. Consider us your outsourced CMS team. Get started for free. Free to start	You will need to hire developer resources. Average salary of a full-stack developer is $111,600 per year. You may need to hire 1-3 developers to maintain the CMS. $224,200

Feature comparison subject to change. Contact support@cosmicjs.com to report any needed updates.

Uptime you can depend on

Reliable infrastructure

No need to fear downtime for your content. Our service is built to auto scale through bursts of high traffic so you can focus on your content and business, we'll handle the infrastructure.