Traditional vs. Headless CMS - Full comparison

The main difference between traditional and headless CMS lies in their architectural approach to content management and delivery. A traditional CMS combines both the backend content management and frontend presentation layers into a single system, while a headless CMS decouples these layers, providing more flexibility and versatility.

So, to transition or not to transition, that is the question.

The future of CMS is quickly moving away from traditional, database-driven systems and toward API-driven headless or decoupled systems. The headless content management system architecture is rising in popularity in the development world. So, while still using traditional systems, you might feel you’re missing something. You’ve heard about the main headless CMS features: it’s faster, it’s secure, it delivers headless content via API.

So, what have we done in this article? We’ve picked six famous traditional CMSs and compared their main aspects (like the ease of development, price, functionality, and purpose) to the headless in detail.

No one ever did something similar.

All six CMSs are on this list because of their popularity and the types of projects they are used for. Let’s introduce them. 👇

The first one is, of course, WordPress. Believe it or not, WordPress runs around 40% of all websites in the world. Yup, fresh news. They indeed continued to dominate the CMS market; we have to give them that credit.
Joomla is the second most known content management system and our second choice. It has significantly less audience than WordPress - it powers around 3% of all the websites on the Internet.
Drupal follows it. Despite being used by fewer websites than the first two, Drupal is still more trendy than Magento, Blogger, Shopify, or Squarespace. Currently, it’s being used by 2.3% of all websites (with a worldwide market share of 4.6%).

The following important character in our little story today is Magento. The eCommerce platform is the 9th most favored CMS globally (0.8% of all known websites). More accurately, the second most attractive platform in 2020, with an overall eCommerce market share of 12% globally. 
The last two CMSs we’re going to talk about are Umbraco and Episerver. Umbraco is the 11th most known in the Top 1 Million sites in the Open-Source category, and Episerver is the leading commercially licensed CMS in the Nordics (used by less than 0.1% of all the websites). 


Now, most of you know that WordPress is used for any type of website. It started as a simple blogging platform, but it’s without limit today. Websites of all shapes and sizes can be made in Joomla, too. Personal or business websites, e-commerce, portfolio, Q&A, profit or non-profit, newspapers and publications - you name it, and these two CMSs can endure it.

On the other hand, Drupal is often the best choice for complex, content-heavy, and high-traffic websites and those with large resource libraries and databases. Companies most often use Umbraco with 10-50 employees and 1M-10M dollars in revenue. As mentioned, Magento is an e-commerce program, as well as Episerver.

Headless is quite different from these six. Of course, it allows businesses to manage, store, and track content projects from creation to publication, just as a conventional CMS does.

Content management with a headless CMS is powerful and flexible. Multichannel content management is made easier with faster editing experiences. Choosing front-end tooling will be easier than ever for developers, and scaling will be easier.

An API (application programming interface) publishes content once created and edited. The benefits of this approach are that you can present your content in many different ways, regardless of how it is presented. There is no impact or input on the front end of the headless CMS.

Regarding headless CMS architecture, 3 facts really make a difference when it comes to building websites and content management:

BCMS is a SaaS, open-source CMS that empowers enterprise content teams. Marketers and developers can focus on creating the best digital customer experiences with BCMS. BCMS gives control over the content to your clients.

They can make changes quickly and easily using the intuitive, minimal editor. BCMS maximizes team contributions and improves consistency. Developers can create online ventures by choosing their tech stack and rapidly building online experiences.

Find out why BCMS is great choice to use as a:

- NextJS headless CMS
- Nuxt CMS
- Gatsby CMS

Contentful is an API-driven headless CMS that offers different ways of content management. Using a central hub, you can manage your content and deliver it across any number of channels and devices. Users of any smart device can edit their content. 

There are some differences between BCMS and Contentful that may seem insignificant, but these differences affect things like security, performance, cost, and customization.

With Strapi, you can easily create and distribute content using an open-source headless CMS. This self-hosted CMS does not require scripting to create a website. Strapi speeds up development by being 100% JavaScript and easily customizable.

Ghost is one of the most used headless CMS solutions. With the open-source theme starter framework, you can take a faster track to develop custom themes. What makes Ghost popular are the SEO options incorporated into Ghost.

If you were wondering if CMS can improve your SEO, you should know that almost every headless solution can contribute to better displaying attractive search results in search engines.

Making flexible and faster web projects is easy when Netlify is paired with the static site generator. For easier versioning, multi-channel publishing, and content updates, Netlify stores content in a Git repository alongside code. Since it is a one-page React application, you can add UI widgets, editor plugins, and custom previews for better customization.

Get familiar with headless concepts. Read what headless CMS is and why you should use it.

There are many options out there, and it can be challenging to navigate their many features. We think it’s wise to aim for a CMS that can grow with you and be adapted as your needs evolve.

To find the most suitable match for specific needs, the right thing is to conduct a thoroughly deep and detailed comparison.

Our first comparison of traditional and headless CMS will concern the simplicity/complexity of development.

For a developer, familiarity equals ease; thus, "easy" is subjective. Most conventional CMSs aren't complicated for developers; they need some time to get used to them. Non-tech audiences, on the other hand, might have some problems.

People usually find WordPress easy. It's quick and flexible, making it possible to build almost any kind of website imaginable. Most folks use WordPress without any prior knowledge of designing websites. It's likely because of the templates. You can choose from thousands of free website themes and customize them. They mostly come with their own options panel allowing you to change colors, upload logos, change the background, create beautiful sliders, and partly customize it to your needs without writing any code.


Joomla is pretty much similar. Its straightforward design, user-friendly features, and UX improvements enable non-tech-savvy users to set it up just as easily as how they would do it with WordPress. It takes only three steps to install, and it can finish the initial process in under 1 minute. Being non-tech and beginner-tech friendly, we must agree that both tools ARE easy (for everybody).


Others are not that 'friendly.' For example, Umbraco is a powerful content management system designed for developers with a fully-featured environment for data management. It requires knowledge for managing through a dated and not very intuitive interface. There are not as many plugins as WordPress, so many features require a developer's implementation. If you're a business owner considering Umbraco, we fear it won't be a painless digital experience for you.


Drupal is even more challenging. It offers some themes, but most of the final websites in Drupal are custom-coded or at least highly customized. That usually means the developer had to roll up their sleeves and make something that looked good. Other than that, the Drupal interface is incomprehensible for most casual users (and many developers, too!). We can't say it's hard to use, but it can be hard to learn how to use it.

Some essential advice for people with limited knowledge of website development would be to find some other CMS alternatives (like WordPress) because it's easier to understand. E-commerce websites require a developer's work by default.

For instance, Magento is justifiably a complete solution for building e-commerce websites. Several features that help to enhance this functionality are Magento debugger, EcomDev PHP unit, easy template path hints, multistore search fields, and more. They can be easily extended or customized (especially in enterprise packages) but require an expert's work.

Working in Episerver CMS consists of defining the graphical layout of the site and creating templates for the presentation of various types of content. Episerver is conveniently installed through Visual Studio and the Episerver Visual Studio Extension, providing everything you need to get a website up and running and get started developing. Its personalization capabilities are AI-driven which means it uses algorithms and predictive analytics to eliminate guesswork and dynamically present the most relevant content or experience for each visitor. That's why someone needs to know how to handle it.

Comparing these six CMSs, it's understandable why most clients have used or at least heard of WordPress in the past. Or Shopify (not mentioned in our text), which is a WordPress alternative for eCommerce. They are the simplest. So, offering your clients new technology they are unaware of can be tricky. The most important part is to describe the limits conventional CMSs have. Secondly, elaborate on the difference in development and how headless can save time/money.

With older CMSs, the website is built "on top" of the CMS, meaning you will need to learn and (re)build your website based on CMS rules and processes.

Headless enables you to add CMS functionality where you need it in your existing tech stack. That means developers don't need to learn all those limited rules and processes but can work with a familiar tool. CMS is integrated rather than the foundation.

However, conventional CMSs look simple for ordinary users, authors, or content creators; they can be complex for a developer. Content, CMS code, and website code coexist and intertwine, creating interdependence and complexity. In headless, content exists separately, enabling developers to do work without the final content being ready.


The ability to architect and manage your content without worrying about its delivery is a massive bonus with headless content management. As is omnichannel experience conventional CMSs cannot offer. They failed to keep pace. Because CMS organizes content in webpage-oriented frameworks, they made it impossible for the same content to adapt to other digital platforms.

Because of all those reasons, headless CMS can be significantly easier for front-end developers.

Every year, thousands of WordPress sites get hacked.

The more attractive the CMS, the more vulnerable it will be to attacks. That puts CMSs from our article on top of the list.

Maybe you know the story when a Joomla Resources Directory (JRD) team member left a full backup of the JRD site (resources.joomla.org) on an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket owned by their own company.

Data that could have been exposed if someone found and downloaded the backup includes details such as Full Name, address, phone number, password, and more.

Each of the six CMSs from our list is vulnerable to attacks, and the reason lies in their open-source frameworks. Such shared development environments offer several benefits, but they also have their share of flaws, many of which arise from a lack of accountability.

Meanwhile, open-source headless options reduce vulnerability and make the entire stack more secure. Secondly, various plugins and themes are also exposed to attacks. There are several ways users can protect their websites. They should:

All these tasks require time, care, and money. If you want to know more about headless CMS security, check it here: Is headless CMS a secure CMS?

A headless CMS consists of a backend layer and connects to different front ends using APIs, thus removing the “head.” This detail improves security considerably. Often the API used to provide content via decoupled CMS is read-only, providing a level of security that might be unavailable with a conventional CMS.

What’s more, that can place API behind one or more layers of code — perhaps an application layer and a security layer — making it even less vulnerable to attack.

Another standard method of hacking, through SQL injection, headless combats by running on a server without SQL or even without being connected to SQL. When a developer truly creates a unique CMS from scratch, like a headless CMS, nothing about your CMS is a known entity. As you might assume, security should be the top priority as long as CMS is concerned. And headless is trying to respect it.

The cost of building and hosting a website via conventional CMSs can vary from $100 to $200.000. How is that remarkable difference possible?

The cost depends on so many things:

It’s like building a house. The cost of a 100m2 home will differ from one with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, security cameras, and a pool. Volume, materials, unique features - it all affects the price. That’s why you’ll always find various CMS and hosting offers.

You can get some super simple websites in WordPress from $100 to $500. Of course, you get basic security, plugins, and a limited visual web appearance with free WordPress themes and possibilities.

For more advanced features, the price goes up. It’s essential to be clear about what type of website you are building and what you need. Fully customized websites and developers’ work can cost as high as $30,000 or more.

Joomla works the same way but is a bit cheaper - going from $700 to $6500. Prices can be higher with some special premium features included.

Umbraco is totally different from the first two. It’s not that beginner-friendly, and non-technical business owners require assistance to set up even a basic website. In addition, it doesn’t have built-in plugins and extensions you can simply use, making it too expensive and time-consuming. Umbraco starts at $5000 per year.

Drupal, too, requires a large amount of custom development, various content types, and complicated workflows. With a set of clearly defined design criteria, features, and capabilities, it can reach upwards of $100,000.

Of course, it all depends on the website type and the region you’re working in. It’s well-known that USA and Western Europe developers cost more than those in Eastern Europe or Asia. Also, business websites or portfolios cost less than mobile apps and eCommerce stores.

Speaking of eCommerce, Magneto is a tool for precisely that. Since online stores are complicated with many details that need to be taken off, they are the most expensive to build. The optimal budget for a basic website based on Magento lies within the $22,000-50,000 range. However, the price can be both lower and way more expensive. As mentioned, it usually depends on hosting options, level of customization, in-house/custom development, design, and extensions.

Episerver is the only CMS that on their website doesn’t have any packages. They form their pricing depending on the scale of the project and customer requirements, and one can expect to invest even $100k per year. Unlike other vendors, this annual subscription cost includes everything required to run a full-scale commerce dashboard.

Now, the scope of the project and the developer's hourly rate has a significant impact on the final prices mentioned above. But there is one more crucial thing—the hosting.

Imagine the hosting as an elegant person who puts all the files - blog posts, photos, products, etc. - in a drawer. It enables you to have a safe online space for your website and makes it accessible to anyone who wants to visit it.

Businesses usually choose among these web hosting types: shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated hosting. Shared hosting is typical in co-working offices, where more websites share space on the same server. Its price is the lowest, but security is jeopardized, and it’s not recommended for eCommerce websites or ones with significant traffic.

Virtual private server/hosting (VPS) is private, stable, and offers vast resources you can customize and organize. In our opinion, it is a wise investment for business websites with lots of monthly visitors.

The third option is dedicated hosting, they put massive efforts into privacy and are the most reliable type of hosting because their price is slightly higher. Speaking about the six CMSs from the text above, you can see their annual cost of hosting in the table below.

At first sight, headless might seem a bit more expensive than other CMS. For example, Butter CMS costs $49 monthly to add up to 50 blog posts monthly to your existing site. Marketing teams who want to scale content, product marketing, and SEO can expect a prize of $249. But, the high price is just high at first sight. Usually, decoupled CMS costs anywhere from under $100 to a few thousand per month.

Let’s take a look at BMCS pricing plans as an example.

The first thing you need to decide before using BCMS is whether you need the self-hosted or managed hosting version. Self-hosted is free, forever. But paid plans also start with a 30-day free trial. All features included.

Let's say you decided on the paid version. In that case, you can choose between two options:

For any paid option you choose, you get the same set of functionality and BCMS features that will significantly facilitate the process of creating a website and managing content.

Features and functionalities included are: 

The only difference is that you can save 20% if you choose an annual subscription.

With all these features, you’ll be able to replace multiple tools with one single place for all your content. For example, by using BCMS, you can stop using form submission tools, different website integrations, serverless function providers, etc.

Here’s why:

If you are struggling to understand the basic headless concept and the stuff we just spoke of, check Intro to Headless CMS.

At the end of the day, it’s not a battle between WordPress vs. Headless CMS, and it all comes down to the project’s requirements, budget, and deadline.

But for us, headless offers a better overall experience. And by that, we mean the user and developer, digital experience, and let's explain that further.

From a front-end developer's perspective, conventional CMS sometimes seems like an endless realm of code. We have to dive into complex code and understand how the data is presented, which can be difficult and time-consuming.
With headless, fronted teams can fully concentrate on visual aesthetics, choosing how to present the data at the end. They do not need to worry about constant security updates and other maintenance issues as they would have with WordPress and alternatives to WordPress. In other words, being headless makes them independent, which very few traditional CMSs can offer.


When comes user experience (UX) might be the most crucial thing about CMSs.

A website that is hard to use is slow or poorly laid out, which will result in leaving visitors. On a larger scale, UX is vital. Its goal is to fulfill users' needs, provide consistently positive digital experiences, and keep users loyal to the product or brand. Some conventional CMSs have a great user experience.

For example, WordPress is easy to navigate for a user and proves that more straightforward sometimes can be better. Another plus for beginners is they don't need to know anything about code or web design. Content creators and editors are primarily relying on CMSs like WordPress and Joomla because of their simplicity. But they shouldn't be frightened by headless. With it, they create and edit content the same way they were before. As you can see from the comparison above, headless is faster and easier for developing a great and modern website. Also, because the backend and front end are separated, headless is much safer.

Because of the way they work, this type of CMS requires development knowledge for design, frontend, and backend. For smaller projects, this means headless can get quite expensive. For larger projects and ones that plan more platforms, cross-platform headless is much more affordable.