From KeystoneJS to Tina CMS

We are the KeystoneJS to Tina CMS migration experts

Challenges with KeystoneJS

Key pain points

The biggest challenge with KeystoneJS is that it hands you all the responsibility that a managed CMS would normally handle. Deployment is entirely on you, and the documentation around production hosting, Docker configuration, and scaling is thin. We've seen teams struggle to go from a smooth local development experience to a reliable production setup, especially if they don't have dedicated DevOps support. The admin UI Docker image alone can balloon to over a gigabyte, which is a headache for containerised deployments.

The community around Keystone is significantly smaller than competitors like Strapi or Payload. That means fewer tutorials, fewer plugins, and slower answers when you hit an edge case. The ecosystem of ready-made integrations is almost non-existent, so you'll be building most things from scratch. For an agency working on client projects with deadlines, that time cost adds up quickly.

Content editors also tend to have a harder time with Keystone compared to more polished alternatives. The admin UI is functional but feels utilitarian, and non-technical users often need more onboarding than you'd expect. There's no visual editing, no preview infrastructure, and no real content workflow features like drafts, publishing schedules, or approval chains without building them yourself. If your client's content team needs a CMS they can pick up and run with, Keystone usually isn't the answer.

Deployment complexity

Self-hosting is the only option, and the docs don't hold your hand. Getting Keystone into production requires real infrastructure knowledge, and the large Docker image sizes make it worse.

Small community and ecosystem

Compared to Strapi or even Payload, the community is much smaller. Fewer plugins, fewer tutorials, and slower support when things go wrong.

No built-in content workflows

There are no turnkey drafts, scheduled publishing, or approval chains. Keystone provides field primitives that can be assembled into publishing workflows, but you need to wire them up yourself.

Admin UI feels dated

The admin panel is functional but lacks the polish and UX of modern CMS interfaces. Non-technical editors often find it confusing and need more training.

No visual editing or live preview

There's no way for editors to see content in context before publishing. You'd need to build your own preview infrastructure, which is a significant engineering effort.

Scaling requires significant effort

Running Keystone under high traffic means managing session stores, reverse proxies, and server resources yourself. It doesn't scale as smoothly as cloud-native CMS alternatives.

Benefits of Tina CMS

Key advantages

Tina CMS has a genuinely compelling core idea: real-time visual editing backed by Git. Instead of your content living in some opaque database, every change becomes a Git commit. For developer teams that already live in Git, this feels natural. The local development workflow is solid too — you can iterate on schema and content simultaneously, merge everything in a single commit, and keep your content pipeline tightly coupled with your codebase. That's a meaningful advantage over CMS platforms that treat content as a completely separate concern.

The inline editing experience is where Tina really shines. Content editors can see their changes in context on the actual live site, which dramatically reduces the feedback loop between "I changed something" and "here's what it looks like." For marketing teams and content creators who are tired of editing fields in a dashboard and then previewing on a separate URL, this is a breath of fresh air. It bridges the gap between developer-friendly and editor-friendly in a way that most headless CMS platforms don't even attempt.

Since going fully open-source under Apache 2.0 and being acquired by SSW, the self-hosting story has improved significantly. You can run your own backend with your own database and auth, which gives you more control than relying on TinaCloud. If you're building a Next.js or React-based project and want a CMS that lives close to your code, Tina is worth serious consideration. If you want help evaluating whether Tina fits your stack, or you're looking at alternatives, we're happy to chat.

Real-time visual editing

Editors can make changes directly on the live site with instant visual feedback. This is genuinely one of the best inline editing experiences in the headless CMS space.

Git-backed content workflow

Every content change becomes a Git commit, so your content versioning, branching, and collaboration all flow through the same tools your developers already use.

Schema defined in code

Content models are defined in your codebase alongside your components, keeping your content structure and frontend tightly aligned and version-controlled.

Strong local development experience

You can develop locally with full CMS functionality, iterate on schema and content together, and push everything in a single commit. No cloud dependency during development.

Markdown and MDX support

Tina works natively with markdown and MDX files, making it a natural fit for documentation sites, blogs, and any project that already uses file-based content.

Fully open-source and self-hostable

The entire backend is open-source under Apache 2.0. You can self-host with your own database, auth, and Git provider, giving you full control over your content infrastructure.