Multi-tenancy in Strapi?: A Comprehensive Guide

Multi-tenancy is a critical concept in modern software architecture, but its meaning can vary. This guide will demystify multi-tenancy in the context of Strapi (a popular headless CMS) and help business owners and developers understand how to handle multi-site or multi-client needs. We’ll cover definitions, misconceptions, Strapi’s limitations, and practical workarounds for managing multiple projects.

1. Definition of Multi-tenancy

What is "True" Multi-tenancy?

In general, multi-tenancy is a software architecture where a single application instance serves multiple tenants (clients or projects) isolated manner.

All tenants share the same application and infrastructure, but each tenant's data and configurations remain segregated.

For example, a SaaS platform might run one codebase that hosts multiple customers' data, with each customer unaware of others on the system.

Varying Definitions:

The term "multi-tenancy" can mean different things to different people:

• Some interpret it as one backend serving many frontends or sites (multiple "heads" on a headless CMS).
• Others mean one application instance with multiple databases or data partitions for separate clients.
• A traditional CMS (like WordPress Multisite) implies managing multiple sites from one admin interface.

Because of these varied contexts, "true multi-tenancy" (single instance, multiple isolated tenants) is often confused with simply managing multiple projects in one place.

Strapi's offers two alternative possible definitions of multi-tenancy:

• Single-project approach: one Strapi instance serving multiple frontends (web, mobile, etc.) with a shared dataset – this is fully supported and essentially what "headless CMS" means (one content repository for many channels).
• Multi-project approach: one Strapi instance hosting multiple independent projects (e.g., multiple websites) is closer to true multi-tenancy and is not supported by Strapi out of the box.

We will discuss this in greater detail in just a moment.

In summary, true multi-tenancy is a single software deployment for multiple clients with isolation, whereas others might loosely use “multi-tenancy” to simply mean managing multiple sites.

2. Common Misconceptions about Multi-tenancy in Strapi

Many who ask for “multi-tenancy” in Strapi are actually looking for a simpler way to manage multiple sites or clients – not a true multi-tenant architecture.

Common misconceptions include:

• “One Strapi to rule them all”: People often imagine running one Strapi admin and backend for all their websites or clients, hoping to simplify management. In reality, this setup introduces complexity and is not natively supported by Strapi.
• Confusing Multi-Channel with Multi-Tenant: Because Strapi is headless, it’s already capable of feeding content to multiple websites/apps (multi-channel). Some mistake this capability for multi-tenancy. Strapi’s FAQ clarifies that you can have multiple frontends on one Strapi (e.g., a blog and a website pulling from the same content), but that is not the same as hosting independent projects for different purposes or organizations.
• “Multi-tenancy will save effort or money”: Business owners might assume one Strapi instance for all sites means less maintenance, which may lead to cost savings (one place to update content types or plugins). While there is some centralized convenience, it’s often outweighed by the complexity of isolating content and users for each site within one instance. In practice, most companies end up wanting isolation – for security, performance, or differing requirements – which true multi-tenancy would provide only with significant engineering effort.

Note: We observed many requests for multi-tenancy in the forum and conversations in the community, often stemming from trying to carry over patterns from older systems (monolithic or legacy CMS) without rethinking architecture.

It’s important to clearly define your needs: do you truly require one instance serving multiple tenants, or can multiple legacy projects be combined into one with proper segmentation of user permissions?

In many cases, switching to Strapi is an opportunity to simplify architecture (e.g., one instance per project) rather than bundling everything together.

3. True Multi-tenancy vs. “Multi-Site” (Perceived Multi-tenancy)

To clarify the differences, below is a comparison between True Multi-tenancy and what many users actually seek (let’s call it “Multi-Site Management” in Strapi):

As the table shows, what many consider “multi-tenancy” (having multiple sites) can often be achieved by running multiple Strapi instances. In contrast, true multi-tenancy (multiple tenants in one Strapi) is a different, more complex beast.

As the table shows, what many consider “multi-tenancy” (having multiple sites) can often be achieved by running multiple Strapi instances. In contrast, true multi-tenancy (multiple tenants in one Strapi) is a different, more complex beast.

4. Strapi’s Approach to Multi-tenancy (and Why It’s Not Supported)

No True Multi-tenancy Out of the Box: Strapi’s core design intentionally does not support true multi-tenancy in a single instance.

The product focuses on a single project per instance model. This means if you need to serve completely independent projects, Strapi expects you to spin up separate instances. There are several technical reasons and limitations behind this decision:

Admin Panel Tied to One Domain: The Strapi admin UI (the back-office interface) is built to work with one backend API domain at a time. In fact, the domain is baked into the admin build during compilation.

This means you cannot easily have one Strapi admin serving multiple domains or projects. If you tried to host multiple sites on one Strapi, the admin panel would be confused about which site’s data it’s managing, because it’s not dynamically multi-domain aware.

Shared Media Storage Complexities: In a single Strapi instance, the Media Library (for uploads like images and files) is shared across all content.

With multiple tenants sharing one instance, you’d need a way to segregate media files per tenant. Strapi doesn’t have a built-in mechanism to partition the upload directory or cloud storage by tenant.

For example, two tenants uploading a file named logo.png might conflict or, worse, see each other’s files if proper checks aren’t in place.

Implementing isolated media folders or buckets per tenant would require custom logic.

Without such logic, media management becomes a tangle (e.g., backups, cloud storage credentials, and access control need tenant awareness).

True multi-tenancy would require either sharing the same tables among tenants with a tenant ID column everywhere, or using multiple databases/schemas and switching connections per request. Both approaches are non-trivial:

• Shared Tables: Every Content Type would need a tenant field, and every query/filter in the API and admin would need to be scoped by the tenant. This kind of global filter is not native to Strapi’s ORM out-of-the-box. It also means one tenant’s data sits next to another’s in each table, increasing the risk of accidental leakage if a query or permission is misconfigured.
• Multiple Databases: Strapi’s configuration can only handle one database connection simultaneously (per environment). While you can programmatically define multiple connections, you’d have to route each API request to the correct connection based on the tenant.
• This essentially creates a custom multi-tenant framework on top of Strapi, which is complex and not officially supported. Every new tenant could mean dynamically creating new tables or schemas, which Strapi’s migration system isn’t built to handle on the fly.

Plugin and Code Assumptions

The entire Strapi ecosystem (plugins, authentication, GraphQL, etc.) assumes a single-tenant context.

For instance, the Roles & Permissions plugin wasn’t designed to partition content by tenant – it can restrict which collection types a user sees, but not “which entries belong to your organization” without customization.

Many plugins would need a tenant awareness update to truly isolate functionality per tenant. This broad impact on the system is a big reason the Strapi team has not enabled multi-tenancy – it “impacts so many things” in the architecture.

Shared Instance” Pitfalls

Even if one overcame the above challenges, running multiple clients on one Strapi has drawbacks: A bug in the core code or a misconfigured query could leak or modify another tenant’s data – a serious security concern.

If one tenant exhausts server resources (heavy traffic or expensive operations), it could slow down or crash the whole instance, affecting everyone. In a multi-instance setup, by contrast, each client is isolated (one client’s spike can’t take down another’s site).

Upgrading Strapi or changing content structure becomes an all-or-nothing scenario. You can’t update one tenant’s schema without updating all tenants since they share the codebase and database structure. This tight coupling can be problematic if one client needs a change that others do not.

From a business standpoint, a shared instance means shared risk. One industry expert said, “No matter how carefully you design a multi-tenant system, you’re always running a greater risk than isolated environments.”

Many companies, especially those with sensitive data, prefer the safety of isolated deployments despite the higher infrastructure cost.

Given these challenges, it’s clear why Strapi steers users away from trying true multi-tenancy in one instance.

As an open-source project, they prioritize stability and simplicity (one instance = one project) over attempting to cover complex multi-tenant scenarios.

In Strapi’s own words, maintaining a multi-project architecture in one app is “very challenging” and not a priority at this time.

Instead, Strapi encourages a different approach to handle multiple sites: separate projects with a “headless” architecture for each.

5. Workarounds for Multi-Site Needs in Strapi

While Strapi doesn’t natively support multi-tenant architecture, several ways exist to effectively manage multiple sites or applications. Here are some strategies, from straightforward to more creative:

Separate Strapi Instances (One per Project or Customer)

The simplest and most robust solution is to run a dedicated Strapi instance for each site or client. In practice, this means each project has its own Strapi application, its own database, and (if self-hosted) its own server or container.

For example:

• Client A’s website -> strapi-instance-A (with its DB, media, etc.)
• Client B’s mobile app backend -> strapi-instance-B (separate DB, etc.)

This is what we would suggest this approach for multiple projects. Each instance can live on a subdomain or separate URL (e.g., cms.clientA.com, cms.clientB.com).

This isolation ensures no risk of data crossover and allows you to tailor each instance as needed.

Business perspective: This approach might involve more servers or resources, but cloud infrastructure (Docker, Kubernetes, etc.) can help manage many instances.

The benefit is stability and security per client. Many agencies automate deployment so that spinning up a new Strapi for a client is quick and standardized. Maintenance tasks (like updates) need to be repeated per instance, but tools like monorepos or scripts can help apply updates in bulk.

Strapi Cloud for Multiple Projects

Strapi now offers Strapi Cloud, a hosted service that can significantly simplify managing multiple Strapi projects. With Strapi Cloud, you can create a project for each site/client, and the platform handles the deployment, scaling, and updates for you.

You still have separate Strapi instances under the hood. Still, you get a unified dashboard to oversee them (each project is isolated, but you can switch between them in your account).

This caters to business users who want less DevOps overhead: you don’t worry about setting up servers for each client—the cloud service does it.

Strapi Cloud is a paid service, so you’d consider the cost per project, but it provides convenience features like one-click environments, backups, and monitoring across all your projects.

If you’re an agency or enterprise managing many Strapi instances, using Strapi Cloud or a similar platform can be an “easier way to manage multiple sites” – which is often what people originally meant by wanting multi-tenancy.

Content Partitioning Within One Strapi (Advanced Custom Solution)

If you absolutely must use a single Strapi instance for multiple sites, you can attempt a partitioned content approach.

This involves adding a tenant or site identifier to every content type and using Strapi’s role-based access control and/or custom logic to filter data per tenant.

For example:

• Create a collection type called “Site” (or “Tenant”) that lists each site/client.
• Add a relation (or foreign key) from all your other collection types to this “Site.” For instance, an Article has a field linking it to which Site it belongs to.
• Customize the Strapi admin or use the Enterprise RBAC features to ensure editors from Site A can only see content tagged to Site A. This might involve creating custom admin roles for each site or writing admin UI extensions to filter entries by site.
• In the APIs, add policies or middleware to check for a tenant identifier (perhaps via a subdomain or an API key) and filter the response to only that tenant’s data.

This approach mimics multi-tenancy by data design rather than true isolation. Some Strapi users have tried it (for example, creating a “tenant” collection and relating all data to it).

Caution is strongly advised. Strapi’s team noted that such a workaround quickly becomes complex and is not “production-ready” for large, dynamic sites.

Performance can degrade as you add deep relations to enforce the separation, and the admin UI might become unwieldy with so much content intermingled. Use this method only for relatively simple use cases (e.g. a few small websites with mostly static content), and test thoroughly.

Monorepo & Code Sharing Strategies

Note: this is the best method if and only if all tenants share the same content types.

Maintaining multiple Strapi instances can be a concern. One way to ease this is to use a mono repo or shared code base. Strapi’s code (especially the definition of content types and components) can be abstracted into reusable modules or packages.

This older article, How to Build a Pseudo Multi-Tenant Application in Strapi demonstrates running multiple Strapi apps that all share the same codebase on disk.

In that setup, you might have a single project repository and deploy it multiple times with different environment configurations (each connecting to a different database).

This allows you to roll out new features to all instances at once (since they use the same code), approaching the convenience of multi-tenancy while still keeping data isolated per instance.

It’s a scripted way to launch “one Strapi per tenant” without manually maintaining separate codebases.

Example: You maintain one set of API and content-type definitions, and when you update it (say, adding a new field to a Content-Type), you deploy that update to all client instances. Each instance runs migrations on its own database.

This is a pseudo-multitenant approach that some have successfully used. However, be aware of the risks associated with the above method.

With this approach, you will not be able to have different schemas for different databases; all schemas and data structures will have to be identical.

Keep in mind, though, that all tenants must remain in lockstep with features—you can’t easily diverge one client’s functionality.

Using a Proxy or Middleware (Segmenting by Domain)

Another workaround approach is placing a smart proxy in front of multiple Strapi instances.

For example, you could have one URL that your editors visit, and based on the login or domain, it redirects them to the appropriate Strapi instance.

This isn’t true single-instance multi-tenancy, but it can create an illusion of a unified system. A more extreme version is proxying multiple Strapi APIs under one roof:

For instance, one could configure Nginx or a custom Node.js gateway to route requests for api.site1.com to Strapi instance 1 and api.site2.com to instance 2. This way, your frontends could all call a single endpoint, and the proxy will delegate to the correct backend.

This approach was hinted at in Strapi’s Forum discussion (“Domain-based routing at the proxy layer”). Still, it was also noted as “not a good idea” to force everything through one admin.

It can get messy and doesn’t reduce complexity much — you’re essentially still running multiple Strapis behind the scenes.

In summary, the recommended workaround is the first one: separate Strapi instances per site.

The other methods are either facilitated by platform services (Strapi Cloud) or require significant customization. Always weigh the complexity cost: maintaining a clean separation is often easier than a tangled one-size-fits-all instance.

6. Additional Insights and Considerations

Finally, some broader insights to help you make an informed decision about multi-tenancy with Strapi.

Headless CMS Paradigm: Traditional CMSs (like WordPress with Multisite Drupal, etc.) provide one installation to manage multiple sites. Headless CMSs, including Strapi, shift the paradigm. They encourage a microservice mindset: one content repository serves one purpose/domain, and you integrate content as needed.

The Strapi team emphasizes that moving to headless offers a chance to rethink content architecture rather than directly porting old multi-tenant setups.

Business owners should understand that while headless architecture might require running multiple instances, it also offers greater flexibility in tailoring content models per project and scaling each project independently.

Industry Trend—Caution with Multi-Tenancy: The broader industry recognizes that multi-tenant architectures are not a silver bullet.

They save infrastructure costs and centralize management in exchange for higher complexity and risk. If a headless CMS doesn’t natively support true multi-tenancy, it might be by design—to encourage isolation, which can mean better security and performance guarantees.

As one analysis noted, multi-tenant systems run a greater risk even with careful design than isolated setups.

This is a business risk consideration: a major incident in a multi-tenant environment can have cascading effects on all customers. For mission-critical applications, many opt for single-tenant deployments (or at least isolated databases per tenant) despite the extra cost.

Strapi’s Roadmap: Over the years, many users have inquired about multi-tenancy support in Strapi (issues, forum questions, etc.).

While there were talks as far back as 2018 about possible multisite features, true multi-tenancy is not implemented as of now (Strapi v5 era). For now, plan your architecture assuming one Strapi per tenant.

Third-Party Solutions: Some community plugins and tutorials attempt to bridge the gap. If you explore such options, do so carefully and consider the long-term maintainability (community plugins might not keep up with Strapi updates and will not be supported by Strapi’s support team).

Often, it might be safer to implement a lightweight custom solution yourself if it’s critical so you fully understand the mechanics and can control the outcome.

Developer Experience vs. Operational Overhead: A single-instance multi-tenant system might seem elegant (one place to code and deploy changes) for developers. But keep in mind the operational overhead shifts elsewhere – you’ll spend more effort writing tenant-aware code, complex testing, and debugging tricky issues.

On the other hand, managing multiple instances might mean writing deployment scripts or using container orchestration, but your codebase remains simpler (there is no conditional logic for different tenants).

One approach might be preferable depending on your team’s strengths (application development vs. DevOps). Business owners should involve their development team in this decision to ensure the approach aligns with their team’s capabilities and the project’s needs.

Conclusion:

While true multi-tenancy sounds appealing in theory—offering centralized management and resource efficiency—it introduces significant architectural complexity, security concerns, and potential performance bottlenecks.

Strapi intentionally does not support true multi-tenancy in a single instance, and for good reason. Instead, Strapi's best-practice recommendation is to adopt a multi-instance architecture: one Strapi project per client, site, or application.

This approach provides:

• Clear isolation between clients and projects (data, admin access, media, deployments).
• Customizability for each project's unique content types and plugins.
• Simplified maintenance, where updates, migrations, or new features can be rolled out per project as needed without risking others.
• Stronger security, since a bug or exploit in one instance won't affect others.

Strapi Cloud is the officially recommended solution for teams seeking convenience and scalability. It allows you to spin up and manage multiple isolated projects from one account, offering a centralized dashboard, one-click deployments, backups, and less DevOps overhead.

This is ideal for agencies and businesses managing multiple clients or brands.

If infrastructure cost or team size is a concern, Strapi supports developer workflows like monorepos and shared codebases. This enables you to maintain multiple Strapi projects with shared content models or APIs, delivering some of the efficiency of multi-tenancy without the pitfalls.

In rare cases where a shared instance is necessary, advanced users may experiment with custom tenant-aware data models, middleware, and role-based access controls. However, these setups require deep customization and ongoing maintenance and should be approached with caution.

Strapi's Multi-site Recommendations: ✅ Use one Strapi instance per project or client. ✅ Use Strapi Cloud for hassle-free deployment and management at scale. ✅ Use monorepos or code-sharing for easier updates across instances. ⚠️ Avoid complex single-instance multi-tenancy unless absolutely required and well-understood.

By aligning with Strapi's architecture and recommended practices, you'll build a more stable, secure, and scalable multi-site content infrastructure—ready to evolve with your needs.