12 Best Payload CMS Plugins to Boost Your Project Now

When you're evaluating a CMS, the plugin ecosystem is one of the first things you look at. Can it handle authentication at scale? Does it have SEO tooling built in? What happens when you need multi-tenancy or AI-assisted content? These questions matter before you write a single line of code.

I've been building on Payload CMS for a while now, and one of the things I keep coming back to when clients ask "why Payload?" is exactly this — the ecosystem has matured significantly, and there are solid plugins covering almost everything you'd need out of the box.

This guide walks through the best Payload CMS plugins across four categories: official plugins, authentication, AI tooling, and developer experience. Whether you're still evaluating Payload or already using it and looking to extend it, these are the plugins worth knowing.

Official Plugins: What Ships With the Ecosystem

Payload maintains a set of first-party plugins inside their monorepo, and these cover a lot of ground. The quality is high because they're maintained by the core team and kept in sync with every Payload release.

SEO

The @payloadcms/plugin-seo plugin adds a complete meta management layer to any collection. It gives you meta titles, descriptions, OG images, and auto-generation hooks that can populate fields based on your existing content. There's also a search-result preview directly inside the admin panel so content editors can see what their page looks like in Google before publishing.

If SEO is a concern for your project — and it usually is — this plugin alone removes a significant amount of custom field work.

Search

@payloadcms/plugin-search solves a real problem: Payload's default query API is powerful but not optimized for full-text search patterns. This plugin creates a separate indexed "search" collection that syncs selected fields from your other collections, giving you fast, prioritizable lookups without reaching for an external search service on day one.

It's not a replacement for Algolia or Meilisearch on large content sets, but for most projects it handles search well without adding infrastructure complexity.

Multi-Tenant

@payloadcms/plugin-multi-tenant is one of the more impressive official plugins. It adds a tenants collection and scopes all data by tenant, letting you run multiple independent sites — each with their own content, users, and settings — from a single Payload instance.

This is the kind of feature that would take weeks to build correctly from scratch. The fact that it's maintained officially and kept current with the Payload internals makes it a serious selling point for SaaS builders or agencies managing multiple client sites.

Import/Export

@payloadcms/plugin-import-export adds CSV and JSON import/export to the admin UI, with support for large datasets via the job queue and a preview step before import. Useful for content migrations, data backups, or handing editors a way to bulk-update content without API access.

Form Builder

@payloadcms/plugin-form-builder adds a dynamic form creation system to the admin panel. Editors can build forms with field definitions and view submissions — no code changes required. If your project includes landing pages, contact forms, or surveys, this removes the need for a third-party form service entirely.

Authentication: More Options Than You Might Expect

Authentication is an area where Payload's extensibility really shows. The community has built several strong plugins here, each taking a different approach.

payload-auth-plugin (authsmith)

With 291 GitHub stars, payload-auth-plugin by authsmith is the most popular auth plugin in the ecosystem. It adds OAuth, SAML, SSO, OIDC, and WebAuthn/passkey support to Payload. If you're building for enterprise clients or need social login plus SSO from day one, this is the plugin to reach for.

The documentation lives at authsmith.com and is kept reasonably up to date with Payload 3.x changes.

payload-authjs

payload-authjs by CrawlerCode integrates Auth.js (formerly NextAuth 5) with Payload. This is a natural fit if you're already using Next.js and Auth.js in your stack — it brings social logins and OAuth providers into Payload without having to learn a new auth abstraction.

At 205 stars and with commits as recent as early 2026, it's actively maintained and well-regarded in the community.

payload-auth (Better Auth integration)

payload-auth by the payload-auth org integrates Better Auth with Payload. Better Auth is a relatively new auth library that's been gaining traction for its flexibility and TypeScript-first design. If you're starting a new project and want a modern auth foundation, this combination is worth exploring. 266 stars and active development suggest real adoption.

payload-oauth2

For simpler OAuth needs — connecting Google, GitHub, or a custom provider like Zitadel — payload-oauth2 by WilsonLe covers the basics cleanly. 175 stars, updated as recently as January 2026, and straightforward to configure.

payload-totp

payload-totp by GeorgeHulpoi adds TOTP (time-based one-time password) two-factor authentication on top of Payload's existing auth system. 127 stars, updated into 2026, and well-suited for admin-heavy applications where you want an extra security layer without full SSO complexity.

AI Plugins: Actually Useful, Not Just Hype

The AI tooling in the Payload ecosystem is further along than you might expect. These aren't vague "AI-powered" wrappers — they solve specific content production problems.

payload-ai

At 430 GitHub stars, payload-ai by ashbuilds is the most starred community plugin in the entire Payload ecosystem. It integrates text generation, image generation, voice generation, and translation directly into the admin panel. Editors can trigger AI writing assistance, generate images inline, and translate content without leaving Payload.

The plugin supports multiple providers and is designed to slot in alongside your existing fields. For content-heavy projects — especially those targeting multiple languages — this meaningfully changes the editorial workflow.

payload-plugin-ai-localization

payload-plugin-ai-localization by Crayonan takes a more focused approach: it adds a "Translate" button to non-primary localized fields, using OpenAI (or other models) to auto-populate translations. If you're using Payload's built-in localization and need to support multiple languages without a dedicated translation team, this is one of the most practical plugins in the ecosystem.

Developer Experience: The Plugins That Make Building Easier

Beyond the feature-layer plugins, there's a set of community plugins that improve the development experience itself — better fields, better editors, better documentation generation.

payload-better-fields-plugin (NouanceLabs)

payload-better-fields-plugin by NouanceLabs has 278 stars and provides improved, specialized field components for the Payload admin panel. If you've ever wished Payload's default fields were a bit more polished — better date pickers, color selectors, and so on — this plugin addresses that directly without requiring custom component work.

payload-visual-editor (pemedia)

payload-visual-editor by pemedia GmbH brings a live visual editor into the Payload admin UI. Editors can see a real-time preview of their frontend while editing content, which is a significant UX upgrade for clients who find the default admin panel too abstract. 283 stars and maintained through 2024.

payload-lexical-typography

Payload 3.x ships with Lexical as its rich text editor, and payload-lexical-typography by AdrianMaj extends it with additional typography controls: color, font size, line height, font family, and letter spacing. At 103 stars, it's a solid addition if your editors need finer control over inline text styling.

payload-oapi

payload-oapi by janbuchar generates OpenAPI 3.0/3.1 specifications from your Payload API schema. This is particularly useful if you're building a public API on top of Payload or working in a team where frontend and backend developers need a shared contract. 114 stars, committed to as recently as February 2026.

payload-dashboard-analytics (NouanceLabs)

payload-dashboard-analytics adds analytics charts directly into the Payload admin panel, with support for providers like Plausible and Google Analytics. 173 stars. Useful for clients who want traffic data without switching to a separate analytics dashboard.

payload-bites (rilrom)

payload-bites is a collection of small, focused Payload v3 plugins — image search, fullscreen editor, audit fields, soft delete, and activity log — all in one repo. At 96 stars and updated into 2026, it's a good set to scan through because there's a good chance one of these solves something you'd otherwise build yourself.

How to Discover More

The official discovery path for Payload plugins is the payload-plugin GitHub topic, which shows everything the community has tagged. The Payload Marketplace also curates a list of developer plugins with direct links and descriptions.

For building your own plugin, Payload's plugin system is straightforward: a plugin is a function that receives the incoming config and returns a modified config. The monorepo includes a template with a /dev folder for local testing so you're not publishing blind.

Worth Knowing Before You Commit

A few honest notes for anyone evaluating based on the ecosystem:

Some plugins target Payload 2.x and haven't been updated for 3.x. Before installing anything, check that the repo shows Payload 3.x in the peer dependencies and has had commits in the last year. The community is active, but Payload 3.0 was a significant rewrite and not everything has caught up.

The official plugins are safe bets — they live in the Payload monorepo and ship with the same release cadence. For community plugins, GitHub star count combined with recent commit activity is a reasonable signal for maintenance quality.

If you're coming from Sanity, Strapi, or another headless CMS and wondering whether Payload has enough ecosystem depth to support a real production project — based on what's available here, the answer is yes. The combination of official first-party plugins and a community that's built serious tooling around auth, AI, and developer experience means you're not starting from zero on common problems.

Let me know in the comments if you have questions about any of these, or if there's a specific plugin category you'd like me to go deeper on. Subscribe for more practical Payload guides.

Thanks, Matija