Payload CMS vs WordPress: a different way to manage your content

What is Payload CMS?

Payload is an open-source CMS, free under the MIT licence, written in TypeScript and designed to integrate natively with Next.js. WordPress relies on a ready-made admin interface and a system of themes and plugins, whereas Payload is code-first, which means that every content type, every field and every access rule is defined in the project's configuration. The admin interface is then generated automatically from that configuration.

Customisation that goes further than WordPress

This is Payload's strongest argument. With WordPress, customising the content structure beyond what a theme offers almost always means stacking plugins, with the conflicts and technical debt that this creates over time.

With Payload, the content structure is built to measure from the start.

• Content collections defined precisely around your business, instead of adapted from a generic model
• A block system that lets editors compose flexible pages without touching the code
• Fine-grained access rules, down to the field level, to control who can see or edit what
• Fully custom fields and components when a need falls outside the standard framework

The result is an admin interface that matches your content exactly, without unused fields or options that never serve any purpose.

SEO built into the structure

Payload offers a free, official SEO plugin that adds metadata fields (title, description, Open Graph image) directly to each collection, with automatic generation from existing content and a preview of how the page will appear in search results.

Its real strength, however, comes from the combination with Next.js. You control server rendering, markup, structured data and loading speed, which is itself a ranking factor. This is a significant difference from WordPress, where technical SEO often depends on the quality of the theme and on a stack of SEO plugins that can conflict with one another.

The plugin ecosystem, free and at the right scale

This point deserves a candid assessment, since it is where many comparisons paint too flattering a picture. Payload provides a core set of official plugins that are free and well maintained.

• SEO, for metadata
• Form Builder, to create forms from the admin panel
• Search, for indexed search
• Nested Docs, for page hierarchies
• Stripe, for payments
• Cloud Storage, for file storage
• Redirects, to manage redirects

Community plugins add to this set and are growing in number, but they remain far from the scale of the WordPress ecosystem, which exceeds 60,000 plugins. In return, everything available for Payload is free with no hidden paywall, and you do not add third-party code of uncertain origin to your stack each time a new need arises, which remains a real security concern on WordPress.

Very low hosting costs

Payload is free and open source, with no licence fees. What remains to be paid for is the infrastructure, namely a Node.js server and a database (Postgres, MySQL or MongoDB).

For a site with modest traffic, the cost stays very contained.

• A small VPS from Hetzner starts at around €5 to €10 per month
• A managed Postgres database such as Neon offers a free tier with scale to zero, which can be enough for a site with little traffic
• There are no per-user fees, no commissions and no mandatory paid tier

One useful clarification concerns Payload Cloud, the managed hosting option offered by the Payload team, which has stopped accepting new sign-ups since Payload was acquired by Figma in June 2025. In 2026, self-hosting has therefore become the default path for any new project instead of one alternative among others, which fits well with the way we work.

Is Payload easier to use than WordPress? Partly

What Payload genuinely simplifies

Once the site is built, the day-to-day editing experience is clean, with a tidy interface, no overlapping plugins, no constant stream of security update alerts to manage, and no risk of a third-party plugin breaking the site after an automatic update.

What you accept in return

WordPress installs in a few minutes and can be managed without a developer, at least at the start. Payload needs to be set up by a developer, since the content structure is defined in code, so it is not a tool you would put together on your own over a weekend.

A fair way to see it is that WordPress is easier to start with, while Payload is easier to use once in place and easier to maintain over time, since it spares you the constant worry of plugin updates.

Speed, a genuine technical advantage

A WordPress site often carries a weight of plugins and theme code that ends up slowing loading times, even with caching. With Payload and Next.js, you control exactly what is generated and how, with static or server rendering depending on the page, and no layer of plugins running in the background without your full knowledge. For a site that needs to stay fast without constant attention, this is a concrete technical benefit.

Why we chose Payload CMS at Nualt

We do not offer WordPress. This is a deliberate technical choice on our part, made with full awareness of how widely WordPress is used.

WordPress solves a problem we no longer set out to solve at Nualt, which is letting anyone put a site online without a developer. That convenience comes at the price of technical debt, of dependence on third-party plugins whose code and long-term future are outside our control, and of an attack surface that grows with every extension installed. This trade-off does not match what we build.

Payload gives us what we look for, namely a content structure designed for each project instead of bent to fit a generic theme, code we understand from end to end, and SEO built into the architecture instead of added afterwards with yet another plugin. It means more upfront work on every project. It also ensures that, six months later, we do not inherit the limits of a tool that was chosen for the wrong reasons.