Strapi Support: Most frequently asked questions on the website

1. "When will Strapi Cloud be available?"

We're proud to share that with 99.99% uptime so far and hundreds of customers already using Strapi Cloud in production, Strapi Cloud is now generally available, stable, and secure for everyone to use! All Strapi users can start with a 14-day free trial. We’re actively monitoring overall uptime and performance with a few hundred active projects while continuously releasing new features and improvements.

Check out the Strapi Cloud roadmap to learn more about upcoming features and improvements.

2. Why do you have some paid features if Strapi is Open Source?

Strapi is following an "open-core" model. Our core product is open-source under the MIT license so we can accomplish our mission: to empower the community to build a million tailor-made projects while providing enterprise features mainly required by companies. It allows us to generate the revenue we need to continue to invest in the rapid development of the Strapi open-source project.

Read more about our vision in our Company Handbook.

3. Are custom roles part of Strapi Enterprise?

Let's detail what kind of roles we're talking about. In Strapi, you manage end-users' permissions to consume the content through APIs. By default, you'll find "authenticated" and "public roles" in the "User & Permissions" Plugin which you can customize

You also have roles restricting content access to specific users in the Administration Panel. We call Role-Base Access Control (RBAC) or Granular-Access Control. As of Strapi v4.8, the custom roles & permissions feature, previously included in Enterprise plans, is now available for everyone for free in the Community Edition. No limitations.

4. Your pricing is based on the number of seats / admin user, how do you define these?

“User” means any individual (employee, Contractor, or other third parties) who is registered to use the Software, regardless of whether such User actually accesses the Software. For clarity, Users are those individuals who are registered to access the user interface of the Software and not the resulting Strapi API generated as part of the Project.

“Seat” means a registered account on the Software, which may be occupied by a single User at any given time on any given instance of the Software in any given Environment.

Read this support article for more details.

5. "Is Strapi a good fit for large-scale apps like web stores with 500,000 products?"

Performance & scalability are quite challenging topics. So many variables could impact: network, load-balancing, scaling (of everything), database tuning, model structure, number and type of relations, filtering types, caching, and CDN usage...

That said, you should never forget that Strapi is a product made of: a Node.js application, a database, and a React admin UI. As long as these three components can scale, you shouldn't be concerned by Strapi's performances. Here is more information on horizontal or vertical scaling for your Strapi application.

If large companies like Toyota, Tesco, or Kyivstar run Strapi in production, then you can trust it is a powerful high-performing system!

6. "Can I have multiple websites on Strapi"?

Yes… and no!

Yes, because that is actually what is "headless" means: having multiple heads, multiple frontends, and multiple pages! But no, because Strapi doesn’t support multi-tenancy yet.

In a more technical consideration, it would represent the following structure:

blog

api blog/posts

api blog/shares

website

api website/home-banners

api website/newsletter

This topic is more complex. Let’s begin with defining what multi-tenancy is. There are two definitions possible:

• a single-project approach: which is perfectly supported In Strapi. It allows, for example, building a web app, a mobile app., and even pushing to an internal application while relying on the same database, configuration, policies, and plugins...
• a multi-project approach: which is not well supported. It changes the application's architecture to allow multiple projects, like websites in a single Strapi application. Each project is fully independent, you can use other domains, databases, policies, and plugins... and maintaining such an advanced configuration and all the synchronization is very challenging.

Now you’re wondering what’s under the hood and where this product’s limitation comes from. Here are the technical details.

Strapi is fundamentally built in both the back end and the admin panel to only work with one domain at a time. When we make the admin panel, we hard code the domain into the build as the Admin is CSR (Client-side rendered); thus, the user's browser downloads the entire admin, and it runs it on the user's machine thus it needs to know what API domain to contact to run operation.

Now, if you’re still reading this article, you are surely wondering, “What if….”

Domain-based routing at the proxy layer? Yes, it would allow you to send traffic to different instances. But it doesn't mean that this is a good idea either. Or maybe you watched Virgin Media hacking multi-tenancy at Strapi Conf 22 and you still wanna do it?

Well, a workaround is possible. You could:

• Create a collection-type “Domain” with domains as entries and as a text field.
• Add a “one-way” relationship with other collection-types (eg: “Pages”)
• Display a different frontend for each domain.
• Allow users to only edit pieces of content based on the domain.

Then you discover that you can utilize API token to secure the REST/GraphQL endpoint but this comes with the limitations of being unable to limit the content that can be accessed. So you want to add policies or middleware's to limit what API token can access at the API layer ect… And so you fall understand layer over layer of customization.

Please carefully consider that this proposed workaround is not production-ready. It’s ideal for small web pages/sites, just landing pages for different domains with some degree of static data. Using this for more complex websites will add complexity in terms of profoundly nested content models that contain a lot of dynamic zones and components. This would potentially bring up the relational performance issues Strapi currently faces, and with this implementation, it would run into relational performance due to the complexity of the model.

In conclusion, headless cms created a new paradigm in the definition of “multi-tenancy”(vs. monolithic CMS) so our primary recommendation is to clearly define your expectations and the architecture you need to match these. Most of the time, it’s an inheritance from your current implementation and dev. Teams are focusing on satisfying business needs while avoiding changing their work style. Switching to Strapi is a considerable occasion to change your architecture to something more straightforward and to review your content editing workflow; even though it means dealing with change management, the overall benefits should be higher.

7. "Is it possible to pay monthly for a Strapi Enterprise license?"

With our Enterprise Edition licensing, we offer annual payments for one year by default on all license plans.

We can do custom terms for our Enterprise plan based on your needs and requirements. Options can be discussed with our sales team here.

Read this support article for more details.

8. "When I buy a license, do I have to pay for each environment?"

A Strapi application may be deployed in multiple instances and environments with the same license as long as it doesn't:

1. Serve different model configurations with the same license
2. Multiple projects serving different websites:
   • Client 1 has one Strapi instance to power their website: client1.example.com
   • Client 2 has one Strapi instance to power their website: client2.example.com An excerpt from this article
3. Get distributed as part of a template available for free download/distribution.

Read this support article for more details.

9. "How do I upgrade my existing Strapi project to the Enterprise Edition?"

If you have purchased an Enterprise Edition license, you will be given a long randomized key, which is used to activate the features of your Strapi project the license provides. There are two key ways to install this license that will be detailed below:

• Via an environment variable STRAPI_LICENSE
• Via a license.txt file located in the root folder of your Strapi project

Read our Installation Guide for more details.

10. "What is different between Strapi and other headless CMS services?"

An estimated 1.7 billion websites exist worldwide, and over half use a CMS. One of our customers benchmarked more than 100 different solutions before choosing Strapi. With more than 55k GitHub Stars, Strapi ranks #136 most popular repository, before Adobe Brackets, Symfony or ASP.NET Core. Based on the number of GitHub stars and several NPM downloads, we think it's fair to say that we are a leading open-source headless CMS.

Being open-source & self-hosted brings many benefits: full control over your stack, no vendor lock-in, and infinite possibilities of customization... Whereas SaaS solutions provide ease of deployment for non-technical users.

When pointing out each solution's differentiators, people generally look for three main points: the feature coverage, the public reviews, and the companies already using the solution at scale.

Our advice would be to pay specific attention to the following:

• The stickiness to your technical stack
• The documentation's quality
• The community's footprint and the number of active contributors
• The company's history and any dependency on a legacy stack