We are the Dato CMS to Magnolia migration experts

Despite its strengths, Dato CMS may pose issues, particularly for projects requiring extensive customisation or specific feature sets, as it might lack depth in certain areas compared to other CMS platforms. We've never been huge believers in "drag-and-drop" schema builders because they lack inherent validation and extensibility.

The pricing model, which scales with the required functionality and traffic usage, could be a limitation for startups or smaller businesses. Additionally, the learning curve associated with its API-driven environment might pose challenges to non-developers. Some users may also need additional plugins or custom development to fully meet their needs.

Magnolia shines if you’re the kind of organisation that genuinely needs the full DXP kitchen sink. It packs personalisation, workflows, multi-site orchestration, multilingual publishing, DAM, marketing automation hooks, and every enterprise acronym you can think of. If your teams run complex global content operations with strict governance, Magnolia’s mature permission system, stability, and long-standing enterprise reputation make it a safe, compliant option.

To be transparent, we don’t actually prefer or build with Magnolia (or any of the DXP-flavoured headless CMSs). They try to do everything, and like most jack-of-all-trades platforms, they don’t excel at the things modern teams actually need that is speed, flexibility, clean workflows, and sane pricing. We’d happily point you toward modern alternatives like Sanity that give you 10× the agility without the enterprise bloat.