Directus

About Directus
Directus is an open-source headless content management system (CMS) that helps businesses store content in custom SQL databases and access them through an API. Using the Directus App, supervisors can sort items into several categories, customize the platform according to brand requirements, and utilize the search functionality to retrieve specific information from the database.
Administrators can configure role-based permissions for users and secure confidential data through two-factor authentication (TFA) and single sign-on (SSO) capabilities. Managers can view content edits or revisions using the rollback functionality and bookmark important items, projects, or collections for future reference. Directus also lets enterprises upload multiple files to the platform, reorder them using a drag-and-drop interface, and automatically pull metadata, such as description, locations, tags, or image dimensions, from files.
Supervisors can create personalized profiles for employees, monitor their recent activities, and encrypt users’ passwords to prevent data exploitation. The software also helps users configure workflows and collect required information using custom forms.
Key benefits of Directus
Stores all data in pure, unaltered SQL.
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- Industry: Management Consulting
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Weekly for 1+ year
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Review Source
Overall rating
- Value for Money
- Ease of Use
- Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10
Best headless CMS on the market - powered by Open-Source
Reviewed on 2021/04/19
I loved the previous versions, but especially the new V9 really excites me. I never experienced any...
I loved the previous versions, but especially the new V9 really excites me. I never experienced any smoother experience setting up any content management system (including the old guys like WordPress or Drupal). From a product and/or IT lead perspective, it brings you so much power for so many use cases - without a huge price tag or complexity.
Pros
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.
Cons
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).
Alternatives Considered
Drupal, Webflow, WordPress, Butter CMS, Strapi, Hygraph, Joomla and ContentfulReasons for Switching to Directus
One though, of course, always is, if those guys are able to maintain their speed and perfection. Especially compared to better funded companies. The answer lies within the dynamic open-source approach. It enables the tool to benefit from the community to keep up with things like Contentful. At the same time, it is also some kind of guarantee for the future. While every company might get closed down in the future, open-source lives on. Picturing the worst case, you could still take over and manage it all by yourself. Other tools simply go offline and bring you headaches. This, combined with the awesome feature set (see pros) and the beautiful UI, puts it above the mentioned Contentful, but also tools like Strapi or GraphCMS. I skip the part, why headless "kills" full CMS like WordPress ;). And, of course, this kind of tool provides you with more flexibility than complete no-code-solutions like Webflow or Squarespace (but this would be an unfair comparison anyway).- Industry: Information Technology & Services
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used Weekly for 6-12 months
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Review Source
Overall rating
- Value for Money
- Ease of Use
- Customer Support
- Likelihood to recommend 8.0 /10
A great platform leveraged as a headless CMS
Reviewed on 2023/10/05
Pros
After reviewing and trying a few headless CMS’, we selected Directus. We found that Directus was a comprehensive, feature rich, well supported and intuitive. The main differentiator for us was their implementation of a multi tenancy solution. I would highly recommend this platform to anyone who is looking to deliver a single CMS product across multiple organisation with discrete and granular controls and permissions.
Cons
They’ve increased (not by that much) their lowest tier pricing. For us the previous pricing was a low barrier for entry for a lot of rich features. However saying that for the new pricing you are still receiving a lot of value.
- Industry: Design
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 1-5 months
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Review Source
Overall rating
- Value for Money
- Ease of Use
- Customer Support
- Likelihood to recommend 7.0 /10
Fantastic concept, medium user experience
Reviewed on 2020/02/06
Until now the experience is good: I like the idea and it works for the project that we started with...
Until now the experience is good: I like the idea and it works for the project that we started with Directus. We still need to resolve some issues, like how to properly manage pages and SEO data or how to overcome the lack of the repeater field, but it's working well.
The experience with the support was fantastic. [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] was kind and friendly, in spite of my incompetence. I appreciate the enthusiasm and the open source spirit.
Sometimes I experienced some limits for the reasons mentioned early, but I'm happy.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Response from Monospace Inc
Hi Davide, thank you very much for your review of Directus 8. Over the past year, we've worked nonstop on bug fixes and improvements to our open-source platform. Now on Directus 9 (a major release since your review, and now in node.js), we'd love the opportunity for you to take another look.
Our open-source platform is far more stable now, thanks to the full API rewrite, and also includes the Repeater interface you were looking for.
Hopefully you'll consider checking out the latest release of Directus and updating your review to reflect this improved version.
:)
- Industry: Leisure, Travel & Tourism
- Company size: 51–200 Employees
- Used Daily for 6-12 months
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Review Source
Overall rating
- Value for Money
- Ease of Use
- Customer Support
- Likelihood to recommend 8.0 /10
Great headless CMS
Reviewed on 2020/02/06
Pros
You can manage your collections and content through good looking administration, you create (even complex) relationships between the collections, there is a support to manage localized content. Your content is served through REST or GraphQL API that is simple learn. Good support of roles and permissions who can consume the content through API. There is a good extensions support for both APP and API. Easy deployement with Docker.
Cons
Performance of API calls for more complex data (relation) can be a bit sluggish, but it can be solved by setting up cache. There are bugs that take a long time to solve. GraphQL API has still lacking features compared to REST API.
Alternatives Considered
StrapiReasons for Choosing Directus
We needed to have headless CMS that could provide content through APIReasons for Switching to Directus
They don't have localization support for contentResponse from Monospace Inc
Hello, and thank you very much for your review of Directus 8. Over the past year, we've worked nonstop on bug fixes, Docs, and improvements to our open-source platform. Now on Directus 9 (a major release since your review, and now in node.js), we'd love the opportunity for you to take another look.
Some of the biggest improvements have been in the API's performance (even without the new Redis/Memory cache support). Our GraphQL API is also a lot further along now compared to the REST API.
Hopefully you'll consider checking out the latest release of Directus and updating your review to reflect this improved version. :)

- Industry: Information Technology & Services
- Company size: Self Employed
- Used Daily for 1-5 months
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Review Source
Overall rating
- Value for Money
- Ease of Use
- Customer Support
- Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10
Excellent headless CMS
Reviewed on 2020/02/13
I have a very difficult multi-platform usecase involving languages from R/Python, reproducible data...
I have a very difficult multi-platform usecase involving languages from R/Python, reproducible data slicing, on the fly dataset creation all the way to front-end react, pregenerated app (gatsby) in a single build command. Directus is my sole source of truth, what I use to back this whole thing.
This allows me to use the same translations and metadata for everything no matter if I am in R or Javascript consuming graphql, either on production client code or in static pregeneration stage in gatsby.
There are other headless apis that can do this, but I cannot self host them and I need to be able to very quickly generate large datasets on the database as I research and tear them down in the same base as the CMS for the app. That is, I need this to run on my computer first.
This is where directus knocked it out of the park for me. Also, docker setup is touch and go. Nothing needed. It is just great.
Pros
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.
Cons
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!
Alternatives Considered
NetlifyReasons for Switching to Directus
I tested all headless cms apis out there (cant remember the names of all of them). None of them fit my use case.Directus FAQs
Below are some frequently asked questions for Directus.Q. What type of pricing plans does Directus offer?
Directus offers the following pricing plans:
- Starting from: US$25.00/month
- Pricing model: Free Version, Subscription
- Free Trial: Not Available
Build your hobby or proofs-of-concept projects for FREE with our Community Cloud. If you are looking for a production-ready and highly performant offering, check out the pay-as-you-go usage-based pricing on our Standard Cloud. Configure the exact hardware you need and apply customized auto-scaling rules, starting at just $.0347 per node, for every hour you use the platform. Our Enterprise team is ready if you require support and an SLA for your project. Head over to directus.io/contact-enterprise to get started. At Directus Cloud, there's a place for everyone and every project!
Q. Who are the typical users of Directus?
Directus has the following typical customers:
Self Employed, 2–10, 11–50, 51–200, 201–500, 501–1,000, 1,001–5,000
Q. What languages does Directus support?
Directus supports the following languages:
Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish
Q. Does Directus support mobile devices?
Directus supports the following devices:
Q. What other apps does Directus integrate with?
We do not have any information about what integrations Directus has
Q. What level of support does Directus offer?
Directus offers the following support options:
Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, Phone Support, 24/7 (Live rep), Chat
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