Fóir as an alternative to Payload

Owning your data without running a database

The usual reason to self-host is a worry about lock-in: if the vendor goes away, or the price changes, or the answer to a question is no, you want your content somewhere you control.

Fóir answers that with an exit rather than an obligation. One command produces a database you own: a table per model, references as real foreign keys, and your access rules translated onto it, checked by a test that puts the same customer's claims against both databases and requires the same rows back. You can leave, and the thing that made your data safe leaves with you.

Until you want to, there is no database for you to run, patch, or be woken by.

A check you forget cannot leak a row

Payload separates tenants with access-control functions that add a filter to your query. That holds exactly as long as every collection is registered and every code path goes through it, and their own documentation is direct about the limits.

In Fóir the rules you write are enforced underneath the application, not by it. A read that forgets a check comes back empty rather than complete, and a project that gains somewhere new to store data cannot ship without rules covering it.

The rest of the backend comes with it

Most of what an application needs beyond storing content is already here: scheduled work, lifecycle hooks that fire on publish or change, outbound operations to the systems you integrate with, and a place to keep the API keys those calls need without pasting them into config.

Sign-in comes with it. Your end users get registration, password and one-time-code login, social providers, roles and refresh tokens, on your own domain rather than ours, without you standing up an auth service beside the CMS.

One workspace, every client

Agencies get a project per client, all administered from one workspace. Clients who should share a schema sit as organisations inside one project: the model is defined once, every organisation inherits it, and any of them can add a model of its own where a client needs something the others do not.

Every key is created inside a project and serves that project alone, so a client's key reaches only their own content. Each project has its own sign-in domain and its own branding.

An audience is a model you own

Content in Fóir resolves per request. An audience is defined from your own models, so it is editable, versioned and addressable like anything else, and a variant can replace a whole record or a single field inside it.

That is the piece with no equivalent on the other side. Payload points you at Croct or Statsig, which means a second system, a second bill, and content that lives in two places.