Why Payload Is the Best Headless CMS for Next.js 2026

Most developers I talk to treat CMS selection as a tooling decision. Pick something popular, get it working, move on. That approach works fine until you're 18 months into a project and realising the CMS you chose is fighting the framework you're building on — or locking you into a pricing model that doesn't scale with your business.

I've built production systems on Strapi, Sanity, and Payload over the past few years. This article is about why I keep landing on Payload for Next.js projects in 2026, what the data actually shows about where the ecosystem is headed, and where Payload still loses — because it does lose, and pretending otherwise wouldn't help you make a better decision.

What Payload Actually Is (And Why 3.0 Changed the Calculus)

Payload started as a self-hosted headless CMS built on Node and Express. Good, but not particularly differentiated. The real shift happened with Payload 3.0, released in November 2024, which repositioned the entire project around a single architectural idea: Payload installs directly into your Next.js application.

Not alongside it. Not as a separate service you run next to it. Inside it.

This means your CMS and your frontend share the same codebase, the same TypeScript types, the same database connection, and the same deployment. You define a collection in Payload and you get typed access to that data in your Next.js server components without an API round-trip, without a separate authentication layer, and without synchronising schemas across two codebases.

Most headless CMSes — including Strapi — were designed when "headless" meant a decoupled API service. Payload 3.0 was designed for the world where your Next.js app is the backend. That's not a minor implementation detail. It's a different mental model for how a content system fits into a modern stack.

What the Growth Numbers Actually Tell You

When evaluating a tool for a production commitment, ecosystem trajectory matters. A CMS that's declining or stagnating becomes a maintenance liability. Here's what the data shows as of early 2026.

Payload hit 40,707 GitHub stars with 3,393 forks and ships on a consistent weekly release cadence — v3.77.0 landed on February 18, 2026. The project crossed 5 million total npm downloads in June 2025, up from 1 million the year prior. Weekly downloads currently sit at approximately 105,000. That is not stagnant.

The Figma acquisition in June 2025 is worth addressing directly, because developers reasonably ask whether an acquisition means a project is about to get sidelined. In this case, the evidence points the other way. Figma acquired Payload because it needed a serious content infrastructure layer — and the weekly release cadence has continued unchanged post-acquisition. The project is not being absorbed into a product and shut down; it is being resourced.

BuiltWith shows 773 live websites using Payload today, which sounds modest. Wappalyzer's trend data is more telling: zero top-traffic websites tracked in February 2025, thirty in February 2026. That is a 30x increase in twelve months among high-traffic sites. Early adoption among serious production deployments is accelerating.

The KD 23 on "payload cms" as a head term — with 3,600 monthly searches — tells you something about market maturity. This ecosystem is where Strapi was several years ago. The search volume is growing. The commercial terms are thin now but they will fill in. Building on Payload today means building before the crowd arrives.

Where Payload Wins Against the Alternatives

Against Strapi: Strapi is a solid choice if you want a CMS-as-a-service running independently from your frontend. But if your frontend is Next.js 15+, you are adding operational complexity — a separate Node.js process, a separate deployment, a separate schema — to get data into your components. Payload eliminates that layer entirely. You also get TypeScript-first schema definitions with Payload, where Strapi's TypeScript support has historically been bolted on rather than native.

Against Sanity: Sanity is genuinely excellent for content-heavy editorial workflows. The Studio is polished, the GROQ query language is powerful, and the hosted infrastructure means you don't manage a database. The tradeoff is vendor dependency and pricing at scale. Payload is MIT-licensed, self-hosted, and your data lives in your own Postgres instance. If data ownership and cost predictability matter to your client or business, Sanity's model creates constraints that Payload avoids entirely.

Against Contentful: Contentful is enterprise SaaS. It will outlast any individual project and has integrations for everything. It will also cost you significantly as content volume grows, and the API-first model means you are always crossing a network boundary to get content into your app. For teams that need enterprise support contracts and don't want to manage infrastructure, Contentful makes sense. For everything else, it is an expensive abstraction.

Against WordPress: If you are evaluating WordPress as a headless CMS in 2026, the meaningful question is usually migration cost, not technical merit. WordPress has ecosystem depth that no headless CMS matches yet. But the developer experience of building a Next.js frontend on WPGraphQL is rough, and the security surface area of a WordPress installation is real. Payload is a better architectural foundation for net-new projects. For migrations, the calculus depends entirely on content volume and editorial workflow complexity.

Where Payload Still Loses

The ecosystem is small. This is the honest constraint that matters most.

Plugin availability, community answers on Stack Overflow, third-party integrations out of the box — Payload has a fraction of what Strapi or WordPress offer. If you need a specific integration (Stripe, Algolia, a particular auth provider) and you want it to be a five-minute npm install, Payload is more likely to require you to build it yourself.

The admin UI, while functional and customisable, is less polished than Sanity's Studio for non-technical content editors. If your client's marketing team is going to live inside the CMS daily, Sanity's editorial experience is meaningfully better today.

Self-hosting also means you own the infrastructure problem. Database backups, Postgres version management, deployment pipelines — Payload Cloud exists and is improving, but if your client wants zero infrastructure responsibility, the self-hosted model adds overhead that a SaaS CMS eliminates.

Finally, the documentation is still catching up with the pace of development. Payload 3.x moves fast — v3.77.0 in February 2026 — and the docs don't always reflect the latest behaviour. You will hit gaps and have to read source code or dig through GitHub issues to fill them. That is a real cost for teams new to the project.

The Gotchas That Will Cost You Time

The migration story is still maturing. Payload's push-to-migrations workflow works, but the mental model requires care. If you run Payload in dev mode and then try to move to a migration-based flow in production, you can introduce schema drift that is painful to resolve. Establish your migration strategy at the start of the project, not when you are preparing to deploy.

The multi-tenant architecture is powerful but non-obvious. Payload's multi-tenant plugin lets you scope collections to individual tenants — exactly what you need for SaaS or multi-client platforms. But tenant scoping requires deliberate implementation at every query level. Omitting a tenant filter in the wrong place results in cross-tenant data exposure, which is silent in development and dangerous in production. This is not a bug; it is a sharp edge that requires understanding, not just copying the plugin setup.

TypeScript generation is not automatic in all setups. Payload generates types from your collection definitions, which is one of its strongest features. But if your build pipeline doesn't account for type generation as a step, you will either commit generated types (creating merge conflicts) or run into situations where your editor types and your runtime schema are out of sync. Decide upfront how type generation fits into your workflow.

The Verdict

Payload is the right headless CMS for a Next.js project in 2026 if your priorities are data ownership, TypeScript-native development, and architectural alignment with how the Next.js App Router actually works. The 3.0 release removed the operational overhead that made previous versions a harder sell — you are no longer running a separate service, you are extending your existing application.

The ecosystem is still early. You will build more yourself, encounter more documentation gaps, and find fewer ready-made integrations than you would with Strapi or Contentful. That is the tradeoff.

For client projects where the client cares about long-term data portability and cost predictability, and where you have a Next.js codebase as the foundation, Payload is the choice I make consistently. The growth trajectory — stars, downloads, adoption among high-traffic sites, and a well-resourced team post-Figma acquisition — suggests the ecosystem gap will narrow. Being early in that curve is an advantage, not a liability.

If you are evaluating Sanity for a content-heavy editorial workflow, or Contentful for an enterprise context with existing vendor relationships, those are legitimate choices for those specific constraints. For the majority of Next.js projects I encounter, neither of those constraints applies.

Payload is the bet I keep making. The data in 2026 makes me more confident in it, not less.

If you have questions, ran into a different gotcha, or disagree with the Sanity comparison — drop a comment below. And if you found this useful, subscribe for more.

Thanks, Matija