If you already visited strapi.io price page, you may have seen this popup and even had the occasion to chat with one of the Strapiers behind it: Pierre, Victor, Adrien, Mélanie, or me.
You’ve left 568 messages on this chat in 2020 and 1609 in 2021 to ask questions related to the features, to know if it’s a good fit for your use case, for technical assistance, for pricing details… And we did our best to provide answers, live or asynchronously.
So we thought it was time to make a Top 10 Most Frequently Asked Questions and share our answers with you!
1. “When will Strapi Cloud be available?”
As you may have seen, we plan to work on a Strapi Cloud and many of you have expressed interest in it by upvoting it on our roadmap as one of the most requested features. This is why we recently decided to change the wording from “Coming soon” to “Not available yet” as it reflects that we are ready to deliver something in the coming months. No public ETA has been communicated but please do not expect something in 2022.
If you need help to host your Strapi project, we have two kinds of partners that could be useful:
- Solution partners (see the full list here) can perform Managed Services to handle the deployment, hosting, scaling, and maintenance of your Strapi. You can choose to either go with the hosting options they offer or directly have them handle deployment configuration & maintenance over your own infrastructure.
- Technology partners (platform.sh, artifakt…) that build, operate, and scale complex infrastructures with a fully managed cloud hosting service.
2. “I don’t understand a “free, forever” open source version with paid features?
Strapi is following an “open-core” model. Meaning that 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. “What are the default roles?”
Let’s detail what kind of roles we’re talking about.
In Strapi, you have roles used to 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 that restrict content access to specific users in the Administration Panel. That’s what we call the Role-Base Access Control(RBAC) or Granular-Access Control. The Community Edition of Strapi offers 3 default roles (Author, Editor, and Super Admin). To go further, creating custom conditions for any type of permission is also possible. This requires an Enterprise Edition starting with a Bronze license plan.
Read this support article for more details.
4. Your pricing mentions: “per admin user/month”. “What do you consider to be an “admin user’?
Admin User is referring to anyone able to access Strapi (the user interface, not the API) regardless of whatever the User actually accesses or the frequency with which they access the interface.
If an Admin User has access to multiple projects with an enterprise edition (like a developer), then it counts twice.
You can find the legal definition in our Enterprise Terms.
5. “Is Strapi a good fit for large-scale apps like web stores with 500,000 products?”
Performance & scalability are quite a tough topic and there are so many variables that could have an impact: network, load-balancing, scaling (of everything), database tuning, model structure, number and type of relations, filtering types, caching, and CDN usage…
That being said, you should always keep in mind that Strapi is a product made of: a Node.js application, a database, and a 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, IBM, eBay, or Rakuten run Strapi in production, then you can trust it is a powerful high-performing system! We would love to hear your own story to share it with our community. You contact us at reviews@strapi.io
6. “Can I have multiple websites on Strapi”?
Yes, yes, and yes! That is actually what being “headless” means: having multiple heads, multiple frontends, multiple apps & websites! This blog post about “Single Source vs. Multichannel vs. Omnichannel Publishing” should help you to better understand this concept.
What about “multi-tenancy” which you may have seen on our roadmap? Actually, there are two definitions possible:
- a single-project approach: which is perfectly supported. It allows building multiple apps & websites relying on the same database, configuration, policies, plugins…
- a multi-project approach: which is not well supported. It changes the architecture of the application to allow multiple projects in a single Strapi application. Each project is fully independent, you can use different databases, policies, plugins… and maintaining such an advanced configuration and all the synchronization is very challenging.
7. “Is it possible to pay monthly for a Strapi Enterprise license?”
With our Enterprise Edition licensing, we offer annual payments for 1 year by default on all license plans.
For the Bronze and Silver plans, we do not allow for monthly, quarterly, or any other modifications to the payment schedule for less than one year. We can provide contracts that are longer than a year, but the entire term must be paid upfront.
For our Gold plan, we can do custom terms based on your needs and requirements. Options can be discussed with our sales team at sales@strapi.io.
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:
- Serve different model configurations with the same license
- 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, this key 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 around the world and over half use a CMS. One of our customers benchmarked more than 100 different solutions before choosing Strapi. With more than 40k GitHub Stars, Strapi ranks #140 most popular repository, before Adobe Brackets, Symfony or ASP.NET Core. Based on the number of GitHub stars and number of 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, infinite possibilities of customization… Whereas SaaS solutions provide ease of deployment for non-technical users.
When it comes to pointing out each solution’s differentiators, people are generally looking 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 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
