Top 10 questions to Strapi CEO

In this blog post, our CEO Pierre Burgy answers frequently asked questions about Strapi, the project, the company, and its business model.

Don’t hesitate to ask additional questions in the comments if this blog post does not include the answers you were looking for.

How big is Strapi and where are you based out of?

The company is based in the heart of Paris, France and has over 13 full-time employees with one fully remote employee based in San Francisco, California. Strapi recently announced a $4M seed round led by Accel and stride.vc with the participation of Notable angel investors and open-source experts such as Solomon Hykes (Founder of Docker), Guillermo Rauch (Founder of Next.js and Zeit.co) and Eli Collins (Ex-CTO at Cloudera).

The funding is being used to scale the team, get the product to a stable version including the most requested features from the community and lay the foundation for a sustainable monetization strategy.

Why should companies care about Strapi?

With more than 700K downloads, 20K stars and 300 individuals contributors, Strapi is the most flexible open-source Headless Content Management System (CMS). It gives developers the freedom to use their favorite tools and frameworks while helping editors to easily manage their content and distribute anywhere.

By making the admin panel and API easily customizable and extensible through a plugin system, Strapi enables the world’s largest companies to accelerate content delivery while building better digital experiences.

Is Strapi 100% Open Source?

Yes. Strapi is published under a standard MIT license. All contributions made to the project via GitHub pull requests are governed by the MIT license. The Open Source third-party components used by Strapi are also governed by licenses that are compatible with the vast majority of standard Open Source licenses.

In addition to the main Strapi project, we have also open-sourced a component library called Buffet.js to help the community build plugins and better user experiences in application interfaces.

Our team is composed of open source enthusiasts who firmly believe in transparency and value community contributions and inputs.

How do you plan to build a sustainable business if Strapi is Open Source?

Strapi is and will always be open-source and free. That being said, we’re currently looking at different business models including a SaaS offering hosted by Strapi and a Self-Managed Enterprise version for customers who would like to host their own instances on-premises or in the cloud.

Our enterprise version will include features that are specifically tied to enterprise use-cases such as internationalization, Single Sign-On, Role-Based Access Control, etc.

How can one get involved and collaborate with the Strapi community?

Whether you have a technical background or not, we aim to make every community member feel welcome and provide useful information so that all stakeholders can get the most out of Strapi.

Today, our learning resources and communication channels (documentation, forum, tutorials) are mostly online and directed to developers. In the future, we do plan to bring the community together offline (meetups, workshops, office-hours) and offer a greater breadth of resources for less technical profiles such as content editors who need to learn how to use the administration panel.

What’s Strapi tech stack?

Internally, we use the following frameworks and programming languages to build, deploy and manage Strapi.

We also use ProductBoard to build our public roadmap based on user feature requests, GitHub as our source code and product management software, TravisCI as our continuous Integration system and Sentry for software monitoring. If you like our tech stack and are looking for a new professional challenge, check out our job openings.

How is Strapi different from traditional CMS such as Wordpress?

Traditional CMS such as Wordpress or Drupal are monolithic systems that include the backend UI, plugins, front-end templates, CSS, a web server and database. They tend to be slower, heavier and require a lot of custom development to become responsive to various display devices. In recent years, traditional CMSs have evolved to overcome these challenges and are often calling themselves Headless although most of them are in fact Decoupled.

According to Dean Barker, the author of the Web Content Management Book, the difference between Decoupled and Headless is the following:

A decoupled CMS is proactive — it prepares content for presentation and pushes it into a delivery environment. A headless CMS is reactive — it manages content, then just sits and waits for some process to ask for it.

As a headless CMS, Strapi provides backend functionalities for websites and apps built with the JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, and prerendered Markup, served without web servers). Strapi supports most databases, both REST and graphQL API and is designed to work with the most popular front-end frameworks including Gatsby, Nuxt, Next.js or another static site generator. Our main objective is to become the most flexible and extensible headless CMS on the market.

Who are your competitors?

HeadlessCMS.org does a great job of presenting and comparing the different players in the market based on CMS types, support for SSGs and licenses.

The main differentiators are self-hosted Open Source vs SaaS and API-driven vs git-based.

What are the most popular Strapi uses cases?

Thousands of companies and enterprises such as Societe Generale, IBM, Discovery Channel, and ASOS are already using Strapi to build and manage their blogs, editorial, corporate or catalog websites and mobile applications.

We’ve also found some more original use cases such as Shelt.in who uses Strapi to manage their content delivery to portable IoT devices ensuring the safety of firefighters.

What is the profile/size of company that can benefit the most from Strapi?

Companies who are fighting traditional CMS technical debt, ongoing maintenance, unreliable performance and spending a lot of time making their content responsive to an ever-increasing number of devices and channels, would benefit from using Strapi. Companies experiencing these pain points are usually mid-size companies or enterprises in the Retail, Media, Banking or Software industry who realize static sites are safer, faster and more cost-effective.

Learn more about Strapi:

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