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Cockpit vs prismic.io: What are the differences?
# Introduction
Cockpit and prismic.io are both content management systems (CMS) commonly used for website development. They have their own set of features, functionalities, and target user base. In this comparison, we will highlight the key differences between Cockpit and prismic.io.
1. **Hosting**: Cockpit is a self-hosted CMS solution, meaning it needs to be installed and maintained on the user's own server. On the other hand, prismic.io is a cloud-based CMS, which means it is hosted and managed by the prismic.io team, eliminating the need for users to handle server management tasks.
2. **Flexibility**: Cockpit is known for its flexibility and ability to be customized extensively to fit specific project requirements. It allows users to build custom APIs, fields, and modules easily. In contrast, prismic.io follows a more structured approach, offering predefined content types and fields for users to work with. While this provides a streamlined content creation process, it may limit the level of customization compared to Cockpit.
3. **Workflow Management**: Cockpit offers basic workflow capabilities, allowing users to create content drafts, review, and publish them. However, prismic.io excels in this aspect with advanced workflow management features. It provides the ability to create custom publishing workflows, define roles and permissions, schedule content releases, and track content revisions more efficiently.
4. **Content Modeling**: In terms of content modeling, Cockpit provides a more open-ended approach where users have full control over defining content structure and relationships. Users can create custom content types and fields based on their requirements. On the other hand, prismic.io utilizes a structured content modeling approach with predefined content types and fields, which simplifies content creation but may restrict complex content structures.
5. **Frontend Development**: Cockpit offers an API-driven approach that allows developers to retrieve content easily and integrate it into any frontend framework or application. This flexibility in frontend development makes it suitable for various project requirements. In contrast, prismic.io provides a more structured frontend development experience with its GraphQL API and SDKs tailored for specific frameworks like React and Vue.js. This can streamline frontend development but may limit flexibility in certain use cases.
6. **Documentation and Support**: While both Cockpit and prismic.io offer documentation and support resources, prismic.io is known for its comprehensive documentation, extensive tutorials, and dedicated support channels. This robust support ecosystem can be beneficial for users seeking guidance throughout their development process.
In Summary, the key differences between Cockpit and prismic.io lie in their hosting options, flexibility in customization, workflow management capabilities, content modeling approaches, frontend development strategies, and level of documentation and support provided. Each CMS caters to different preferences and project requirements, offering unique strengths and limitations in various aspects of content management.
Hi StackSharers, your help is dearly needed as we're making a move to which we will commit for the next few years.
Problem: As our Marketing team gets growing needs to publish content fast and autonomously, we're trying to add a CMS to our stack.
Specs:
This CMS should have fairly advanced marketing features: either natively built, and/or be open source, so we can either find third parties' plugins suiting our needs or build our own plugins homebrew.
"Advanced marketing features" like these: Non-devs should be able to handle content autonomously, Should have a non-dev friendly interface, should allow creating a library of reusable components/modules, should show the preview before publishing, should have a calendar with all publications, should show the history/tracking, should allow collaborating (Google Docs like), should display characters limit optimized for SEO.
Solution: We're considering an SSG + Headless CMS combination. We're fairly confident for the SSG (Gatsby), but we're still uncertain which CMS we should choose.
Of all the content management systems out there, contentful seems to be the most flexible. It consist of an user interface with an API a front end app can retrieve data from.
It makes no assumptions about how your data is presented or structured, and you can form any kind of content in the interface. Architectural portfolio with square footage attributes? Check. Carousel section on a page? Check. A blog? No problem. Entire landing pages consisting of sections that have child items in them and attributes for each child? Not an issue. Image hosting / cdn and resizing? No problem. Character limits? Widely supported. Multilingual? Easy peasy
There are two parts of the interface. Content types and content items. Content types is just a definition of how a content item is structured, you can add fields such as title, unique id, image, rich text, lists of child content items, etc. And then the API will just return a list of content items in JSON array or object format.
There is service integration with common apps, or data sources.
Because it’s just an API call, you can use literally any tech stack with it. It won’t stop you from using MySQL or any other technology alongside it. No messing about compilation, Java, maven, like with AEM. No being constrained to the CMS’s programming language or hosting environment like with Wordpress (to an extent, wp has an API too). You can integrate it with any app, whether it be serverless, on a vm, or inside a docker container.
Downside is the front end is really up to you. It’s just a cms for structuring your data. No preview though. How you present it is not handled by contentful. It is it’s greatest strength and not a weakness though
Hi Kamil, Have you considered Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)? It is not completely open-source but is built on top of many open source modules - like Apache Sling, Apache Felix, has a great deal of open-sourced core components, supports SPA - React and Angular Recently and can be deployed as a cloud service. Good luck in your search!
I'd like to share my experience for a similar use case.
A couple of months back I was in a similar place while facing some similar set of challenges within our SEO and Content Team. We were working with WordPress at that moment and for some parts - we still do. While WordPress is a very fast, intuitive and comprehensive tool to power static pages, it's not ideal for: 1. The content team as it requires some level of technical skills 2. Code reusability perspective - impacts performance in a longer run 3. Performance and user experience can easily go for a toss considering content team may not be diligent with everything outside the scope of the content
While evaluating we were looking at these key criterias: 1. SEO, Performance and UX 2. Ease of use for Content Team, developer independence 3. Learning Curve for devs and more importantly content creators 4. Support for complex design cases 5. Cost
Being part of a small org on a tight budget our natural inclination was for open-source solution, Strapi, and so we gave it a go for a smaller project before jumping the marketing wagon.
Strapi is a great tool, easy to learn and pick up. You get most of the design use cases out of the box baked for you. It's a Node.js service so you'll need to manage the service (meaning you'll have to handle monitoring, logging, cdn, auth, etc) and DB - which requires quiet some dev bandwidth. Now Strapi is still very young in term of DB migrations (not a seamless deployment yet - no schema diffing mechanism), setting up different environments required effort and you can do content modeling only in development environment (the db migrations complexity) - which becomes really critical when you want devs, design and content to collaborate simultaneously and don't want repeated work for modeling. Over a 5-6 weeks of use we realised that more and more dev bandwidth is required to do progressive addition of new content and hence we did another PoC with contentful.
Comparing this with contentful - which is a managed service, comes with inbuilt environment and preview setup, gives on-the-fly content modeling (replacing all the dev bandwidth dependency for managing migrations, cdn, auth, service, etc) gives a huge advantage of speed and developer independence at a very moderate price. Plus, the UI is very intuitive (taking some concepts from Tag Manager).
Few other thing to highlight: - Both Strapi and Contentful have plugins for common tooling. - Both the dashboard supports custom data type and UI extensions. I found Contentful UI extensions much more easier to implement. - Contentful has only US based availablility zone. Simple in-memory caching can be used to improve costing and SLA.
Hope this helps!
Hi Community, Would like to ask for advice from people familiar with those tools. We are a small self-funded startup and initial cost for us is very important at that stage. That's why we are leaning towards Sanity. The CMS will be used to power our website and flutter cross-platform mobile applications.
Former Prismic.io developer here. If you want something robust vs "looks good from a distance," I would recommend Contentful. They are the biggest for a reason. Their CMS handles a lot of use cases and has great documentation. Prismic.io will work well in simple blog-esque use cases. Their more complex features break easily and their documentation is confusing. It has fallen quite a distance behind Contentful. Sanity appears to be a much newer CMS and you might come to regret the lack of features, but I've only briefly reviewed their product.
I wanted to use an open-source CMS for this project so that ruled out a lot of options (Contentful, Sanity, Prismic etc...). The only other open-source option I found worth considering was Payload CMS. Since this was my first headless CMS project, I chose Strapi over Payload CMS. Payload CMS is very powerful and flexible but may be TOO flexible and abstracted for my first crack at this. Strapi also seems to have a lot of momentum which is important for open-source projects.
I've been happy with Strapi so far and it's been able to do what I needed. I may try Payload CMS on a future project now that I have some experience.
Pros of Cockpit
- Flexible and plays nicely with any frontend3
- Easy for Content Managers to understand and use3
- Open Source3
- Fast & lightweight2
- Modular2
- GraphQL2
- Self hosted2
Pros of prismic.io
- Nice writing room7
- Very Good UX3
- Prismic.io powers lichess.org/blog3
- Friendly Pricing2
- Nice UI and clean2
- Works with GraphQL with Gatsby2
- Releases - Scheduling content to go live1
- Integration Field1
- Slices - Reusable components1
- Page "slices" very useful1
- SDKs for render frameworks1
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Cons of Cockpit
Cons of prismic.io
- No write API yet2
- Bad Documentation1
- No admin UX control (only schema)1
