Headless CMS - Which is the right choice for you?
June 04, 2025
I've been searching for a headless CMS, and honestly there are a huge number of options.
I'm quite happy with the current backbone of my website being Gatbsy, so I was keen to stick with that. Of all of the headless CMS options, I ended up settling on trying out Sanity.io, TinaCMS and Contentful.
My first step was through Sanity.io, I used the handy Gasby Guide at https://www.gatsbyjs.com/guides/sanity/, created a new Sanity project, hosted in GitHub pages as I wanted and started looking at the integration piece. Now, don't get me wrong, the integration took some minor fiddling, but it wasn't too bad.
It's relatively straightforward to use and creating new content types is also easy to do. However having a separate project to support Sanity.io did grate on me a touch, and the UI is not the prettiest, so when a friend mentioned TinaCMS - I immediately took a look.
On the face of it, TinaCMS is pretty and well-integrated with the base project. Again, I looked at the Gatsby documentation and an incredibly convenient guide https://tina.io/docs/frameworks/gatsby - however, what seemed to be a straightforward integration was filled with package version mismatch issues; including the GraphQL mismatch issue highlighted on the guide. No amount of fiddling could correct that, so I started to rebuild the entire site in Astro - that integration did go better, however I was then on to the next issue;
I really don't like Astro.
Well I think i need to add more context, it's not that I really dislike Astro. I actually love the page setup / layout. I think it was the idea of rebuilding my simple but alive site from scratch all over again.
Then I was faced by my final choice. The overall integration was painless and updating content on the contentful site is simple. Plus the UI itself is much nicer.
The only spanner in the works so far, is that I'm struggling to display any inline or embedded content that is added to the content. Given that this has been the easiest process so far, I'm inclined to stick with it and look more into using the contentful rich text renderers - watch this space!
