Directus

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.

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.

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.