Strapi Support: Most frequently asked questions on the website

1. "What is Strapi Cloud?"

Strapi Cloud provides a managed environment to host your Strapi CMS project. Instead of setting up and maintaining your own infrastructure, you deploy your project to Strapi Cloud, which handles hosting, uptime, and ongoing platform maintenance.

Strapi Cloud is generally available and already supports hundreds of production projects, with 99.99 percent uptime so far. A free plan is available to get started, with paid plans for larger or more demanding use cases.

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 advanced security and collaboration features mainly required by medium to large companies as part of the Growth and Enterprise CMS plans. It allows us to generate the revenue we need to continue to invest in the rapid development of the Strapi open-source project.

3. "Are custom roles available in all Strapi plans?"

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 can also restrict content access for specific users in the Administration Panel using roles. Strapi uses Role Based Access Control, also referred to as granular access control, to manage permissions. Since Strapi v4.8, custom roles and permissions are included in all editions of Strapi CMS and are available without limitations.

4. "Your CMS 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 challenging topics which can be impacted by many variables: 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 performance. Here is more information on Top 10 Ways to Improve Strapi's Performance

Don't take our word for it, check out how large companies such as Tesco, Airbus, or DeliveryHero use Strapi in production at scale by visiting Strapi Case Studies.

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

It depends.

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

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.

Multi-tenancy is a critical concept in modern software architecture, but its meaning can vary. Read the following guide to better understand multi-tenancy in the context of Strapi and help business owners and developers understand how to handle multi-site or multi-client needs. It covers definitions, common misconceptions, and Strapi's limitations. For teams considering a multi-project approach, we also recommend reviewing this support article which outlines how to use a single Strapi codebase across multiple instances.

7. "Does Strapi Support Localization?"

Strapi supports localization through our built-in i18n plugin, which is included in all plans, including the free Community Edition. There is no limit to the number of locales you can create, making it easy to manage multilingual content at scale.

For teams looking to streamline their translation workflow, the i18n plugin can now be combined with our new AI-powered translation feature, available in the Growth plan.

You can learn more about how this works, along with our other AI features, on this page.

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

No. A Strapi license is tied to a single project, not to individual environments. You can run multiple lower environments for the same project, such as development, staging, or testing, under the same license without additional cost. A single license is not intended to cover multiple independent production deployments or unrelated projects.

For additional details and examples of license boundaries and restrictions, refer to this Strapi support article.

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 the difference 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 70k GitHub Stars, Strapi ranks as the #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 and 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