What is ButterCMS?
ButterCMS is a hosted headless CMS built around three things: pages, collections and a blog engine. You define page types and fields, editors build landing pages from them, and your front end pulls everything through an API. There are SDKs for the common stacks, including Next.js, Nuxt, Rails, Django, Laravel and .NET, which is the reason many teams pick it. It is a way to add a CMS to an existing app without changing the app’s language.
Who should use it?
Butter suits small and mid-size teams that need marketing pages and a blog edited without developers. Typical cases are a SaaS company with a Rails or Laravel app that wants a managed blog and landing pages, or a startup that outgrew WordPress but has no appetite for running Strapi.
It is not an enterprise platform. There is no self-hosted option, and the content model is simpler than in Contentful or Contentstack.
What does it cost?
As of October 2026 the vendor’s pricing page lists a Free plan, then Basic at $71 per month, Advanced at $224, Professional at $359 and a custom Enterprise plan. Every plan has unlimited users and components. The limits that matter are API calls, pages and locales: Free has 5 pages and 50K API calls per month, Basic 20 pages and 100K calls, and multiple locales start at Professional. Webhooks and the write API are add-ons on Advanced and above, and single sign on is Enterprise only. Pricing changes, so confirm it before you commit.
What do we build with ButterCMS?
Page types and components. We design page types that match your layouts and a library of components editors can stack. Page count limits shape the model, so we count your pages first.
Blog and content hubs. The blog engine covers categories, tags, authors and SEO fields. We add related posts, search, RSS and canonical rules, and keep old WordPress URLs alive.
Front end. In Next.js we use static generation or incremental regeneration, with webhooks rebuilding the affected page. In server frameworks we call the API from the app and cache the response. Our Next.js development team handles the former.
Integrations. Forms, marketing automation, analytics and search connect through the API and webhooks. Check that your plan includes webhooks before designing around them.
How does ButterCMS compare with a blog on WordPress?
The editing experience is simpler, because there are no plugins to update and no theme to patch. The trade is control. WordPress lets you change anything, while Butter gives you what the API exposes. For teams whose WordPress site is mostly a blog plus a dozen landing pages, that trade usually favours Butter. For teams with custom post types, membership or commerce built into WordPress, it does not, and a headless WordPress or Strapi setup keeps more of what they have.
We also look at the editor side before recommending it. If your marketers build a new page layout every week, check that the component library can express those layouts, since a missing component means a developer ticket. A short workshop with your editors on real past pages answers this faster than a feature list.
When we would recommend something else
| Situation | Better fit |
|---|---|
| Hundreds of pages and many locales | Contentful, Contentstack or Agility CMS |
| You want to host the CMS yourself | Strapi or Payload |
| Content lives in git and developers do the editing | A git based CMS such as Decap or Sitepins |
| Heavy structured data for an app | Sanity or Contentful |
If you are weighing options, our headless CMS page explains how we choose.
Moving to ButterCMS
We export the old site, map posts, pages and media to Butter’s types, import them through the Write API on a staging account, and rebuild the templates. Redirects are generated from the URL map. Because pages are priced by count, we prune thin or duplicate pages before importing. For WordPress sources see WordPress to headless CMS migration.
Working with us
We build Butter projects end to end or supply engineers who already know the SDKs. To add people to your team, hire ButterCMS developers. Our rate band is $50 to $150 per hour; fixed scope is quoted after an audit of page types, locales and integrations.
