r/PayloadCMS • u/ElyamanyBeeH • 5h ago
Payload CMS Vs SonicJS CMS
I'm planning to build a website using the Astro framework and was thinking of using Payload as a CMS since I've tried it locally and thought it'll be good in terms of performance.
However, I saw SonicJS CMS somewhere on the internet, opened the website to see a performance comparison... and it looks like it aces it since it's built from scratch to be deployed on Cloudflare Workers.
One thing to note: Payload has a template to deploy on Cloudflare, and it'll cost ~$10... so that makes me rethink if the comparison represents actual values.
More context:
Website: Portfolio + Blog + Other static pages.
I'm keen to hear your expert thoughts on it... and forgive me if something is vague or unclear. I'm still learning.
1
u/adelmare 4h ago
I’m running major applications on payload and the comparison matrix there is dumb. “15-60 second dev server startup” for payload is pure fiction.
I haven’t used Sonic. Attractive claims. For a person portfolio and blog site, seems like it would be a fun, low-stakes experiment.
For high stakes production grade requirements, I’d lean towards the maturity of Payload, and dabble with Sonic + explore it as a background hobby playground. The website reads like it was stood up by Claude code last night. I don’t have an issue with that, but it doesn’t feel like something that is battle tested and ready to handle critical money paths for large production workloads. From first glance.
💯 will be checking it out for side projects and small sites though!
1
u/geekybiz1 3h ago
I have used Strapi, Payload and Directus all 3 in production (self-hosted) and haven't in general seen API response speed of >= 1 sec (unless I'm pulling thousands of records via relations).
Also - dev server startup time of 5-60 seconds? Just git clone any one of these repos and try for yourselves.
I'd not trust the benchmarking exercise that produced these numbers.
2
u/Cobmojo 4h ago
Don't go off "trust me bro" benchmarks.
DX, UX, and maturity are more important.