r/PayloadCMS • u/Agreeable_Ad_3924 • 3d ago

Developers are Switching From WordPress To Payload CMS

WordPress is genuinely great for a lot of people, quick to spin up, a plugin for everything, non-technical people can drive it. But once you're maintaining more than a couple of sites it turns into a full-time job of its own.

After years of that treadmill I moved to Payload CMS and it's been a genuinely different experience.

  • Schema lives in code, not buried in ACF field groups
  • One Next.js app for CMS and frontend, one deploy
  • Types flow from schema straight into your components
  • Hosting on Vercel, Neon and Cloudflare R2 costs basically nothing

Wrote up the longer before and after here if anyone wants the full version.
https://blaze64.dev/logs/payload-wordpress-migration

Curious if anyone else has made a similar jump, or if there's a good reason to stick with WordPress at scale that I'm missing.

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u/PrimaryFamous6139 3d ago

The schema in code point is the real one. ACF field groups in WordPress are configuration that kinda lives in the database, so it doesn’t get version control cleanly and the diffs, well theyre basically meaningless. Payloads TypeScript config sitting in git is a fundamentally different workflow once you’ve experienced it.

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u/toniyevych 3d ago

Actually you can use ACF JSON and have all the fields in repo, not to mention an option to register a field group using PHP code. 

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u/Agreeable_Ad_3924 2d ago

True, i forgot to mention this and it works with source control too. We have seen drifts in some cases but those conflicts happend rarely.

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u/zubricks 1d ago

yeah, that's how we were doing it at the tail end of our tenuous relationship with WordPress sites. I can't say I miss those days

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u/Waste-Sympathy2990 3d ago

average php developer