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b10cks vs. Strapi

Both open source. Only one hands you the whole product.

Strapi's community edition is free and fully self-hostable, and it ships without live preview and without content history. Those live in Growth at $45 a month plus $15 per seat above three. In b10cks they are on the free plan.

Every feature. Unlimited editors. From €0 / month.

Credit where it is due

The project that made headless normal.

Strapi pioneered the open-source headless CMS and earned its place. The codebase is well built and genuinely extensible, the plugin ecosystem is mature, and the community is large enough that someone has already hit your problem.

The MIT licence is also more permissive than ours. If you plan to distribute a modified server, that matters, and we would rather say it here than leave you to find out.

  • MIT licensed
  • Mature plugin ecosystem
  • REST + GraphQL
  • Extend the codebase

Where it costs you

Open source, split across tiers.

As Strapi matured the feature set separated into a free community edition and a paid Growth tier. The software stays open. The editorial experience does not come with it.

01 / Edit

Live preview is a paid tier.

The community edition ships without it. Growth starts at $45 a month for three seats and adds $15 for every editor after that. Seeing your page before you publish it is not an advanced feature.

02 / Release

So is content history.

Versioning, releases and scheduled publishing sit in Growth as well. On Community you publish and hope. In b10cks, history with full rollback is on the free plan.

03 / Localize

Localization is a plugin.

Field-level translation control is basic and locale inheritance is manual. The multilingual experience was not designed for the non-technical people doing the translating.

04 / Collaborate

No multiplayer, no comments.

Neither tier includes real-time collaboration or threaded editorial comments. Review workflows and audit logs are enterprise-only.

05 / Structure

A form builder, not a map.

The content type builder works, one field at a time in a tree view. b10cks models the whole architecture on an infinite canvas, which changes how fast a team can extend it.

06 / Deliver

Hosting is a second bill.

Strapi Cloud is a separate product from the Growth feature licence. You pay for hosting on top, or self-host and pay only for features. A b10cks plan covers both.

The licence cuts both ways

Strapi's MIT licence is more permissive than b10cks' AGPLv3. If you distribute a modified server, AGPLv3 asks you to publish those changes, which is a real constraint for some products and a benefit for the community.

For teams self-hosting for internal use, the practical difference is close to zero.

The rows that actually differ

The question is not who is open source. It is what you get.

APIs, self-hosting and content modelling land on both sides. The split is everything an editor touches: preview, history, releases, collaboration, comments, and whether SSO needs a sales call.

What it actually costs

Five editors. Two very different bills.

Strapi Community is $0, self-hosted, without live preview, content history or releases. Growth is $45 a month for three seats, plus $15 for each seat above that, so a team of five pays $75 a month for the feature tier alone. Hosting is extra if you do not want to run it yourself. SSO, audit logs and review workflows need an enterprise contract.

The same team on b10cks: €25 a month on Essential, full feature set, managed cloud included.

Start free. Build from here.

€0/ month to start

  • Every feature on every plan
  • Unlimited editors, no per-seat fees
  • Managed cloud included, no second bill
  • Paid plans from €25 to €350 / month
See plans and usage limits ↗

Who should pick which

Pick Strapi when the codebase is the point.

Strapi is the better fit when your team already knows the codebase and wants to extend it at framework level. When you are building a bespoke CMS layer rather than using one. When MIT is the licence your distribution model needs. And when the editorial side is simple enough that live preview and content history genuinely do not matter.

Pick b10cks when

The editors matter as much as the API.

You want a visual editor without a tier upgrade, localization that works for people who do not write code, real-time collaboration out of the box, and content modelling you can see. You want one bill covering features and infrastructure, and no per-seat maths.

Licence

AGPLv3

Editors

Unlimited

Live preview

Free plan

Hosting

Included

AGPLv3, self-hosted with one command, or b10cks Cloud with the same platform and no hosting to manage.

A few things worth knowing.

Make room for your next build

Open source that keeps nothing back.

Visual editor, localization, version history and CDN delivery. Everything Strapi puts in Growth, on the free plan.