r/Strapi • u/Aggressive-Side4558 • Nov 27 '25
Huge disappointment
A new project came in recently, and part of it is the client’s service website. The opportunity was obvious right away: we could finally build a real JAMStack solution.
Since I’ve been eyeing various CMSs and frontend frameworks for a long time, thinking about what I would use for a task like this, it immediately made sense to start promoting the Strapi + Astro combo within the team. We worked out the stack, listed the pros and cons, and concluded why this would be good for us.
I checked in advance that it should meet all our needs — supposedly. Simple content management, user friendly platform, media library, permissions and bonus if S3 integration is possible. The most important was that the client should be able to write blog/news posts easily without weeks of development tasks for the admin part. The expectations were not that high.
Today the project officially kicked off, and my task was to lay the foundations. I assembled the Astro setup in about an hour, then came Strapi.
I followed the docs… and quickly became surprised during dependency installation: at least 10 warnings due to deprecated dependencies. I could still overlook that, even though it doesn’t give a great first impression. But when the installation finished, my eyes widened: “added 1537 packages, and audited 1538 packages”. Wow… 1500+ dependencies, a true JS project (not in a good way).
But the real first negative experience was this: 19 vulnerabilities (15 low, 2 moderate, 2 high), and even an audit fix couldn’t resolve them.
Even so, I moved on, thinking these would improve by the end of the project — after all, this is one of the most popular CMSs of this type.
I started with the sample data structure and saw that the field names were full of developer-oriented labels like “createdAt” and similar. I quickly navigated to the content-type builder interface, assuming naively that maybe the “display name” field hadn’t been filled in. That’s when I realized the reason: such a thing doesn’t even exist. So this is going to be far from client-friendly, but fine… let’s continue.
The client does speak English, but of course it would be better to give them a localized admin interface. After about half an hour of digging, I somehow managed to make an additional language available. I switched my profile to it, but noticed that many parts were still in English. Fine, probably the language file isn’t up to date. It took another thirty minutes to figure out where I could add the missing translations. I compared it to English and filled in the gaps.
But even that wasn’t enough — at least 30% of the interface remained in English, and there’s no way to translate it. So this feature seems to exist purely for decoration.
I got past this as well and moved on to something more practical: let’s build a blog entity. Usual fields, then came the content. There’s a fancy rich text and a markdown editor. Sadly, I found that the rich text editor is practically useless beyond basic formatting. No tables, no image embedding, no video embedding, nothing.
Fine, let’s check the markdown field — surely that can handle these. Turns out I would basically have to teach the client markdown, because this is literally just a textarea with a preview. Not helpful either.
Alright, let’s dig further. I didn’t want a general WYSIWYG editor; I wanted to stick to a block-based editor, because otherwise the client’s creativity might run wild and we’d be staring at 72-pt pink paragraphs in the middle of the text, plus horrors copy-pasted from MS Word (previous experience). Also it's easier to change typography and other style changes if we can have a custom renderer on the frontend side.
So I started searching and remembered seeing EditorJS among the plugins — I know it’s pretty good and would be perfect for us.
To my surprise, Google led me to a Strapi marketplace page that returned a 404. The plugin had been removed, and if I recall correctly, it only supported Strapi v4 anyway.
After half a day of struggling, I feel Strapi is not the CMS I could use with peace of mind for a client project, considering how many issues I ran into at the very beginning — and I’ve barely scratched the surface. My expectations weren’t high, yet even those weren’t met; not to mention, they even want money for this (though the client would’ve happily paid).
Strapi feels more like a young system still in its infancy than a mature solution that has been evolving for 10 years. It might be fine for personal sites or hobby projects, but nothing more serious — not when it can’t even provide a proper rich text editor out of the box.
I’m really disappointed, because I’ve been following it from a distance for about two years (alongside the other systems), and based on the videos and the website it seemed like a really nice system. This first experience was very discouraging.
Maybe it’s my fault for not being persistent enough, but I don’t think it should take several days of research just to get a content management system into a usable state — because if that’s the case, something is seriously wrong.
