Directus Reviews

It is free, if you are able to host it yourself!
It is completely white-label, which makes your employees love it even more.
It is perfectly customizable.
In case you miss something, you can easily jump on the train and add it for your project - or all Directus users (contributing in the open-source community).
If you want it fully managed, there is a cloud-version at a fair price (cheap compared to others) too.

Potential con for some people: The PHP version got more or less deprecated. There might be one version again, but focus is definitely with NodeJS. If you want to host it yourself and are not able to run Node or Docker, you might run into problems.
File management could be better and more customizable (in terms of conditional rules how uploads get processed per collection and field).

I love the concept behind Directus: the idea to freely create a database in an easy way, organizing the content as you need or as you imagined it. I come from Kirby CM and Craft CMS and doing websites in which the custom design is the key, it's important to us to shape our content as we want.

It's easy to install, the Slack support is friendly and helpful. In the search for the perfect headless CMS solution, it was my choice, also because it's open source and at the moment the pricing of others options is over budget for our clients. We were ok paying a fee for a license, but not a perpetual subscription.
Moreover, a key point in the decision to adopt it is the self-hosted solution: we wanted to avoid every possible lock-in.

Finally, the stack: working in a communication agency, we are not software engineers: PHP + Vue.js it's a perfect combination. React and node.js onthe server was a switch too big to take another leap.

Above all, the bugs: being open source and free it's normal, but it is frustrating in the measure we decided to use it for clients works.

Second: the lack of documentation for the interfaces or for the detailed use of the JS SDK.

Moreover, sometimes I felt overwhelmed by the technical details of the interface. I don't have competence in relational databases and to me too much things doesn't have a meaning. But I'm mainly a front-end developer that try to be "independent", so I think that it's normal.

Finally: the lack of a good repeater. At the moment it's impossible to use a file field in it, or to repeat a group of field. For us it's almost a strict requirement for clients projects.

This is Free and Open Source Software at its best. Directus has a great, well tended community, excellent developers, many options and lots of friendly answers to real questions. I have not found any other headless API I can self host in amazon or wherever I want. This makes for a local development cycle, short time to market, very easy to prototybe setup for example for react/gatsby apps.

The app where you manage the database still needs a bit more documentation. It does not lack features, but some features lack propper documentation. I hope to help on this in the future!

The interface is very friendly, and as the product matures, the installation is becoming better.

This is not an enterprise-level application, yet. It has a number of tiny gotchas that one has to learn about. One can still do most anything they desire.

It's really easy to setup and encourages to learn new technologies

It's not really done yet, I mean Directus is switching from PHP to Nodejs and this is a long proccess that is still happening and the documentation is not complete yet.

The admin panel has an intuitive interface for managing database relationships (collections), users, fields for your data types. I feel excited to present my non-technical media producers with a way to add their media files, tag them appropriately by creator, relate them to 'topics' stored another table, and be able to update and add new topics with no technical expertise.

I had some challenges in setup that came down to outdated or incomplete documentation, but that may also be lack of experience on my side. Perhaps some things that were not explicit were actually expected knowledge that I was lacking.

I am impressed with the continuous development of Directus and the commitment to deploying frequently. There are always new features and fixes and the team releases at a pace that would make a commercial team sweat, let alone an Open-Source team.

The only challenge I faced while setting up Directus was a little confusion about the config of setting up multiple projects on the same install. However, the documentation was thorough and the Slack talkative, and I was soon up and running with a shared instance that eliminates the maintenance of multiple instances.

I really liked the headless aspect and how easy it is to build up the overall construct for your data. The API is nice documented and easy to understand.

In version 6 the API is really slow when your database is quite huge. The issue was reported but couldn't be solved in this version so we had to upgrade the whole project (loading time for a site was 6s+...)

I like that Directus is free and open source, with an active community over Slack and that the software evolves very quickly. I also *love* the fact that you can access the whole SQL DB schema besson Directus.

New versions sometimes introduce critical bugs. The Directus team is responsive on GitHub and Slack, but it needs some time to validate new versions before upgrading production DBs.

Directus is quite impressive about the potentials it have from a business point of view.
The software is easy to configure and the community is very active continously improving the available functionalities and solving known issues

Some features are still not fully working (i.e. forgot password and reset password needs some work)
PHP in my opinion is not very flexible for developer, so it require lots of components to be added

The interface is so user friendly and has a solid and highly customizable backend for all the needs.

The new version is fully functionnal but still has some issues that can appear during the implementation.

But the team is phenomenal and is pushing updates and fixes all the time and have a helpful community to guide you to use properly the platform.

CMS looks very mature, with lots of functionality already there. No need for installing tons of plugins, modules, extensions... Open source and i18n were our main perks when we chose Directus over others.

We've pinpointed bad time to start with it. Directus Team just started rolling out v8 where available documentation was for v7. Some small issues were visible, but quickly ironed out with swift releases. On the other hand - Slack support + Git issue tracking worked for us very well.