Case Study
View Case StudyTray.ai
Migrating hundreds of thousands of pages, re-platforming and extending for the leading composable AI integration platform
From Uniform to Directus
We are the Uniform to Directus migration experts
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Challenges with Uniform
Key pain points
Uniform’s biggest problem is the price of admission. And once you're in, good luck breezing through the learning curve. Teams consistently need workshops, onboarding sessions, and a few existential crises to get comfortable with its orchestration layer.
Because it’s still a relatively young DXP, the ecosystem is thin. You won’t find the deep plugin libraries or community support you get with more established headless tools. Content teams also struggle with their mental model. Especially since the abstraction adds a layer of debugging that feels like fighting a boss battle before publishing a single page, and unless you’re on their higher tiers, expect features and limits that remind you this thing is very much built for enterprises… not anyone trying to stay under budget this decade.
High enterprise pricing barrier
Uniform sits behind an aggressively enterprise paywall, making even basic usage expensive unless you're already swimming in Fortune-500 budgets.
Complex learning curve
Its whole “experience orchestration” model takes time to wrap your head around. Your team won’t be productive on day one, or even week one.
Extensive training requirements
Marketers and developers both need onboarding and workflow retraining, which slows adoption and inflates your implementation cost.
Enterprise-tier feature limitations
A surprising number of essential features only unlock once you upgrade, which is frustrating when the base plan is already pricey.
Preview functionality gaps
Content creators won’t love the limited, indirect preview setup. It’s nowhere near as smooth as modern CMSes with first-class real-time preview.
Integration complexity overhead
Uniform’s abstraction layer adds mental overhead and troubleshooting work when things break, especially if you're stitching together several backend systems.
Benefits of Directus
Key advantages
Directus instantly wins points with us because, well… it has a rabbit for a logo. But beyond that, it's genuinely a solid database-first CMS. If you like the idea of a CMS that sits directly on top of your SQL database without any abstractions, Directus feels incredibly natural.
You can self-host it, tweak it endlessly, and treat your schema exactly the way you want. Editors get a no-code admin UI that feels polished, developers get REST and GraphQL out of the box, and teams get workflows, versioning, automations, and proper permission controls. It's flexible, fast, and a great fit if your content is really just structured data waiting for a smarter interface. If your project revolves around relational data and you want total control from database to API, Directus is one of the cleanest ways to build it.
Intuitive non-technical interface
Editors get a clean, no-code admin panel that feels more like a productivity tool than a CMS. Non-technical teams can handle content updates without pinging developers every five minutes.
Database-agnostic SQL integration
Directus plugs straight into your SQL database and turns it into an API instantly. If your data lives in Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, or SQLite, it just works.
Field-level permission controls
You can lock down every field, table, and action with granular role-based permissions. Perfect for teams that care about security and don't want interns accidentally deleting production data.
Built-in REST/GraphQL support
Your entire database is instantly exposed as both REST and GraphQL endpoints. Just plug into your frontend and start shipping.
Extensive UI customization
Directus lets you tweak the interface, add custom views, tailor layouts, and build the exact editing experience your team needs. It feels like a CMS you can actually shape instead of fight.
Real-time collaborative editing
Multiple contributors can work in the Studio at the same time without stepping on each other's toes. Collaborative editing shipped in February 2026, so drafts stay clean and the whole workflow feels built for modern teams, not 2010 intranets.
AI Assistant with image and PDF support
The built-in AI Assistant can process images and PDFs as well as text, and it works across OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini. It's a genuinely useful addition rather than a feature-list checkbox.
Common questions
Uniform to Directus migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Uniform to Directus migration
How do we migrate away from Uniform?
Uniform is an orchestration layer, not a traditional CMS, so migration means detangling it from the systems it sits on top of. Your actual content likely lives in a separate CMS, DAM, or commerce platform. The Uniform-specific parts, including composition layouts, personalisation rules, and A/B test configurations, need to be rebuilt in your target platform or replaced with dedicated tools. We typically spend 2 to 4 weeks on Uniform-specific teardown, on top of whatever migration the underlying content sources require.
Why do teams leave Uniform?
The price-to-value ratio is the most common complaint. Uniform's enterprise pricing is steep, and teams find they're paying premium rates for an abstraction layer that adds complexity rather than removing it. The learning curve is real. Teams consistently need weeks of onboarding to become productive, and the orchestration model introduces debugging overhead that frustrates both developers and content editors. When the contract comes up for renewal, many teams conclude they'd be better served by a simpler architecture.
Do we actually need a DXP like Uniform?
Probably not. We've worked with teams that adopted Uniform because they were managing content across 4 or 5 different systems and wanted a single editing interface. In practice, most of those teams would have been better off consolidating into one strong headless CMS and using it as the single source of truth. The "composable DXP" pitch sounds good in a sales deck, but it often means you're paying enterprise prices to glue together tools that could be replaced by a cleaner architecture. We're happy to audit your stack and give you an honest answer.
How do we migrate content out of Directus?
Directus sits directly on your SQL database, which is both a blessing and a curse during migration. The blessing is that your content is in standard PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQLite tables, so extraction is as simple as SQL queries. The curse is that Directus stores relational data and file references in its own conventions, so you need to untangle junction tables and re-map asset URLs. We write custom migration scripts for each project. A typical Directus migration with 50 to 100 content types takes 3 to 5 weeks.
Why do teams move away from Directus?
The two biggest triggers we see right now are licensing uncertainty and pricing sticker shock. Directus moved to the Monospace Sustainable Core License (MSCL) with v12 in May 2026, replacing the old BSL. Organisations under $5M revenue and 50 employees get a free Innovation Grant, but even above those thresholds the MSCL still permits free use of the Core tier — so larger orgs aren't categorically forced onto paid plans, though many opt into the cloud or a commercial self-hosted license for the production features sitting outside Core, and the community is noticeably split, with some teams forking old versions or migrating off entirely. On the cloud side, the old unlimited tier is gone; the Professional plan is $99/month and caps you at 5 users, 75K database entries, and 250K API requests. Growth past those limits means a jump straight to custom Enterprise pricing. On the development side, any custom interface work still requires Vue.js, which creates friction for React-focused teams. Breaking changes between updates also erode trust over time. Teams that started with Directus for its open-source appeal often outgrow it when they need predictable pricing and cleaner editorial workflows.
Can we keep our existing database when migrating from Directus?
You can keep your database infrastructure, but you'll likely restructure the schema. Directus creates its own system tables (directus_users, directus_permissions, directus_files, etc.) alongside your content tables. During migration, we extract the content tables, transform the data to fit your new CMS's content model, and leave the Directus system tables behind. If you're moving to a headless CMS like Sanity, the data moves from SQL rows to structured JSON documents, which typically results in a cleaner content model.
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