Why we are bullish on Payload CMS in 2023

PayloadCMS is a developer-friendly, open-source content management system with customizable templates, media management, and SEO features. It's built on Typescript and Expressjs with an open design philosophy (*), making it flexible and scalable for different projects.

We've been following Payload's progress over the past year into its stable release and we feel like right now it's in a great position to adopt it as a core offering for our clients. Over the last two months we've invested time in developing an ecommerce project with it (coming soon) and we are going to leverage our experience in that project to contribute back to the community where we can, more on that further down.

Payload CMS has reached the infliction point to skyrocket to success and show the rest of the market how it's done and we're here for it.

Roadmap in 2023

The Payload team have published a roadmap for all great things to come in 2023, however here are the ones we're excited about in particular.

Cloud

Their cloud offering promises to handle CDN, emails, database and deployments all for you out of the box; this makes it a huge time saver for many projects where you don't want to be bogged down with devops.

Other open source projects like Meilisearch and Strapi have seen great success in funding their operations via a cloud offering as opposed to a licence-based monetisation plan, which instils further confidence that Payload is here to stay.

Multi database support

Payload currently only supports MongoDB which isn't a limitation for scaling your project by any means however it does limit certain complex technical stacks you might want to utilise, or if you want to take advantage of an existing infrastructure.

However they're working on abstracting the database provider layer in the API which will allow support for other DBs such as PostgreSQL; we're particularly excited about the implications around integrating databases like Planetscale with it.

Serverless deployment

The admin panel being deployable on serverless (and edge) functions is a great feature that will essentially allow you to host your CMS entirely for free on a base tier via a MongoDB hosted database and the admin panel being hosted by a service like Vercel. It also allows for better performance at edge cutting down response times to end users and provides even greater flexibility of how you can host your admin UI.

Everything else on their list is great and you should read it, however these are the features for us that will make Payload stand out against its competitors as it's able to maintain its price tag of "Free" and open source in such a competitive market.

What are our plans?

We want to continue building a strong baseline in working with Payload, so we will share our learnings with the community and try to contribute back in any way we can, most immediate plans are the following:

Meilisearch integration plugin, until an official integration is available we will try to do our best to create a solution that works for our clients and the community
Analytics dashboard integration, supporting Plausible and GA4
Tutorials on extending Payload and complex setups with deployments and GraphQL