---
title: "Headless CMS vs WordPress, revisited in 2025."
date: 2025-04-08
url: https://remiam.co.uk/notes/headless-cms-vs-wordpress-2025
tags: [CMS, WordPress, Headless, Comparisons, Revisited]
read_time_minutes: 7
description: "Headless CMS vs WordPress in 2025 — Sanity, Strapi, Directus, Payload, Nuxt Studio compared, and how to choose based on the actual editing team."
---

# Headless CMS vs WordPress, revisited in 2025.

*Published 2025-04-08 · 7 min read · by Liam (Remiam)*

Three years after we wrote about WordPress 6, the headless landscape has matured. Strapi, Sanity, Directus, Nuxt Studio. The answer is different now — and the criteria are clearer.

We wrote about WordPress 6 in 2022 and said the answer was 'when the content team is the primary user, WordPress is on the shortlist'. That's still true. But the rest of the landscape has reshaped completely. Here's the 2025 version of the same conversation.

## What changed

- Sanity matured into the default headless CMS for design-led teams.
- Strapi went enterprise-stable. Directus became the open-source default. Payload arrived and quietly won the 'TypeScript-first' niche.
- Nuxt Studio launched as a low-friction option for teams already on Nuxt Content.
- Webflow Logic and Framer CMS turned 'no-code CMS' into a real category.

## The CMS decision matrix

| Team shape | CMS we reach for | Why |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Marketing team, knows WordPress | WordPress | No re-training cost |
| Design-led, structured content | Sanity | Visual editing + clean schema |
| Engineering-led, TypeScript everywhere | Payload | TS-native, code-first |
| Open-source preference, ops control | Directus or Strapi | Self-hostable, no vendor lock-in |
| Small team, Nuxt project already | Nuxt Content + Studio | Lowest friction, lowest cost |
| Marketing must own everything, no eng | Webflow or Framer CMS | No-code, hosted, designer-friendly |

*Which CMS we reach for in 2025, by team shape.*

## How we now choose

- WordPress — still right when the editing team already knows WordPress and the budget for re-training is zero.
- Sanity — design-led teams, structured content, visual editing matters, ready to write a schema.
- Payload or Directus — engineering teams who want to own the CMS like any other service in the stack.
- Nuxt Content + Studio — small teams shipping Nuxt anyway, content team is small and disciplined.
- Webflow / Framer — marketing teams who must own everything, no engineering involvement after launch.

> WordPress is still on the shortlist for the projects it always was — but the shortlist itself is much longer.

## What we got wrong in 2022

- We said headless was for 'small disciplined teams'. The tooling is now so good that mid-sized marketing teams cope fine.
- We undersold visual editing. Sanity's visual layer changed the conversation with brand-led clients.
- We didn't predict the no-code CMS resurgence. Webflow and Framer eat real territory now.

Three years on, WordPress is still on the shortlist for the projects it always was — but the shortlist itself is much longer.

## References

1. [Sanity — official site](https://www.sanity.io)
2. [Payload CMS — official site](https://payloadcms.com)
3. [Directus — official site](https://directus.io)
4. [Nuxt Content — documentation](https://content.nuxt.com)