# CMS Brew vs Decap CMS, compared honestly.

> Both keep content in your Git repository. The difference is the handoff: an admin panel your client has to learn versus a chat, and publish-on-save versus per-field guards that hold the risky edits for you.

## Short answer

Choose Decap CMS if you want free, self-hosted, and open source, and your editors can live with a form-based admin panel you configure and maintain. Choose CMS Brew if you hand finished sites to non-technical clients: they describe the change in chat instead of learning a panel, every field carries a guard level so risky edits wait for your approval, and requests that are really your job are refused in the editor and routed to you with the client's own words.

## Why developers go looking for a Decap alternative

Decap CMS, the old Netlify CMS, is still a solid free option, and it is still maintained by the community. The pain is everything around it. Netlify deprecated Git Gateway, the repository bridge the classic one-click login runs on, so those setups now owe an auth migration to a self-hosted OAuth app or a third-party bridge.

And even with auth sorted, the day-two problems stay: you model every collection and widget in config.yml by hand, for every client site, and your client still faces a form-based admin panel they use twice a year and never quite learn.

- **An admin panel is still an admin panel:** Decap's editor is collections, forms, and markdown widgets. A client who edits twice a year forgets it between visits. In CMS Brew they type what they want changed and see it in a live preview before it publishes.
- **Nothing stands between the client and production:** Whatever the config exposes, an editor can change and publish. Editorial workflow adds a draft board, not a rule about which fields are safe. In CMS Brew every field category has a guard level, and anything you set to Review reaches you before it reaches the site.
- **The easy auth path is gone:** Git Gateway is deprecated and new configurations are not recommended. A new Decap setup means wiring your own OAuth app, or adding another service, just to log the client in. CMS Brew ships sign-in out of the box: Google, or a 6-digit email code.

## CMS Brew vs Decap CMS, side by side

| | CMS Brew | Decap CMS |
| --- | --- | --- |
| What the client sees | A chat. They describe the change in plain words and watch a live preview. | An admin panel with collections, forms, and markdown widgets to learn. |
| Setup per site | Connect the GitHub or GitLab repository. Content is mapped automatically. | Write and maintain config.yml: collections, fields, widgets. |
| Client sign-in | Built in: Google or an emailed 6-digit code. | Bring your own OAuth. Git Gateway is deprecated. |
| Guardrails | Per-field guard levels: Open, Warn, Review, Locked. Code is never editable. | Clients can edit any field the config exposes. Editorial workflow adds drafts, not per-field rules. |
| Out-of-scope requests | Refused in the editor and escalated to you with the client's original words. | Not a concept. The request reaches you as an email or a phone call. |
| Publishing | One commit to your repository, one-click revert. | Also Git commits. Both tools keep content in your repo. |
| Running the CMS | Hosted. Nothing is added to your site, no admin page to ship or update. | A self-hosted admin page you ship with the site and keep updated. |
| Price | $39/mo for 5 sites, unlimited editors, 7-day free trial. | Free and open source. Decap Turbo, its paid team add-on, is separate. |

## Where the other option wins

Where Decap wins: it is free, open source, and self-hosted, and if your auth is already wired and your client is comfortable in a form admin, it keeps working. CMS Brew earns its fee when the panel itself is the problem: rare editors, no appetite for config and auth upkeep, and changes you want to review before they go live.

- Your OAuth is already wired and working, and nobody is asking you to change it.
- Your editors are technical enough to be comfortable in a form admin with markdown widgets.
- The budget for the site is zero, and your time spent on config and auth upkeep does not count.
- You need a feature CMS Brew deliberately does not have, like clients creating whole new pages.

## How to switch from Decap CMS to CMS Brew

1. **Connect the repository** Sign in and connect the site's GitHub or GitLab repository. There is no content migration because there is no content to move: your Markdown, frontmatter, and images already live in the repo, and CMS Brew maps the editable content automatically.
2. **Set your guards** Review the mapped fields and set a guard level per category: Open publishes freely, Warn asks the client to confirm, Review holds the change for you. Structural and code fields are locked from the start.
3. **Invite the client** Send the client an invite. They sign in with Google or an emailed 6-digit code, no GitHub account and no new password. Their first edit is a message, not a training session.
4. **Retire the panel when ready** Run both side by side as long as you like; both write plain commits. When you are confident, delete the /admin page and config.yml from the repo, and the OAuth app or auth bridge that served it.

## FAQ

### Is Decap CMS dead?

No. Development slowed after Netlify handed the project to the community in 2023, but it still gets releases. What is deprecated is Git Gateway, the repository bridge behind the classic one-click login, which is why so many Decap setups are being rethought right now.

### Do I have to migrate my content to CMS Brew?

There is no migration. Your content already lives in your Git repository, which is exactly where CMS Brew reads and writes it. Connect the repository and the editable content is mapped automatically. Your Decap config can stay in the repo or be deleted; CMS Brew does not use it.

### Can my client break the site with CMS Brew?

No. The editor never writes code. It can only change the specific content fields you allow, and anything risky is flagged for review before it goes live.

### Which frameworks does CMS Brew work with?

Next.js, Vue, SvelteKit, Astro, Nuxt, Remix, Gatsby, and Hugo, with previews on Vercel, Netlify, and Cloudflare. Every publish is a normal commit, so any host that rebuilds from Git works.

### Decap is free. What am I paying for?

The costs around free: writing config for every site, wiring and maintaining auth, training the client on the panel, and fielding the requests the panel cannot handle. That holds for the newer free options too, hosted or self-hosted, and whether or not they read your frontmatter without a config file. Some of them do offer a review step, and it is a branch you merge on GitHub, a whole batch of the client's changes at once. What you are buying here is finer than that: chat instead of a UI to learn, a guard level on every field so routine edits publish without you and only the ones you marked wait, and out-of-scope requests routed back with the client's own words. CMS Brew is $39 per month for 5 connected sites with everything included, and it starts with a 7-day free trial.

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- [Home](https://cmsbrew.com/)
- [Features](https://cmsbrew.com/features)
- [Full product details](https://cmsbrew.com/llms-full.txt)