EmDash is a modern, full-stack TypeScript Content Management System built on Astro and Cloudflare. It re-imagines the extensibility and user experience of traditional CMS platforms like WordPress, leveraging a serverless, type-safe architecture. A core innovation is its sandboxed plugin ecosystem, where plugins run in isolated Cloudflare Worker sandboxes with explicit capability declarations, fundamentally addressing security vulnerabilities. EmDash utilizes Portable Text for structured JSON content storage, decoupling content from presentation and enabling flexible multi-channel distribution. Designed for AI Agents, it offers development skill files, programmatic CLI tools, and a built-in MCP server for direct AI interaction. EmDash supports various databases and S3-compatible storage, providing a high-performance, secure, and developer-friendly platform for modern web content management.
Payload is a pioneering Next.js native headless CMS designed to install directly into your existing /app folder. Bridging the gap between an application framework and a traditional CMS, it enables developers to seamlessly integrate frontend and backend workflows in a single directory. A standout feature is the ability to query your database directly using React Server Components without relying on REST or GraphQL APIs. Payload offers an entirely extensible, 100% TypeScript architecture complete with out-of-the-box authentication, highly granular access controls, a block-based layout builder, and Lexical rich text editing. Free from vendor lock-in, it can be easily deployed via serverless infrastructure like Vercel or Cloudflare, making it an extremely robust, scalable choice for building anything from e-commerce stores to enterprise applications.