Compare
TachyonCMS and Contentful
Contentful is a hosted content platform with editors, previews and a CDN ready to go. TachyonCMS is software you run yourself, and it's still an API without an admin.
Checked on against TachyonCMS v0.1.0 and Contentful's own docs. Each Contentful row links to the page it came from.
| Topic | TachyonCMS v0.1.0 | Contentful |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | On your server, as a release binary or a Docker image, beside your own Postgres. | Contentful runs it for you. Content goes out through a CDN from data centres around the world, with EU data residency as an option. Source: Contentful, where it runs |
| Reading content | REST, with filters, sorting, cursor paging and populated links. Reading needs no sign-in unless a rule says so. | The Content Delivery API, read-only JSON over the CDN, plus a GraphQL Content API whose schema follows your content types. Source: Contentful, reading content |
| Writing content | The same REST API, signed in with a session, a bearer token or a scoped API key. | The Content Management API, which Contentful's own web app is built on. Source: Contentful, writing content |
| Previews and images | Neither yet. Drafts, then media, come next on the roadmap. | A Content Preview API for unpublished content, and an Images API that resizes, crops and converts. Source: Contentful, previews and images |
| Editing | No admin screen yet. You work over HTTP or with the tachyon command. | A web app with a rich text editor, scheduled publishing, content versioning, comments and live preview, depending on your plan. Source: Contentful, editing |
| Roles | Four built-in roles plus your own, and access rules per collection, global and field that go into the SQL query. | Admin and Editor on Free, Author too on Lite, and custom roles on Enterprise. Source: Contentful, roles |
| Languages | Not yet. Localization is planned, with no date. | Two locales on Free, three on Lite, and as many as you agree on Enterprise. Source: Contentful, languages |
| Limits | Whatever your server and database can take. There are no quotas. | Free has 10 users and 100K API calls a month, and its Starter Space holds 25 content types and 10,000 records. Lite raises those. Source: Contentful, limits |
| Price | Free, under MIT. You pay for your own server and database. | Free for learning and exploring, Lite at $300 a month, and Enterprise quoted. Source: Contentful, price |
Where TachyonCMS isn't there yet
- There's no admin screen, and none of the editing extras that come with one.
- No previews, image transforms, versions, scheduled publishing or locales.
- No GraphQL. It's planned, with no date.
- No CDN or hosted service. You run it and keep it up.
- No apps or webhooks. Both are planned, with no date.
- It's pre-alpha, so keep it off the public internet for now.
Who should pick which
Pick Contentful if you’d rather nobody on your team ran a server. Editors get a finished web app, developers get REST and GraphQL from a CDN, and the plans grow with you. For a marketing team that needs to ship this quarter, that’s the safer bet, and it isn’t close.
Pick TachyonCMS if your content has to stay on infrastructure you control, you don’t want record or API-call quotas, or you’d like the whole thing under MIT. It’ll ask more of you: you host it, and until the admin lands, you edit through the API.
Already on Contentful’s free plan and bumping into its limits? That’s a fair reason to look around. Just weigh the admin you’d be giving up today.
Where this comes from
The TachyonCMS side comes from the v0.1.0 README and its code. If a row's out of date, tell me in an issue and I'll fix it.