The Headless CMS Showdown: Dato CMS vs Agility CMS

In this showdown, we pitch Dato CMS vs Agility CMS.

Agility CMS Product Overview

Agility CMS is a cutting-edge content management system (CMS) designed to transform how businesses manage, optimize, and deploy digital content. With a focus on innovation and user-centric features, Agility CMS empowers organizations to create captivating digital experiences effortlessly.

At the heart of Agility CMS lies its powerful headless architecture, offering unparalleled flexibility and scalability. By decoupling the front-end and back-end, Agility CMS enables seamless content delivery across various channels and devices, elevating the digital experience for every user.

Agility CMS adopts an API-first approach, facilitating seamless integrations with external systems and tools. Its well-documented APIs allow developers to connect effortlessly, unlocking endless possibilities for marketers and content editors to leverage third-party integrations.

One of Agility CMS's standout features is its robust content modeling system. This allows businesses to define and structure content according to their unique needs. With flexible content modeling capabilities, users can create custom content types, establish relationships between content items, and set validation rules, ensuring content is organized and optimized for success.

Scalability and performance are paramount in Agility CMS's design. Built to handle large-scale content management needs, the platform guarantees high availability, reliability, and exceptional performance. By leveraging cloud hosting services and incorporating caching mechanisms and CDN integration, Agility CMS optimizes content delivery, ensuring blazing-fast and responsive digital experiences.

Security and compliance are top priorities for Agility CMS. The platform adheres to industry-standard security practices and robust encryption, ensuring data remains secure at rest and in transit.

Agility CMS's white glove service provides a personalized experience like no other. From onboarding to ongoing support, a team of experts guides users through every step, ensuring a smooth journey and the highest level of service.

Whether for intricate multimedia content, interactive applications, or specialized digital experiences, Agility CMS equips businesses with the tools and support to bring their visions to life with precision and efficiency. As a proud member of the MACH Alliance, Agility CMS aligns with industry-leading principles, ensuring seamless integration with other MACH-compliant systems and opening avenues for innovation and growth.

Agility CMS is a comprehensive solution that embodies flexibility, innovation, and user empowerment, making it an ideal choice for businesses seeking to excel in the era of composable architectures.

Dato CMS Product Overview 

Dato CMS is a cloud-based headless Content as a service (CaaS) platform that works with static websites, mobile apps and server-side applications. It allows both non-technical users and team members to manage their content operations. 

Dato CMS provides a content infrastructure that comprises two different APIs, a content delivery API and a content management API for working with your content. Users can leverage the content management API to create and deploy digital experiences; this includes creating, updating, deleting, and fetching your projects' content. 

DatoCMS ships with an official API client for Javascript and Ruby. Both clients use JSON Schema for API typing.

Dato CMS vs Agility CMS 

Sitemap and URL Management

Most headless CMSs leverage APIs to generate a map of the pages on your site and manage URLs. In Agility CMS, your pages live within your sitemap. You can see at a glance where each page is and how it relates to the other pages. We also call this a 'page tree', and we use it to show the hierarchy of all the pages as they appear on the website. 

Dato CMS, on the other hand, doesn't offer sitemap and URL management out-of-the-box. The only way to generate or manage URLs in Dato CMS is to integrate third-party software or code your own solution. 

Integrated Page Management

Agility CMS's hybrid headless approach provides templates and modules that determine how content will look when rendered on the website. Editors can modify the layout of pages in the easy-to-ease visual interface using drag-and-drop functionality. The system is extensible, with many built-in modules and the opportunity to add new modules created by your development team.

Dato CMS is a pure headless solution that integrates with static site generators like Gatsby to offer an intuitive web UI for content creators. A static site generator enables content editors to publish content without developers. However, without third-party software, all that Dato serves is structured content.

Unlimited Number of API Requests

Agility's CMS offers users unlimited API requests starting from its Standard Plan, giving you unlimited users and content items. On the other hand, Dato CMS doesn't offer unlimited API requests; they offer 100k/month with their free plan and up to 2M/month with their enterprise plan, and you have to pay for additional requests.

Comparing the Two:

While both DatoCMS and Agility CMS offers powerful content management capabilities, Agility CMS distinguishes itself with its comprehensive approach to support, scalability, and advanced integrations. Agility CMS's white glove service ensures personalized assistance throughout the user journey, while its emphasis on scalability and performance makes it well-suited for enterprise-level projects.

Ultimately, the choice between DatoCMS and Agility CMS depends on the organization's specific needs, the users' roles, and the extent of integration and scalability required. Both platforms contribute to the growing landscape of headless CMS solutions, offering unique features that can empower businesses differently.

The Verdict

When choosing a CMS, decision-makers always ask themselves the same question: should I choose a CMS that benefits my content editors or one that caters to developers? The truth is that this is no longer an issue because you can have the best of both worlds. However, while Dato CMS is a solid choice for developers, it still lacks functionalities for content editors. 

The main strength of Dato CMS lies in its developer-focused architecture. Dato CMS presents a simple-to-use platform for developers that enables plenty of third-party integrations to make up for the sometimes bare-bones structure and UI of Dato CMS.  

Dato CMS enables developers to customize it and create static websites and single-page applications to deliver them to different channels, but it falls short of catering to content teams and editors. For non-technical users, Dato can present too much of a challenge because it needs a high degree of customization to get it up and running the way you want to, which is something that doesn't happen with Agility CMS.