Decap CMS: manage your site without a developer.

Your site is delivered. It is fast, well-indexed, deployed. And then you want to change a sentence. Add a blog post. Update a price. Two options: call your developer (and wait), or do it yourself.

The second option is called Decap CMS.

The problem with traditional CMS platforms

A CMS (Content Management System) is the software that lets you edit your site content without touching code. WordPress is the best known — and for many people, CMS and WordPress are synonymous.

The problem: WordPress is not just a content editor. It is a full web server. It needs a MySQL database, PHP hosting, regular security updates, and plugins for almost everything. You wanted to change a paragraph — and you end up managing infrastructure.

For a business website or a company blog, that is disproportionate.

What Decap CMS is (and what it is not)

Decap CMS is a content editor. Not a web server, not a framework, not a hosting platform. Just an editor.

It opens in your browser at yoursite.com/admin. You see your pages, your posts, your content. You edit what you want. You click “Publish”. Done.

What happens behind the scenes: Decap CMS writes your changes directly to your GitHub repository — the same place where your site code is stored. No database. No additional server. Your content is plain text files (Markdown), versioned like code.

A bit of history: Decap CMS was called Netlify CMS until February 2023. Netlify transferred the project to a community organisation (decaporg) and renamed it. The code, configuration and features are the same — only the name changed.

What you can do without a developer

Once Decap CMS is installed and configured (which is done by the developer at delivery), you have access to an admin interface in your browser. Here is what you can do on your own:

Edit existing content

• Change a title, a paragraph, a description
• Update a price, a date, a name
• Fix a typo

Create new content

• Write and publish a blog post
• Add a case study or a project
• Create a new entry in a defined collection

Manage media

• Upload images via drag and drop
• Organise your media library
• Replace an existing image

Manage the editorial workflow

• Save a draft without publishing
• Move a post to review
• Publish when the content is ready

The editorial workflow: draft → review → publish

This is the most useful feature for teams. Decap CMS offers a three-step workflow:

01

Draft

You create or edit content. It is saved but not visible on the site. You can come back to it as many times as needed.

02

In review

The content is ready to be reviewed by a colleague or a manager. The status changes, but nothing is published.

03

Published

One click on "Publish" merges the changes into the main branch. The site rebuilds automatically.

What happens technically: each draft creates a pull request on GitHub. When you publish, Decap CMS merges that pull request. If you use a host with continuous deployment (Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel), the site rebuilds in seconds.

In practice: you click “Publish” at 2:02 PM, your post is live at 2:03 PM.

What you cannot do without a developer

Let’s be honest. Decap CMS gives you autonomy over content, not over structure. Here is what still requires technical intervention:

• Adding a new content type (a new collection, new fields)
• Changing the layout of a page or a component
• Adding a feature (contact form, third-party integration)
• Modifying the design (colours, typography, spacing)
• Configuring permissions or user roles

This is not a limitation of Decap CMS — it is the distinction between content and structure. WordPress blurs that boundary — which offers flexibility up front, but complicates maintenance over time. Decap CMS maintains it clearly.

How much it costs

The most direct question deserves the most direct answer:

Decap CMS is MIT-licensed — free, open source, no mandatory paid tier. The CMS itself costs nothing. Your static hosting (Cloudflare Pages, for instance) is free on the Free plan. The total running cost of the CMS is literally zero euros per month.

The only cost is the initial setup — configuring Decap CMS, defining collections, integrating it into your site. At Astro4B, that is included in the delivery price.

Why we chose it for our clients

We were not looking for the most powerful CMS. We were looking for the CMS best suited to our clients: SMEs and freelancers who want to edit their content without depending on a developer for every comma, but who do not need 47 plugins to run a blog.

Decap CMS ticks every box:

• Free — no recurring cost tied to the CMS
• Git-based — every change is versioned, reversible, traceable
• Simple — the admin interface takes 10 minutes to learn
• Secure — no database to protect, no WordPress login to brute-force
• Bilingual — native internationalisation (i18n) support

Limitations to know about

No sales pitch. Here is what Decap CMS does not do well:

• No real-time collaborative editing — two people cannot edit the same post simultaneously (unlike Google Docs or Notion)
• Functional interface, not luxurious — it is a work tool, not a design product. For a more modern interface on the same principle, Sveltia CMS is a drop-in alternative
• No advanced role management — in the open-source version, all authenticated users have the same rights
• Not suited to very large volumes — beyond 500 posts, navigation in the interface slows down

For a business site with a blog of 10 to 100 posts, none of these limitations matter in practice.

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Decap CMS is included in every site we deliver. If editorial autonomy matters to you, build your project in the configurator — the CMS, hosting, and deployment are in the price.