Adapto CMS

What it is

Adapto CMS is a hosted headless CMS for developers and the agencies and product teams that build for clients. You model your content, store it, and fetch it over a REST API; the pages describe an API and CLI workflow, not a visual page builder. The company's pitch is pricing: one flat rate that bundles the content API, media CDN, image optimization, localization and webhooks, with every feature on every plan. The pages do not say where the company is based. They do say it was started by two founders, Vlad and Alex, who ran an agency first and built the CMS they wished they had been able to recommend.

What you build and how

Adapto stores structured content and hands it to whatever front end you write. The pages list the primitives a dev team gets on every plan: content modeling, a REST API, a CLI, webhooks, a media CDN and localization. Custom data structures are on that list too, so you define your own collections rather than fitting a fixed blog or page schema. There is also an asset library, "microcopies", and custom roles for the people who log in.

The API is REST with JSON responses. The FAQ is direct about GraphQL: "Not yet," and it is on the roadmap. If your front end depends on GraphQL queries today, that is a gap.

The CLI is the unusual part. The company calls it "a CLI built for AI agents, not just terminals". It gives AI agents such as Claude Code and Cursor structured access to your content, so an agent can scaffold collections, manage content and publish from a terminal or from the agent's own context. The page's example is running adapto llm-info >> CLAUDE.md so the agent learns every command. The listed uses are Claude Code editing content during a build session, Cursor scaffolding collections from a spec, agent-driven content migrations, and publishing pipelines triggered by LLM workflows.

Media is bundled rather than bought separately. The comparison table on the homepage contrasts a typical stack of a CMS for content, Cloudinary for images, S3 for storage and a CDN for delivery, four invoices in all, with Adapto's "content API, media CDN, image optimization, all bundled. One dashboard. One key." Hosting is handled for you: "We run the servers, the database, the CDN, the patches. You call the API."

Localization and webhooks are included rather than gated. Teams add editors, add locales and turn on webhooks without changing plans, because the company says Adapto scales by content volume and API usage "not headcount, locales, or features". Organize work by organization, invite as many contributors as a project needs, and run unlimited projects under one account. That structure is aimed at agencies with a roster of client sites.

Moving in is described as short. The company's Strapi page says Strapi exports cleanly through its REST API, a one-off Node script reads from your Strapi instance and writes into Adapto through the Adapto REST API, and most marketing sites migrate in a weekend. The team says it will walk you through the data model translation and the webhook rewiring at no charge. Moving out is covered too: you can export everything through the API at any time, including pages, articles, custom collections and media assets.

Self-hosting is not offered. On the Strapi page the company says Adapto "doesn't compete here", because self-hosting is out of scope by design. The pages do not mention an open-source license or code export beyond the API.

The evidence from the pages

Plans are published and flat, with every feature included and usage as the only difference:

• Free Evaluation, $0 a month, "always free": 500 total records, 5,000 API calls a month, 2 GB of bandwidth a month. The site says there is no credit card and no trial expiry, and that the limits are small on purpose because the tier is for evaluation, not production.
• Hobby, $29 a month or $290 a year: 10,000 total records, 150,000 API calls a month, 50 GB of bandwidth a month.
• Scale, $249 a month or $2,490 a year: 300,000 total records, 500,000 API calls a month, 300 GB of bandwidth a month.
• Professional, $449 a month or $4,490 a year: 750,000 total records, 1,500,000 API calls a month, 1 TB of bandwidth a month.

The Strapi comparison also mentions a Startup plan at $69 a month, flat with no bandwidth meter, but the pages held for this entry do not list its limits. Annual billing gets 2 months free. There is no contact-sales tier: published plans top out at 750K records and 1.5M API calls, and past that the company says it will quote "a real number, not a budget-based quote".

Billing terms, from the FAQ: a plan price is locked for the billing period, existing customers keep their rate if pricing changes, and the company gives at least 30 days' notice, with annual subscribers protected for the full 12 months. If you approach a limit, it emails you and allows a 7-day grace period to upgrade or reduce usage. It says it does not silently bill overages or throttle your API without warning.

Data: if you cancel, your content stays accessible for 30 days for export and is then permanently deleted.

Reputation: the pages show a 5 out of 5 star rating with the quote "Simplicity, ease of use, and pricing predictability." No customer count, security certification, compliance standard, hosting region or support channel appears in the text shown, so the pages give you nothing to verify on those points. Treat the comparisons with Contentful, Storyblok and Strapi as the company's own framing.

Who it suits and who it does not

Adapto suits a freelancer or small agency that wants a predictable monthly number across several client projects, a product team that needs a content API with media, localization and webhooks without stitching vendors together, and a developer already working with AI coding agents who wants a CLI built for them. The free tier is real enough to build a prototype against, and the first paid step is $29 a month.

It is a poorer fit if you need GraphQL today, if policy requires self-hosting, or if you want editors to build pages visually, since the pages describe a content back end and not a site builder. The record and API-call limits also matter. A content-heavy catalog could pass the Free Evaluation limit of 500 records quickly, so check which plan your record count lands in before you commit.