Fóir as an alternative to Strapi
Strapi is the open-source headless CMS you run yourself. Both model content and both sign in your end users. The differences are what you operate, and what arrives already built.
Side by side
| Capability | Fóir | Strapi |
|---|---|---|
| Price | £0.99, £29 or £99 a month | Free self-hosted, or from $35 a month for Strapi Cloud |
| Content management | Standard | Standard |
| Hosted auth | Included | Included |
| Keeping it running | Managed, nothing to patch | You run, upgrade and scale it |
| Personalisation | Built in, resolved per request | Build it yourself |
| Per-tenant schema | Per project or organisation | One schema per instance |
| Agent access | Content and control plane | Content over MCP |
| Search and vectors | Full text, embeddings, geo | Plugin or an external service |
| Data ownership | Postgres export, access rules included | Your own database from day one |
Price
- Fóir
- £0.99, £29 or £99 a month
- Strapi
- Free self-hosted, or from $35 a month for Strapi Cloud
Content management
- Fóir
- Standard
- Strapi
- Standard
Hosted auth
- Fóir
- Included
- Strapi
- Included
Keeping it running
- Fóir
- Managed, nothing to patch
- Strapi
- You run, upgrade and scale it
Personalisation
- Fóir
- Built in, resolved per request
- Strapi
- Build it yourself
Per-tenant schema
- Fóir
- Per project or organisation
- Strapi
- One schema per instance
Agent access
- Fóir
- Content and control plane
- Strapi
- Content over MCP
Search and vectors
- Fóir
- Full text, embeddings, geo
- Strapi
- Plugin or an external service
Data ownership
- Fóir
- Postgres export, access rules included
- Strapi
- Your own database from day one
Strapi's behaviour is taken from its published documentation, current at August 2026. Where we say a thing is absent we mean absent from the product and its official plugins, not impossible to build. Corrections are welcome and we will make them.
The upgrade you do not run
Strapi is yours, which also means the version bumps, the plugin compatibility and the scaling are yours on the day they matter.
Fóir is managed. The trade is real and it runs one way: you give up the server, and you keep an export that carries your access rules with it.
Audiences without a second system
Serving different content to different visitors on Strapi is something you design: a field convention, resolution logic in every client, and a way to preview it.
In Fóir an audience is a model you own, and the API returns content already resolved for the request.
Many clients from one workspace
Several Strapi clients usually means several instances, each with its own copy of the content types and its own upgrade.
Fóir gives each client a project in one workspace, with no instance to upgrade. Clients who share a schema are organisations inside one project, where the model is defined once and each of them inherits it.
Retrieval past the keyword
Semantic search on Strapi is an external vector service you keep in sync with your content.
Fóir generates embeddings for your records, and stores coordinates on any model so you can ask what is nearby.
What you would otherwise assemble
A content API is the smallest part of what an application needs. These come with it.
Publishing
Drafts, full version history, revert, publish at a future time, and bulk rollouts when a batch has to go live together.
Model behaviour
Per model: versioning, publishing, variants, or none of them. Records can be plain data, owned by a customer, or public.
Permissions
Roles for your team and roles for your customers, plus per-record visibility and grants to a named person.
Hosted sign-in
Password, one-time code, and social or OIDC providers, on your own domain, with tokens and refresh handled for you.
Media and assets
An asset library with upload, transformations and responsive renditions, and the same access rules over files as records.
API keys
Each key reaches exactly the models and operations you allow, against a schema generated for that project.
Automation
Cron schedules, lifecycle hooks on publish and change, outbound operations, and a vault for the keys they need.
Notifications
Transactional email and push to web, iOS and Android, from the same events your content already emits.
Notes and tasks
Comments anchored to the record they concern rather than to a page, assignable to whoever has to act on them.
Ask Fóir
An assistant that works your content through the same tools and permissions your team has, staging its edits for review.
Work that carries on without you
Assign a task to Fóir and it works while you are away, coming back on the note when it needs an answer or is done.
Extensions
Install apps that add your own tools to the admin, beside the content they operate on.
Search and vectors
Full-text search, and embeddings generated for your records so you can retrieve by meaning rather than by keyword.
Geo
Store coordinates on any model and query by proximity: what is near this point, ordered by distance.
See it against your own models
Create a project, define a model, and read it back over the API.