Craft CMS vs Payload

Craft CMS and Payload both give developers control of the content model and both can be self-hosted. Craft is a PHP application built on Yii 2: developers set up sections, entry types and fields in its control panel, and most sites render pages with Twig templates from the same install. Payload is an open-source TypeScript application that installs into a Next.js project, with collections, access rules and hooks written as code in your repository.

This page compares Craft 5, the current version, with Payload 3, as checked on 29 September 2026. Craft Commerce is a separate product with its own licence, covered in its own section below. For the mechanics of moving, see our Craft CMS to Payload migration page; this page is about choosing.

The short decision

Stay on Craft when the site renders through Twig templates the team maintains, editors work well with entries, Matrix and previews, and multi-site covers the regions and languages. Craft 5 is supported until the end of 2030, so no support deadline is pushing the decision.

Choose Payload when the frontend is, or is about to become, a Next.js application and the team wants the content model, access rules and APIs in the same TypeScript codebase. Payload can be hosted by your team, deployed from Vercel or Cloudflare templates, or hosted by Payload under an enterprise agreement.

Where Craft stands in 2026

Craft 5 is the current major version, and 5.11.3 shipped on 18 September 2026. Pixel & Tonic’s supported-versions page gives Craft 5 active support until 31 December 2030 and security fixes until 31 December 2031. The same page ends Craft 4’s security support on 30 April 2026. Security releases for Craft 4 have continued since, most recently 4.18.9 on 17 September, but a Craft 4 site is outside the published window and faces an upgrade whichever platform it ends up on.

Craft 6 is a port to Laravel, the PHP framework, announced in September 2025. Pixel & Tonic calls it mostly a strict port, with a compatibility layer for plugins and modules written for Craft 5, and has made Craft 5 a long-term support release, maintained for five years after Craft 6 is fully released. The first alpha was tagged in May 2026 and 6.0.0-alpha.18 on 1 September. The announcement expected a beta in the third quarter of 2026. No beta had been tagged on 29 September, and the Craft 6 upgrade guide says it is not ready for production. The guide starts from the latest Craft 5 release on PHP 8.5 and rules out upgrading straight from Craft 4.

For a Craft 5 site, Craft 6 is an upgrade to plan for, with five years of Craft 5 maintenance promised after it ships. It gives no reason on its own to replatform.

Two ways to run Craft, and where Payload sits

Most Craft sites render pages with Twig, a PHP template language: templates query entries and output HTML from the same install that holds the content. Craft can also run headless. The headlessMode setting tunes the system and control panel for it, and a GraphQL API with queries and mutations is in core in every edition. The free first-party Element API plugin builds JSON endpoints, and custom controllers can serve other formats.

Payload is headless by design. Its admin panel and APIs run inside the Next.js application, where server components read content through the Local API without an HTTP request, and REST and GraphQL are generated for other clients. If the frontend is also moving to Next.js, a coupled Craft site’s Twig templates are rebuilt as React components; another frontend can consume Payload’s APIs instead. A headless Craft site already has a frontend, so a move changes the backend and the queries.

Entries, sections and Matrix

Craft models content as entries. Each entry belongs to a section: a Single for a one-off page, a Channel for a stream such as news, or a Structure for a page tree. Its fields come from its entry type’s field layout, and since Craft 5 entry types are shared across sections. Craft has more than 20 built-in field types, set up in the control panel, and the schema is written to YAML files in the project config folder so it can be committed and deployed between environments.

Matrix is Craft’s component field. In Craft 5 it holds nested entries: each block is an entry of a chosen type with its own fields, and Matrix blocks were converted to entries during the Craft 5 upgrade. The first-party CKEditor plugin can nest entries inside rich text as well.

Payload defines collections, globals and fields in TypeScript. Its blocks field does the job of Matrix, and Lexical rich text can hold blocks too. The model can be reviewed in pull requests next to the code that reads it, and Payload generates TypeScript types from it for the frontend.

Drafts, preview and approval

Craft keeps drafts and revisions in core. Edits to a live entry autosave as a provisional draft, applying a draft creates a revision, and editors can revert to earlier revisions. Preview targets let authors preview an entry while writing it and share a private URL with colleagues before publishing, on a Twig page or a headless frontend.

Craft 5 has no approval workflow in core. The Workflow plugin by Verbb adds approval steps for nominated user groups, at $49 plus $15 a year after the first year, and Pixel & Tonic’s roadmap lists approval workflows for Craft 6.0.

Payload’s drafts and versions give a saved draft over a live version, autosave, diffs, restore and scheduled publishing in core. Live Preview renders the draft in your frontend next to the form, and Payload’s enterprise page lists a Visual Editor as coming soon. An access rule can limit who publishes. Named approval stages are Payload’s enterprise Publishing Workflows or custom work.

Multi-site and languages

Craft’s multi-site is in every edition. One install can serve any number of sites, with a soft cap of 100, organised in site groups, and a site can stand for a region, a brand or a language. Each section’s propagation method sets which sites its entries appear in, and each field’s translation method makes it shared or translated per site, per site group, per language or by a custom key.

Payload localizes at the field level: you declare locales, mark the fields that vary and set fallback, and one document holds every language. Publishing locales independently depends on a feature Payload labels experimental and in beta. Several sites from one Payload install use the official multi-tenant plugin, which adds a tenant field to chosen collections, or a site field the team designs. Each site’s frontend is your code.

A multi-site Craft install is where a move to Payload needs the most design. Decide whether each site becomes a locale, a tenant or a separate deployment before pricing it.

Users and permissions by edition

Craft’s editions set how many people can work in the control panel. Solo is free and limited to a single admin account. Team costs $279 per project and allows five user accounts and one user group. Pro costs $399 per project and adds unlimited users and user groups with custom roles and permissions. Enterprise, by request, adds first-party SAML single sign-on, a custom licence agreement, procurement support and dedicated premium support.

Payload does not limit users by plan. Access control is a set of TypeScript functions per collection, document, field and operation, so a rule such as “regional editors edit only their region’s entries” is code the team writes and reviews. SSO is an enterprise feature or something built into the application.

Plugins, licences and upgrades

Craft’s paid licences are perpetual. Team and Pro include a year of updates, then $99 a year per project. A site that stops renewing keeps working on the version it has, receives no further updates, and is not charged for the gap when it renews. The Craft License is proprietary, and the source code is public on GitHub.

Plugins come from Pixel & Tonic and third parties and are licensed separately from Craft, and each paid plugin has its own renewal terms. Budget for Craft’s renewal and for every commercial plugin the site depends on, and check each plugin’s support for the target version before a major upgrade.

Payload’s open-source core is MIT-licensed, as are its official open-source plugins. Enterprise features, support and Payload hosting are separate commercial agreements. Upgrades are npm releases and database migrations your team or partner runs; the current line is 3.x, and a 4.0 canary is in development.

Craft Commerce is a separate decision

Craft Commerce is a paid plugin at $1,199 per project, with a year of updates and $299 a year after that. It requires Craft Pro, and its price does not include the Craft licence. Payload has an official ecommerce plugin and template, and its documentation marks the plugin as beta with possible breaking changes. A shop weighs catalogue, checkout, tax and order management on their own terms, so compare those separately from the CMS.

Cost inputs and exit

Craft’s cost lines are the licence and its renewals, plugin licences and renewals, hosting and development. Craft Cloud, hosting run by Pixel & Tonic, starts at $120 a month per project billed annually, or $130 monthly, and includes a Craft Team or Pro licence; plugin licences are not covered. Self-hosting Craft 5 needs PHP 8.2 or later and MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL.

Payload has no licence fee. The budget goes to hosting, the database and storage, building and maintaining the application, and any enterprise agreement for support, SSO or hosting from Payload. Price both over the same period for the same editors, sites, languages and environments.

Craft can export elements from its index pages to CSV, JSON, XML, XLSX or YAML, GraphQL can pull content for a scripted export, and the schema already sits in project config files. Leaving Payload, the content is in a database you control and the schema is in your repository; our guide to migrating off Payload covers that direction.

What it means for an existing Craft team

A team on Craft 5 that stays keeps its PHP skills, Twig templates and plugins, and Craft 6 will change the framework underneath with a compatibility layer for Craft 5 plugins. A team on Craft 4 is past the published support date and has to reach Craft 5 before it can move to Craft 6. That upgrade is the natural point to compare against a move, because plugins need Craft 5 releases and Matrix content is converted either way.

Moving to Payload changes the languages the team works in, from PHP and Twig to TypeScript and React. Content moves by script: entries through GraphQL or exports, Matrix entries into blocks, assets with their image transforms recreated. Templates do not move; they are rebuilt as components.

What it means for a new Next.js build

For a new site with a Next.js frontend, Craft runs headless. The frontend queries Craft’s GraphQL API, and a preview target points editors at the Next.js preview route. Editors get Craft’s control panel, and the team runs two applications: Craft on PHP for content and Next.js on Node.js for the site.

Payload installs into the Next.js project, so the content model, admin, APIs and frontend can share one repository, and server components read content without an API call. The choice turns on whether the team wants Craft’s control panel and PHP hosting next to the frontend or one TypeScript application.

When staying on Craft is the better call

Stay on Craft when the Twig templates work, the team writes PHP, editors rely on Matrix, previews and multi-site, and the renewals cost less than a rebuild. Craft 5’s support window runs to the end of 2030. If approvals are the gap, price the Workflow plugin before pricing a replatform.

What a move to Payload rebuilds

A move re-implements the parts of Craft that do more than store content. Plan for sections and entry types as collections and globals; Matrix and CKEditor nested entries as blocks; Twig templates, macros and includes as React components; the multi-site setup as locales, tenants or deployments; user groups and permissions as access functions; each plugin’s job, from SEO to forms to redirects, as a plugin or application code; image transforms; and redirects for any URL that changes. A headless Craft site also rewrites its GraphQL queries. WAYF’s CMS replatforming service covers that move.

Two decision scenarios

Both scenarios are illustrative. They are not client projects.

A multi-site Craft 5 estate that works. A manufacturer runs three regional sites in four languages from one Craft 5 Pro install. Fifteen editors sit in three user groups, pages are built from Matrix entries, and in-house PHP developers maintain the Twig templates and a handful of commercial plugins. The recommendation is to stay on Craft 5. Multi-site, per-field translation and user groups match how the team works, support runs to 2030, and the Craft 6 upgrade can be planned from the latest 5.x release. If a legal review step becomes a requirement, price the Workflow plugin first. Payload becomes a candidate if the company decides to rebuild the frontend in Next.js.

A Craft 4 site becoming part of a Next.js product. A software company runs its marketing site on Craft 4 with Twig templates, past its published security-support date of 30 April 2026. Its product team is building a Next.js application and wants the marketing pages, docs and in-app announcements to share one content model. Four editors publish in two languages with a single publish right, and the developers write TypeScript. Payload fits: collections, access rules and the admin live in the Next.js repository, and the app reads content through the Local API. The frontend rebuild is already planned, so the templates are part of that work; the move adds the Matrix-to-blocks migration, redirects and replacements for the site’s plugins. Price it against Craft 5 running headless behind the new frontend, which also starts with the Craft 4 upgrade.

A short evaluation checklist

Run these with your own site before choosing:

• Version. Record the Craft version and whether each plugin has a Craft 5 release.
• Templates. Count the Twig templates, macros and includes, and note which ones a planned redesign replaces anyway.
• Matrix. List the entry types used inside Matrix and CKEditor fields and how deep the nesting goes.
• Sites and languages. List the sites, site groups and each field’s translation method.
• People. List the user groups, their permissions and any approval step.
• Plugins. List every plugin with its renewal cost and what would replace it in Payload.
• Cost. Put licence and plugin renewals, hosting and development for both options over the same period.

A note on our position

WAYF is an official Payload partner and top contributor, so we have an interest in this comparison. We recommend staying on Craft when its templates, Matrix content and multi-site setup already serve the team.

If you choose Payload, WAYF’s Payload development service covers the build. For a move from Craft, plan the replatforming around the templates, Matrix content and sites that need to move.