Payload CMS emerges as the clear winner for building a website platform serving thousands of tenants. Its native multi-tenancy plugin enables a single deployment to serve unlimited tenants efficiently, while most competitors either lack multi-tenancy entirely or become prohibitively expensive at scale. For teams prioritizing full control and cost efficiency, self-hosted Directus ranks second; Firebase/Firestore offers a viable path for those willing to build custom CMS features on top of proven infrastructure.
The fundamental challenge is that most headless CMS solutions were designed for single-tenant use cases. Strapi, Ghost, and even enterprise platforms like Contentful hit architectural walls when scaled to thousands of separate tenant websites. The comparison below reveals which platforms can actually handle this demanding use case.
The website builder use case fundamentally requires true multi-ten