Payload

Payload was founded in 2018 in Grand Rapids, Michigan by James Mikrut, Dan Ribbens and Elliot DeNolf and was acquired by Figma in June 2025; Figma's own announcement says Payload stays open source and that it will keep investing in the project. The code is MIT licensed on GitHub with about 44,800 stars and a Discord of roughly 14,800 members. We found no Russian or Chinese link in ownership or engineering. Note the name collision: a payments company also called Payload has its own SOC 2 and status page and is unrelated.

There is no plan to price. The framework is free, has no seat or page limits, and runs anywhere Next.js runs, so the honest number is your hosting, for which this comparison takes a 2 vCPU, 4 GB server at roughly £20 to £25 a month as the reference, plus a Postgres or MongoDB database, which Payload does not bundle. Payload Cloud, the vendor's managed hosting, sits behind a login and its sign-up page said on 16 September 2026 that new signups are paused while the company joins Figma, with existing projects running normally; we could not read a current Cloud price and third-party figures are not used here.

What you get is a CMS defined in code: collections and fields in TypeScript, an admin panel generated from them, drafts and versions, document and field-level access control, localisation on any field with no limit on locales, image resizing on upload via Sharp, and REST, GraphQL and in-process local APIs from the same configuration. The official MCP plugin turns any instance into an MCP server with CRUD over collections and read and update over globals, over HTTP with bearer tokens or stdio, with setup guides for Claude Code, Cursor and VS Code. The SEO plugin adds meta fields with preview; sitemaps, canonicals and structured data are yours to write in the front end. There is no visual page builder, no native forms product, no commerce module, no bundled CDN and no cookie tooling: every one of those is a developer decision. Support is community (Discord, forum, GitHub issues); we found no phone support and no certification claims for Payload CMS itself. There is no Trustpilot profile; G2 shows 4.9 on 59 reviews.

In our experience: Saaskly runs on Payload. We chose it because the content model lives in typed code we control, the admin panel is generated rather than built, the access-control model is precise, and the REST, GraphQL and MCP surfaces let agents read this site the way readers do. We would not recommend it to a business without a developer, and Payload Cloud being closed to new customers makes that gap wider today. The score reflects the buyer this category is written for, not the software.