Why I stop using the strapi

Headless CMS

Why every company does not have enough engineers? Because we don’t have enough money and managers, whatever. By the way, When you don’t have enough engineers, Headless CMS looks like a good choice for your business. But when I was using the headless cms, it’s not a good experience. Why is this happening?

Documentation

I was using the strapi for my first headless cms. It looks nice, but when I deployed my strapi code to AWS, it did not work. When I was involved in the strapi, strapi v4 was launching but the documents are almost fit with v3. v4 has many changes from v3, but I can’t notice. So I need to figure out how to deploy, how to debug, how to connect other APIs, and so on.

It was a terrible experience for me because when I use the other serverless platforms like GCP firebase, AWS amplitude, Azure web apps, it works well. And the powerful CMS is not powerful enough with my non-technical colleagues.

I don’t know how much I need to know about headless CMS, but I am using it because I don’t want to spend much time building a CMS. But It spend a much more time than building a new CMS (Because It based on back office)

Prices

I don’t know why this happened, but when I just set-up a cloud server on GCP, strapi spent almost $800 per month. Also I need to pay for strapi because for set-up a role for users. At the time, less than 10 users were active on my service. Because only my colleagues can access the services.

My GCP partner also does not notice why this is happening, but It looks not look good to me. By the way, I decided to stop using the strapi, then use other services.

Firebase

Because we decided to use the GCP, firebase looks like a good choice for my business. I have some conditions:

1. Serverless platform
2. FE Engineers can control the Databases. — Because, including me, there are three FE developers in my company, but there are no BE engineers.
3. Powerful database that can be used for multiple community services.
4. Can send a push notification on that platform.
5. Authentication

Firebase has enough functionality for my business, So I decided to use the firebase. Here is some notes after I using it:

• Some documents are not updated enough, but major documents are already updated.
• The Firestore collection is a little weird on the web. I think the Firestore collection is better with nodejs than the web client.
• Authentication works better than I expected. For example, When I use the signInWithCustomToken it automatically creates a user collection.
• If you are using the Firebase v9, It can be used as a module.

If you need to choose a serverless platform, Firebase may a good choice.