Case Study
View Case StudyTray.ai
Migrating hundreds of thousands of pages, re-platforming and extending for the leading composable AI integration platform

Directus looks fantastic in demos, but things get rocky once you actually try to use it at scale. Cloud plans jump to enterprise the moment your team grows past five users, and the API limits are tight enough that any traffic spike means aggressive caching or a surprise bill. It feels flexible until you realise the platform has a lot of operational overhead baked in.
On the dev side, updates can introduce breaking changes, the documentation doesn’t always keep pace, and the extension ecosystem is pretty thin. Localization is technically supported but fiddly and easy to misconfigure, and large datasets make the UI noticeably sluggish. And if you want anything deeply custom, you’re suddenly living in Vue.js land, which is not where most teams want to spend their weekends.

Directus has a habit of shipping updates that occasionally break things you weren’t planning to fix. Unless you're on an enterprise plan, you don’t get clean version control.

The plugin ecosystem is still pretty bare. Anything even mildly niche ends up becoming a “let’s just custom build it” moment, which defeats the purpose of picking a CMS with extensions.

Yes, it supports multilingual content, but setting it up feels like assembling IKEA furniture blindfolded. It works, but expect extra config, extra steps, and extra patience.

Want safe rollbacks, controlled releases, and predictable deployments? Great, Directus will tell you to upgrade first. Versioning is locked behind higher-tier plans, which is… bold.

Custom interfaces and deeper tweaks need Vue.js, so if your team only speaks React, prepare for a small identity crisis (or a hiring plan).

Heavy tables and deeply relational data can slow down queries and the UI, forcing you to optimise more than you probably wanted to.
Contentstack is one of the more polished enterprise headless CMS platforms. It has API-first, composable, and loaded with the usual DXP buzzwords. It actually backs some of it up. The workflows are strong, role-based approvals are genuinely helpful for large editorial teams, and the visual builder plus modular blocks give marketers enough power to ship pages without pinging developers every 30 seconds. Its omnichannel delivery, multi-region CDNs, and fast APIs make it a solid fit for global brands with heavy traffic and complex localisation needs.
But this is firmly in enterprise territory. We generally don’t recommend platforms in the “DXP with 47 whitepapers” category, but if you must pick one, Contentstack at least has a smoother developer experience than most. The composable architecture is well thought out, integrations behave predictably, and the SDKs play nicely with modern frameworks like Next.js. If you're a Fortune-500-sized team and want help figuring out whether this is the right bet, or want a modern alternative instead, get in touch.

Built for large teams shipping across markets. The stack scales fast, stays stable under heavy traffic, and doesn’t crumble the moment your marketing team schedules a global launch.

Contentstack’s workflow engine handles multi-step approvals, roles, and governance without duct tape. Perfect for teams that need structure instead of Slack chaos.

Your content gets pushed worldwide through edge CDNs, keeping delivery fast even when your customers are nowhere near your servers.

Developers get flexibility without wrestling with legacy monolith logic with REST, GraphQL, and webhooks.

Strong developer tooling means faster builds and fewer hours wasted writing boilerplate just to fetch and render content.

Fully modular, cloud-native, and replaceable in parts. Plays nicely inside modern composable stacks instead of dragging you back to 2010.
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