Payload CMS

Payload is a self-hosted headless CMS and application framework built with Node.js, Express, React and MongoDB.

It’s meant to provide a massive boost to your development process, but more importantly, stay out of your way as your apps get more complex.

Out of the box, Payload gives you a lot of the things that you often need when developing a new website, web app, or native app:

• A Mongo database to store your data
• A way to store, retrieve, and manipulate data of any shape via full REST and GraphQL APIs Authentication—complete with commonly required functionality like registration, email verification, login, & password - reset
• Deep access control to your data, based on document or field-level functions
• File storage and access control
• A beautiful admin UI that’s generated specifically to suit your data

Why Payload?

The team behind Payload has been building websites and apps with existing content management systems and application frameworks for over a decade. We know what works and what doesn't about each of the existing solutions, and to this day have found no silver bullet solution.

We believe that a CMS should be:

• Cost-effective and should save time and effort
• Intuitive for developers and content authors alike
• Self-hosted however and wherever the application specifies
• Designed in code but used with no coding experience
• Blazing fast
• Secure
• Fully flexible and extensible

Payload is our silver bullet solution. It represents over two years of passionate development and brings everything we need when we build new apps and websites:

• A beautiful, dynamic, customizable admin UI
• Extensible and reusable authentication
• Content localization
• Local file storage
• Extremely flexible access control
• Field conditional logic
• Block-based layout building
• Array field type(s)
• Security
• and much more

Get Started

Get started in just one line with npx create-payload-app.

The Getting Started documentation will help you get up and going quickly or view our full documentation