Directus 2026: Benefits, Features & Pricing

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On this page

Overview
Pricing and Plans
Features
User Reviews

Overview

Directus

4.5

(60)

Pricing

Starting at $25.00 per month

About Directus

Directus is a cloud-based headless content management system (CMS), which helps businesses connect custom SQL databases with dynamic API and view and manage database content. Features include customizable branding, bookmarking, revisions and rollback, single sign-on (SSO), status tracking, multi-language and data filtering.

The application comes with pre-defined content authoring workflows, which enable supervisors to set project statuses as a draft, under-review, published or soft-delete along with role-based permissions for users. Directus API imitates actual SQL database schema by using the database mirroring feature and triggers custom code through event and webhooks. Professionals can create or delete projects consisting of database, storage adapter, and configuration file and hide names by building private projects.

With its digital asset management module, users can store files, scrape metadata and create automated thumbnails of higher resolution images. Directus is a free and open-source platform. Support for the solution is provided via documentation and discussion forums.

Directus Screenshots

Directus Pricing and Plans

Starting price: $25.00 per month

Free Trial

Free Version

Community Cloud

$0.00

Plan includes:

24/7 Monitoring
Access Roles
API Bandwidth
API Requests
Asset Storage
Automatic Updates
Cloud-Extensive Features
Community Support
Content Collections
Content Items

Standard Cloud

$25.00

flat rate, per month

Plan includes:

All Features of Community Cloud
Backups
Configurable Auto-Scaling Overages
Custom App and API Urls
Multi-Tenant Database
Plus: No Pause on Inactivity
Region Selection
Serverless Hardware

Enterprise

Pricing available upon request

Plan includes:

Advanced Caching
All Features of Standard Cloud
Custom Auto-Scaling Overages
Custom Extensions
Custom Rate Limiting
Dedicated Hardware
LDAP Support.
Plus: Single-Tenant Database
Premium Support and SLA
Remote Database Access

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Directus Features

Popular features found in Dashboard
Access Controls/Permissions
Alerts/Notifications
Data Import/Export
Data Visualization
Functions/Calculations
Performance Metrics
Reporting/Analytics
Scorecards
Search/Filter
Widgets
More features of Directus
Activity Dashboard
API
Audio File Management
Authentication
Categorization/Grouping
Collaboration Tools
Configurable Workflow
Content Management
Content Publishing Options
Customer Database
Customizable Branding
Customizable Forms
Data Connectors
Data Management
De-Coupled Front & Back Ends
Deployment Management
Digital Asset Management
Document Classification
Document Management
Drag & Drop
Electronic Forms
File Management
Filtering
For Developers
For Marketers
Full Text Search
Image Editing
Integrations Management
KPI Monitoring
Mobile Access
Multi-Channel Marketing
Multi-Language
Personalization
Project Workflow
Role-Based Permissions
SDKs
Secure Data Storage
SEO Management
Single Page View
Single Sign On
Text Editing
Two-Factor Authentication
Version Control
Video Support
Visual Modeling
Website Management
Workflow Management

Directus User Reviews

Overall Rating

4.5

Ratings Breakdown

57%

38%

Secondary Ratings

Ease of Use

4.5

Value for money

4.9

Customer support

4.5

Functionality

4.4

Jens K.

Verified reviewer

Management Consulting

11-50 employees

Used weekly for less than 2 years

Reviewed April 2021

Best headless CMS on the market - powered by Open-Source

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.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Functionality

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).

Reasons for choosing 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).

Daniel C.

Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services

2-10 employees

Used weekly for less than 12 months

Review source

Reviewed October 2023

A great platform leveraged as a headless CMS

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

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.

Reasons for switching to Directus

Multi tenancy was better implemented in Directus

Davide L.

Verified reviewer

Design

11-50 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

Reviewed February 2020

Fantastic concept, medium user experience

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.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

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.

Reasons for choosing Directus

For the pricing, but above all for the requirement of our managers to have the code and the data on our servers. In addition to that, the idea to have the opportunity to customize it was very important. But please, takes Dato CMS as a reference: it has everything a digital agency could dream!

Reasons for switching to Directus

I wanted a database to manage complex dataset, like products catalogues and a product in which the headless concept was at the basis. Moreover, Kirby comes with the concept of "pages", that it's perfect for hierarchical content but a nightmare in some situations.

Vendor Response

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. :)

Replied March 2021

Verified

Reviewer

Leisure, Travel & Tourism

51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 12 months

Reviewed February 2020

Great headless CMS

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

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.

Reasons for choosing Directus

They don't have localization support for content

Reasons for switching to Directus

We needed to have headless CMS that could provide content through API

Vendor Response

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. :)

Replied March 2021

Alejandro B.

Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services

Self-Employed

Used daily for less than 6 months

Reviewed February 2020

Excellent headless CMS

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.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

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!

Reasons for choosing Directus

I tested all headless cms apis out there (cant remember the names of all of them). None of them fit my use case.

Ignacio G.

Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services

11-50 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Reviewed February 2020

Best headless open source CMS

We're creating a completely custom web in which you can reuse components.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

It's community support, open-source, and features. Nothing to envy from really expensive proprietary CMS.

Cons:

Breaking changes in updates, lack of Many to Any support on App, failures updating large datasets with relationships, lack of a tool to perform migrations between environments and long URLs to consume. All of which are getting addressed at the moment :)

Reasons for switching to Directus

We had proposed Strapi to implement the solution because on paper was better, but once we started using it we got into many issues and features that at the moment weren't there. We tried directus and, even though at the moment was also lacking some things, got convinced quickly.

Vendor Response

Hi Ignacio, 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. We've specifically addressed many of your Cons, including the very powerful many-to-any relationship type! Our open-source platform is also far more stable now, thanks to the full refactor. Hopefully you'll consider checking out the latest release of Directus and updating your review to reflect this improved version. :)

Replied March 2021

Brian M.

Verified reviewer

Consumer Electronics

5001-10000 employees

Used daily for less than 12 months

Reviewed February 2020

Great product that is still young

We had departments using many different CMS's. They ranged from extremely expensive to open source projects. While Directus is not perfect, it has proven to be better than all the others. We have actively tried to improve the product, and we find that the others in the community do the same. Also, and this is a HUGE value, the response to questions and issues within the Directus-Slack channel is amazing! Actually, the communication and support from this organization is impeccable. Friendly, helpful, understanding. Just out of a sense of loyalty to such good people, I will want to stay with them.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

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

Cons:

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.

Reasons for choosing Directus

Regarding Adobe -- a CMS should have a small learning curve. With better documentation, Directus will be a product that is quickly adapted to any organization. Regarding Umbraco -- the decision here is hard to explain. We just found Directus to work better for us in more situations.

Reasons for switching to Directus

We also switched from Adobe, but I wasn't able to enter that. We switched off this product for it was really expensive with a really, really, really steep learning curve. We switched off of Umbraco due to design and small issues. Umbraco is actually a pretty decent product.

Rémi W.

Verified reviewer

Printing

2-10 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Reviewed February 2020

Directus, your friend and your first backend services (headless cms)

We build our api with the minimum technical ressources. Since I'm the only dev, it allow me to stay focus on the main product. A must have for starting projects.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Functionality

Pros:

Directus will allow you to create instant database with all security layers you may need for an api (auth, ...)

Cons:

The data ownership by users is quite a pain (e.g : You want to create an item through a webhook and attribute it to a specific user) and user registration through api require some custom code to follow your expectation.

Reasons for choosing Directus

Directus is open source, can be hosted and works well with Docker.

Reasons for switching to Directus

Stronger than the previous one with more functionalities

Vendor Response

Hi Remi, 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. Our open-source platform is far more stable now, thanks to the full refactor. Hopefully you'll consider checking out the latest release of Directus and updating your review to reflect this improved version. :)

Replied March 2021

Alan T.

Verified reviewer

Computer Software

Self-Employed

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed February 2021

One of the greats

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

I'll start with the flexibility, you can create and edit every table in real-time and in an easy-to-use GUI. Best part is this can be clamped onto any SQL database and it will just start working then you can setup the table existing into the software.

Cons:

Well I mean it's not quite and intuitive as something like WordPress but point people in the correct direction and they soon get the hang of it

Reasons for choosing Directus

Simple to use compared to other platforms and the awesome community support from them!

Reasons for switching to Directus

Limitations in WordPress and customisability you just can't, won't, and will never get with that platform. (Not to mention being slow and sluggish)

Eloy R.

Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services

Self-Employed

Used daily for less than 12 months

Review source

Reviewed February 2021

Awesome piece of software

I've had to learn express and knex to implement custom endpoints and I really enjoy doing things this way. I also started using it's javascript sdk client and it's simply awesome!

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

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

Cons:

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.

Reasons for choosing Directus

The price, the options and the possibility to run it locally

Reasons for switching to Directus

Limit of roles available

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