Best Payload CMS agencies: an evidence-led shortlist

There is no official ranking of Payload agencies. This is an evidence-led shortlist, and its publisher, WAYF, is included in it. Every agency below has Payload work you can open in a browser, and each entry says where that evidence came from and when it was read.

WAYF is a Payload partner agency and top contributor, we publish this page, and we are first on the list. We have a commercial interest in you calling us, so the WAYF entry states its evidence and limitations alongside the other six.

How each agency here was checked

Four kinds of evidence were checked for each agency. They cover vendor attribution, the partner directory, agency-published work and public code.

Payload names the agency in its own case study. When the platform vendor names the agency next to the client, the relationship is confirmed by someone other than the agency. We read all twenty case studies on payloadcms.com on 15 September 2026. Nine of them carry a “Partner” field and eleven do not. Those nine name seven agencies: pemedia twice, OMNIUX twice, and .NFQ, Clock Limited, View Source, Riotters and Humaan once each.

The partner profile lists projects with live links. Profiles in the Payload partner directory can list project names, years and URLs in a “Built with Payload” section. We checked all 36 profiles on 15 September 2026. Twenty-two list at least one project and fourteen list none.

The agency publishes the work itself and names Payload in it. This check fails more often than the others. Several agencies publish a detailed case study for a project the directory lists as built with Payload, without naming the platform anywhere in the write-up. Clock Limited is one of the seven below in that position, and its entry says where.

The agency maintains public Payload code. Reading someone’s open-source plugin or starter tells you how they structure a Payload project before you pay them to structure yours.

A note on what these checks cannot do. Fourteen directory profiles list no projects at all, and several of those agencies are long-established firms. An absence of public evidence limits what you can confirm from your desk, and it says nothing about the capability itself. Distinction lists nothing on its Payload profile and runs a Payload partner page on its own site with client work on it. View Source lists no projects on its profile and is the named Partner on Payload’s First Street case study. If an agency you like fails these checks, ask them directly rather than crossing them off.

The short answer

Grouped by the kind of project each agency has evidence for. The order carries no ranking.

Agency	Where	Has evidence for
WAYF	Warsaw, Poland	Enterprise CMS migrations, multi-tenant estates, institutional platforms, product builds
pemedia	Düsseldorf, Germany	Corporate newsrooms and community platforms at brand scale
FocusReactive	Amsterdam · London · Warsaw	Content platforms, WordPress migrations, Payload tooling
Clock Limited	London, UK	Membership and subscription platforms, publishing
MUTON	Brno, Czechia	Replatforming legacy CMS estates, enterprise integrations
10x Media	Bavaria, Germany	Smaller budgets, marketing sites, internal platforms
Humaan	Perth, Australia	Design-led product and campaign builds

WAYF

Where: Warsaw, Poland. The partner profile lists delivery across Europe, North America, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America and Australia.

Best fit for: enterprise CMS migrations where the estate is large enough that the migration itself is the project, multi-tenant setups running several brands off one content layer, and institutional platforms where the permission model has to match how the organisation approves things.

What the evidence shows. Three projects on the partner profile, each with a published case study on this site. Ingersoll Rand moved its China sites off Oracle Content Manager; the workspace supports 20+ brand tenants and 9 page types with role-based access control, and the rebuilt frontend covered thousands of pages, tens of thousands of media assets and tens of thousands of redirects. The Council of Europe Development Bank ran its 70-year anniversary on an events platform built under the bank’s own roof, handling invitation-only and public events through the same system. Kaffy is a specialty coffee marketplace on iOS, Android and web.

On public code, the Payload Astro Starter runs Payload behind Astro and is MIT licensed. It was last pushed on 8 September 2026.

WAYF does not appear as a Partner in any of Payload’s twenty case studies. That limits what this vendor-published corpus can confirm; the directory listing, WAYF’s published case studies and the public starter provide separate evidence.

What to ask us: how we would sequence a migration where the redirect map is larger than the page count, and what we would refuse to move.

Book a call about a Payload project or read how we work with Payload.

pemedia

Where: Düsseldorf, Germany. Founded 2008.

Best fit for: corporate newsrooms, press and communications platforms, and community hubs for brands with a large audience and an editorial team that publishes daily.

What the evidence shows. Payload names pemedia as the Partner on two of its own case studies: ASICS and Vodafone. Payload’s ASICS write-up describes an ambassador platform serving a community across 33 countries and 25 languages, and attributes a 40% reduction in development budget and a 40% improvement in performance metrics to the work. Those figures are Payload’s, published on Payload’s site, and we have not independently verified them. Payload’s Vodafone case study covers an in-store touchscreen app, which pemedia also publishes as its own case study, naming Payload.

The partner profile lists four projects: Vodafone Newsroom (2025), ASICS FrontRunner (2024), IMMERSION by Phantasialand (2023) and RheinLand Versicherungen (2023). The touchscreen app is a separate project and does not appear there.

pemedia’s English case studies for the Vodafone Newsroom, ASICS FrontRunner and RheinLand Versicherungen name Payload; the German version of the Newsroom page does not. We found no pemedia case study for IMMERSION.

What to ask them: how the editorial workflow handles an embargoed release, and what their proprietary media library means for your ownership of the assets in it.

FocusReactive

Where: Amsterdam, London and Warsaw.

Best fit for: content platforms and migrations off WordPress, and teams who want to see how their agency writes Payload code before signing.

What the evidence shows. The partner profile lists two projects carrying a 2026 date, LucianLight and EmailOctopus, alongside Gimble (2025) and Reverse Health (2024). Their own site publishes the EmailOctopus project as a WordPress migration.

FocusReactive publishes the focusreactive/payload-plugins repository under the MIT licence. It covers A/B testing, GA4 analytics, live SEO analysis, content presets, inline comments, AI translation and scheduled publishing.

Their CMS Kit accelerator gets described as Payload tooling in places, and its own page lists Storyblok, Sanity, Contentful and Directus, with Payload absent. The plugins repository is where the Payload contribution sits.

What to ask them: which of those plugins they would put in your build, and what they charge to maintain the ones you depend on.

Clock Limited

Where: London, UK. Independent since 1997 and a certified B Corp.

Best fit for: membership platforms, subscriptions and paid communities, particularly where one backend has to serve several brands.

What the evidence shows. Payload names Clock as the Partner on its Mythical Society case study. The partner profile adds Beacon TV (2024) and Hearst (2024).

The Hearst project is the interesting one and needs a caveat. Clock’s own case study describes Elle Collective, a multi-brand membership platform built so Hearst can add brands beyond Elle, with identity-provider integration. Payload appears on that page only as a technology partner in the footer, and is not named in the case study narrative. The directory lists the project as built with Payload.

What to ask them: how the membership tier logic survives a brand being added two years after launch, and where the identity integration sits.

MUTON

Where: Brno, Czechia.

Best fit for: replatforming a legacy CMS estate where most of the effort sits in the integrations rather than the content model.

What the evidence shows. MUTON’s own site carries more than its profile does. It describes rebuilding corporate websites end to end on Payload and Next.js, calls itself a Payload Enterprise Partner, and publishes an OptiTrack case study covering a motion-capture company with several enterprise systems integrated.

MUTON publishes several aggregate figures about its track record. We have not been able to verify any of them and have left them out rather than repeat them.

What to ask them: to walk through the OptiTrack integration list and say which of those systems they had built against before.

10x Media

Where: Kirchhaslach, Bavaria, with hubs in Sofia and Santiago. The agency describes a core team of eight.

Best fit for: projects at the smaller end. The partner profile states a budget range of $10K–$50K.

What the evidence shows. Four projects on the profile: The Set Set (2025), FAYA (2025), Camp Datenschutz (2025) and a KMS relaunch (2024). Their profile also links the All About Payload YouTube channel, which publishes Payload teaching material. Two of the 36 profiles link a YouTube channel of their own, and this is the one about Payload.

What to ask them: how a team of eight covers support when your launch week collides with another client’s.

Humaan

Where: Perth, Australia, working across Australia, Asia, Europe and North America.

Best fit for: design-led builds where the interface is the point, and campaign or product sites that need to look considered.

What the evidence shows. Payload names Humaan as the Partner on its Surveillance Watch case study. The partner profile adds Chaleit (2025) and Knightcorp (2025). Humaan states a fully in-house team, which is worth confirming if you are comparing against firms that subcontract delivery.

What to ask them: how the design system is handed over, and what an editor can change without a developer.

About the badges

Payload marks four profiles as Featured, and states that featured partners are chosen on the recency and quality of work produced using Payload. Those four are pemedia, .NFQ, 10x Media and MUTON (checked 1 October 2026).

Five profiles carry a Top Contributor badge: Clock Limited, OMNIUX, Riotters, Show + Tell and WAYF. Payload publishes no criteria for that badge anywhere we could find, so the badge is context rather than a ranking. WAYF holds it, and we do not claim to know exactly what it measures.

Neither marker is a ranking. Check badges alongside relevant delivered work and references.

What to ask any Payload agency

These apply whether or not the agency is on this list. Each one asks for an artefact you can inspect, which is the part a good pitch cannot supply on its own.

Ownership, on day one and at the end. Who holds the GitHub organisation, the database, the hosting accounts and the domain registrar login while the project runs, and what transfers when it ends. Get that answer in writing while you are still choosing between agencies.

A config from a delivered project. Ask to see a Payload config that shipped, with access control and a content model of more than three fields. Redacted names are fine. You are looking at how they structure collections and whether permissions were designed or bolted on.

AI-assisted work and how it was checked. Ask whether AI assistance was used in delivery, what review the output passed before it reached your repository, and who is accountable when it breaks.

The exit. What happens to your platform if the relationship ends. A clean answer describes a system you already own, with the handover written down somewhere you can read before you sign.

A reference on a comparable build. Ask for a named client on a project of similar shape who will take a call. A logo wall answers a different question.

Our longer treatment of partner selection is in what to ask before choosing a CMS or migration partner, which covers the commercial and contractual side that this page does not.

One piece of context from 2026

Figma announced on 17 June 2025 that the Payload team had joined Figma. The post, written by Figma CTO Kris Rasmussen, states that Payload will remain an open-source product and that in the immediate future nothing is changing for users. The MIT licence and the public repository are unchanged.

Who you should hire stays the same. The acquisition does put one question higher on the list for any agency on this page or off it: where do they deploy Payload for clients, and whose name is on those hosting accounts. That question was worth asking before June 2025 as well.

If a migration is what you are looking at

On a migration, the platform being left behind shapes the work more than the platform being moved to, which is why the question “who is good at Payload” is only half of yours. We publish CMS migration guides for the common sources, and CMS replatforming describes how we scope that work.

If you want a second opinion on a shortlist that includes us, we will give you one on a call, including the cases where someone else on this page is the better fit.

FAQ

1. Who are the best Payload CMS agencies?

   There is no official ranking, so the useful question is which agency has evidence for the kind of project you are running. Seven agencies on this page have work you can check: WAYF for enterprise migrations and institutional platforms, pemedia for corporate newsrooms, FocusReactive for content platforms and open-source Payload tooling, Clock Limited for membership and subscription platforms, MUTON for replatforming legacy CMS estates, 10x Media for smaller budgets, and Humaan for design-led product builds. WAYF publishes this page and is included in it.

2. How can I verify that an agency has actually built something with Payload?

   Four checks cover vendor attribution, the partner directory, agency-published work and public code. Payload's own case studies carry a Partner field where an agency delivered the work, which is the platform confirming the relationship: nine of the twenty published case studies name one. Each partner profile on payloadcms.com lists projects with years and live links, and twenty-two of the thirty-six profiles list at least one. The agency's own site may publish the same work and name Payload in it. And some agencies maintain public Payload code you can read on GitHub. An agency that passes none of these has not necessarily done no Payload work; it means you have to ask for references directly.

3. Is there an official Payload partner ranking?

   No. Payload runs a partner directory and marks some profiles as Featured, with the stated basis being the recency and quality of work produced using Payload. Five profiles also carry a Top Contributor badge, and Payload publishes no criteria for it. None of that is a ranked league table, and no agency, this one included, can claim a position in one.

4. What should I ask a Payload agency before hiring them?

   Ask who owns the code, the database and the hosting accounts on day one and at the end. Ask to see a Payload config from a delivered project, including access control and a content model of more than three fields. Ask which parts of the build were AI-assisted and how that code was reviewed. Ask what happens to your project if the agency stops working with you, and ask for the name of a client on a comparable build who will take a call.

5. Does Figma's acquisition of Payload change who I should hire?

   Not directly. Figma announced on 17 June 2025 that the Payload team had joined, and said Payload would remain an open-source product with nothing changing for users in the immediate future. The licence and the public repository are unchanged. It does make one question worth asking any agency: where do they deploy Payload for clients, and who holds those hosting accounts.

Payload partner directory, partner profiles and all twenty Payload case studies read 15 September 2026. Agency websites and GitHub repositories read the same day. The Featured partners and the pemedia and MUTON entries were rechecked and corrected on 1 October 2026. Figures attributed to Payload or to an agency are labelled as theirs and have not been independently verified.