Menestrel vs Directus for an Astro site
Directus is free to self-host under 5M$ revenue and is not really a website CMS. Why the comparison is less about price than about what each tool actually is.
Prices and features surveyed at the source on 8 August 2026. They change: check with the vendor before deciding.
Directus is frequently suggested when someone asks for a headless CMS, and the suggestion is often wrong, in both directions. It is worth being precise about what it is.
Directus wraps a SQL database you already have in an admin interface and a REST or GraphQL API. Point it at a schema and it gives you a back office for it. That is a genuinely useful thing, and it is not the same category as a CMS for brochure sites.
Pricing, which is not the interesting part
| Directus | Menestrel | |
|---|---|---|
| Core | Free, 3 seats, 25 collections, 5 flows | 1 site, 2 editors, 200 entries |
| Self-hosted | Free under 5M$ revenue and 50 employees | Not offered |
| Cloud hosting | $99/month add-on on Core and Team | Included |
| Team | $499/month yearly ($599 monthly) | €15/month excl. VAT for 10 sites |
The revenue threshold matters: most French agencies are comfortably under 5M$ and 50 employees, so self-hosting Directus costs nothing in licence. If price were the whole question, Directus would win this page.
It is not the whole question.
Where Directus is the better choice
- You already have a database. Directus is the fastest way to give non-developers a usable interface onto existing tables. Nothing here competes with that.
- An internal tool, not a public site. Stock, bookings, a client list, a back office: this is what it is for.
- Complex relational data. Many-to-many, filters, permissions per field, automation flows. We model pages and collections for a site and stop there.
- You want to own your infrastructure and you can operate it.
Where the difference actually bites
Directus does not know your site exists. It exposes data over an API. The notion of publishing a version of a page, rebuilding a static site and following that deployment does not exist in it, because it is not what it does. Menestrel is built around exactly that: a click, an immutable snapshot, a rebuild at your host, and the tracking until the page is live.
The editing experience targets a different person. Directus shows tables, rows, fields, filters. A shop owner updating opening hours from their phone is not the user it was designed for. Our editor is.
Per site, not per install. With Directus, twenty brochure sites means either twenty installs to operate, or one shared install with a data model that has to keep them apart. Both are real work. We are priced and shaped per site.
If you are already on Directus with Astro
Keep it for the data. Genuinely: if Directus is holding a product catalogue or a booking system, moving that to Menestrel would be a downgrade, because we do not do relations, permissions per field or flows.
The question is narrower: are your brochure pages, the ones with a title, a
paragraph, a photo and a price, also in there? Those are the ones worth
moving, and menestrel import reads Astro content collections once you have
exported them.
Honestly, the limits
- No relational modelling worth the name, no flows, no per-field permissions.
- No API at request time.
- Publishing takes a build, usually one to three minutes.
- Astro only, hosted only.
The short version
This is not really a competition. Directus is a data platform; Menestrel publishes Astro sites. If someone recommended Directus for a brochure site, they answered a different question from the one you asked.