Keystone vs Directus

Compare Keystone and Directus for your content needs. Find out what actual users are saying about each product and which one is best suited for you!

Keystone
Keystone
The superpowered CMS for developers. Keystone helps you build faster and scale further than any other CMS or App Framework with a powerful GraphQL API & beautiful Management UI.
Directus
Directus
Directus is a headless CMS and backend platform for managing complex content structures and digital assets, offering customizable solutions for developers and empowering teams to build faster.

What Users Say

See what users who have used Keystone and Directus have to say about their overall experience with the product.

Keystone's Key Strengths

Read what users love about Keystone.

Directus's Key Strengths

Read what users love about Directus.

Keystone's Key Issues

Read what issues users have with Keystone.

Directus's Key Issues

Read what issues users have with Directus.

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What Marketers & Content Creators Say

Hear from the users who uses Keystone and Directus daily about their experience with the editors.

Keystone's Editorial Experience Highlights

What marketers love about Keystone's editor.

Directus's Editorial Experience Highlights

What marketers love about Directus's editor.

Keystone's Editorial Experience Issues

What marketers dislike about Keystone's editor.

Directus's Editorial Experience Issues

What marketers dislike about Directus's editor.

Mobile Editing

Find out how the platforms handle the mobile-first experience for the new generation of workforce on the move.

Keystone:
Not Suitable for Mobile

KeystoneJS does not specifically support a mobile first editing experience; the editing capabilities are primarily designed for desktop use.

"Keystone helps you build faster and scale further than any other CMS or App Framework. Describe your schema, and get a powerful GraphQL API & beautiful Management UI for your content and data."
Source
"KeystoneJS is a powerful Node.js content management system and web app framework built on express and mongoose. It features an intuitive Admin UI."
Source
"... Strapi is more oriented towards providing a mobile-friendly and customizable interface compared to KeystoneJS which has a more traditional desktop-focused UI."
Source
"Keystone has a beautiful auto-generated Admin UI that is primarily designed for desktop use without a mobile-first editing option."
Source
"Keystone's Admin UI will save you time and make managing your data easy, but there is no mention of mobile editing capabilities."
Source
Directus:
Mobile-First Experience

Directus supports mobile content creation via its mobile app and user-friendly interface.

"Layouts provide intuitive displays to view and interact with Items in a Collection."
Source
"Explore the features and benefits of the Directus Mobile App for seamless content management on-the-go."
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"The Directus Studio App serves as a comprehensive no-code interface for managing and presenting data, content, and assets."
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"Directus stands out as a fully open-source platform, designed to be modular and extensible."
Source

Automatic Content Linking

Find out if the platform supports automatic linking of related content to help user discover more content without additional manual effort from the marketer. This automatically create topical clusters of content and is essential for SEO.

Keystone:
No Automatic Content Linking

Keystone JS does not support automatic related blog linking, relying instead on manual relationships.

"Keystone facilitates building structured content but does not automate linking similar blog posts."
Source
"Keystone requires developers to manually define relationships between content."
Source
Directus:
No Automatic Content Linking

Directus does not support automatic related blog linking; only manual relationships are available.

"Directus provides a way to manually link related content but does not have AI-driven auto-linking."
Source
"Directus emphasizes creating and managing relationships manually for SEO purposes."
Source
"Discussion highlights the lack of built-in automatic internal linking features."
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"Directus focuses more on policies and access control rather than auto-linking features."
Source

Automatic CTA Linking

Find out if the platform supports automatic display of Call-to-Actions using AI to help users take actions that are relevant to the content they are reading.

Keystone:
No Automatic CTA Linking

KeystoneJS does not support automatic linking of CTAs to content through AI.

"The document field does not include AI-based automatic CTA linking."
Source
"No built-in support for automatic call-to-action linking."
Source
"KeystoneJS does not feature automatic CTA linking in any form."
Source
Directus:
No Automatic CTA Linking

Directus does not support automatic linking of CTAs to content through AI features.

"Directus offers a highly flexible API and content management system but lacks a specific feature for automatic CTA linking."
Source
"While Directus has released AI extensions, they do not include features for automatic CTA linking."
Source
"Traditional CMS architectures, including Directus, are not designed to support AI-driven content strategies like automatic CTA linking."
Source

Comments

Find out if the platform supports comments from your users to improve user engagement. This is often a great way to collect feedback and user emails.

Keystone:
No Comments Supported

Keystone.js does not support built-in external commenting features out of the box. Custom fields can be created, but not natively.

"Keystone.js does not provide native support for external commenting features."
Source
"The platform focuses on content management but lacks built-in comment mechanisms."
Source
"Keystone can be extended with custom fields, but external commenting is not a built-in feature."
Source
Directus:
Comments Supported

Directus supports commenting directly on items for team collaboration with mentions and editing options.

"Encourage team collaboration directly within your content for things like approval processes and feedback."
Source
"Comments are a collaboration tool and can be left on items from the sidebar."
Source
"To create a comment, follow the steps: Navigate to the Content Module, select the desired Collection, select the desired Item and submit your comment."
Source

Multi-tenancy

Find out if the platform supports managing multiple clients or projects within a single account. This is useful for agencies, multi-client or multi-project scenarios.

Keystone:
No Multi-tenancy

KeystoneJS does not support multi-tenancy for managing multiple client accounts in a single framework.

"KeystoneJS does not support multi-tenancy."
Source
"KeystoneJS is not optimized for multi-tenancy."
Source
Directus:
Multi-tenancy Supported

Directus supports multi-tenancy through project and role scoping, allowing for isolated environments for different clients.

"The Multi-tenant SaaS starter kit is designed to streamline the backend infrastructure for Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. The user data is setup as a simple project and task as an example only, but you can build whatever you desire."
Source
"Directus supports multi-tenant architectures, ensuring that each Professional Project is isolated within its own container. This approach guarantees dedicated minimum resources."
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"Directus has multi-tenancy in that you can create different projects that each have their own database. Within each project you have the ability to create different roles to manage specific access."
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"Multitenancy is an architecture that allows multiple tenants (e.g., customers) to be managed by the platform. There are two main ways to achieve multitenancy: project scoping and role scoping."
Source

What Developers Say

Hear from developers who've integrated and built on Keystone and Directus about their experiences.

Ease of Integrating Keystone:
Medium
Integration of Keystone JS is moderately complex, with some specific challenges noted.
Ease of Integrating Directus:
Medium
Integration is generally straightforward but requires careful configuration and may involve technical complexities.

Keystone's DX Highlights

What developers love about building with Keystone.

Directus's DX Highlights

What developers love about building with Directus.

Keystone's DX Issues

What developers dislike about building with Keystone.

Directus's DX Issues

What developers dislike about building with Directus.

Content Modelling

Find out how developers model and manage their content with the platform with key highlights and limitations.

Keystone:
Customisable Content Types

KeystoneJS offers extensive content modeling capabilities with various field types and GraphQL API.

"Keystone helps you build faster and scale further with the programmable open source GraphQL API back-end for structured content projects."
Source
"KeystoneJs is an open source Node.js CMS with a wide range of features including a user-friendly admin UI, content modelling, and a powerful GraphQL API."
Source
"KeystoneJs is an open-source Node.js CMS with a wide range of features including a user-friendly admin UI, content modelling, and a powerful GraphQL API."
Source
Directus:
Customisable Content Types

Directus provides robust content modelling capabilities, including custom collections, fields, and relationships.

"The Directus data studio enables no-code configuration and management for any SQL database, with no arbitrary restrictions on how you build your data model."
Source
"Directus collections help you manage your data. Create custom collections, define fields, configure relationships, and leverage features like content versioning."
Source
"Directus supports creating collections, defining fields, and configuring relationships, forming a comprehensive content model."
Source

Custom React Components

Find out if the platform supports custom React components to go beyond the basic HTML components for content.

Keystone:
Custom React Components Supported

Keystone supports adding custom React components via Document fields in the rich text editor.

"The really cool stuff is behind the **`+`** button on the right of the toolbar – these are the **Custom Components**."
Source
"They store structured data, and can be inserted (and edited!) anywhere in the document."
Source
"If you need a field type which isn't provided, or you need a specialised version of an existing field type, you can define your own custom field type."
Source
Directus:
Limited Customization

Directus allows for integration with React using its SDK, but fully custom React components are not natively supported.

"Integrating Directus with React applications provides a powerful combination for building dynamic and real-time web applications."
Source
"Directus provides a set of reusable UI components that can be used when building extensions."
Source
"Custom Modules are completely open-ended components that allow you to create new experiences within the Directus platform."
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"Custom Interfaces allow you to create new ways of viewing or interacting with field data on the Item Detail page."
Source

Full Text Search

Find out if the platform supports full text search across multiple fields to help users find content quickly.

Keystone:
Full Text Search Supported

Keystone.js supports native full-text search across entire datasets, allowing robust search functionality.

"Native full-text search. A way for you and editors to easily search for strings across your entire dataset."
Source
"Keystone manages three models fundamental for the whole system. The role of Keystone is to manage the content of basic pages for the main frontend app."
Source
"Thanks for posting. It looks like you are calling the findOne query using the non-plural name on GraphQL; you can see a list of example GraphQL queries Keystone generates."
Source
Directus:
Full Text Search Supported

Directus supports full text search across multiple fields with built-in indexing for enhanced performance.

"Full text search is a powerful feature in Directus that allows users to perform comprehensive searches across their data collections."
Source
"Directus offers robust search capabilities that allow users to quickly find the data they need within their collections."
Source
"Directus Features: Full Text Search, Role-Based Permissions, Content Management."
Source

Starter Kits

Discover starter kits and templates to help you get started with the platform.

Keystone:
Available

KeystoneJS offers a starter kit to quickly create a new project.

(Expand section to see a list of Keystone templates and starter kits.)

Directus:
Available

Directus offers community-maintained templates and premium starter kits for projects.

(Expand section to see a list of Directus templates and starter kits.)

Pricing & Plans

Compare the prices of Keystone and Directus.

Keystone's Pricing
Open Source
$0 / forever
- Unlimited users
- Unlimited content
- Community support
Directus's Pricing
Starter
$15 / month
- 1 Studio User Included
- 5,000 DB Entries
- 50,000 API requests
Professional
$99 / month
- 5 Studio Users Included
- 75,000 DB Entries
- 250,000 API requests
Business
$499 / month
- 10 Studio Users included
- 250,000 DB entries
- 1,000,000 API requests
- SSO included
- Support add-on
Enterprise
$0 / custom
- Custom Studio Users
- Custom DB Entries
- Custom API Requests
- Multiple Environments
- Premium Support and SLAs

Compare with other technologies

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Wisp is the best solution for blogging. Try it free today!