Menestrel vs Decap, Sveltia and Keystatic
The git-based CMSes are free and commit straight to your repository. What that costs your client, what it costs you across a fleet, and when free is exactly right.
Prices and features surveyed at the source on 8 August 2026. They change: check with the vendor before deciding.
Decap (formerly Netlify CMS), Sveltia and Keystatic share one idea: the editor writes in a web interface and the CMS commits to your Git repository. No database, no API, no subscription. Content lives in the repo next to the code.
It is an elegant model, it is free, and for a lot of projects it is the right answer. This page is about where it stops being one.
The model, honestly
| Git-based | Menestrel | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free, open source | €3/month excl. VAT per site |
| Where content lives | Your Git repository | Our database, exported on demand |
| Client needs | A GitHub or GitLab account | An email address |
| Per site setup | A config file you maintain | One cms.config.ts, synced |
| Publishing | A commit, then your CI | Snapshot, rebuild, tracked to live |
Where git-based is the better choice
- You are the only editor. If you write the content, committing from a web form is strictly simpler than any hosted service, and free.
- Content must live in the repo. Some clients, some audits, some regulated contexts genuinely require it. That is a hard requirement and we do not meet it.
- A single project you control end to end.
- Zero budget, and it must stay zero. Nothing beats free.
Where the difference actually bites
Your client inherits a GitHub account. Not a metaphor: to edit their own opening hours, they need an account on a developer platform, an authorisation flow, and often a two-factor setup. Every one of those steps is a support call you will take. Menestrel asks for an email address.
Content and code share one history. Restoring last week’s price means touching the repository. A client mistake and a bad merge live in the same place. We keep content out of the repo on purpose: the schema is code and belongs in review, the client’s copy is not and does not.
Across a fleet, each site is one more thing to maintain by hand. A config file per repository, an auth backend per site, a breaking change to absorb on each of them. That is the part that quietly eats an agency’s margin.
Nobody tells the editor it is live. A commit fires your CI, and what happens next is between you and your logs. Menestrel follows the deployment and shows the editor when the page is genuinely served.
On longevity, without exaggerating
Figures surveyed on 4 July 2026, worth rechecking before you decide: Sveltia has overtaken Decap in npm downloads and moves fast, but runs on a single maintainer, with no 1.0 and no paid offering, and a UI in English and Japanese only. Decap is maintained at a minimum. Keystatic is the most recent and the closest to us technically.
This is not a criticism, it is the normal state of good open-source projects. It is simply a question worth asking out loud before you put twenty client sites on one of them.
If you are already on Decap or Sveltia with Astro
This is the easiest migration we support, because your content is already
markdown in Astro content collections. menestrel import reads them directly,
along with your images, and builds the schema from what it finds. It is
usually under thirty minutes for a brochure site.
Honestly, the limits
- We are not free. €3 a month per site, and that is the whole argument against us on this page.
- Content is not in your repo. It is exported in one command, in markdown and JSON in content-collections format, on every plan including the free one, but it does not live there.
- Publishing takes a build, usually one to three minutes.
- Astro only.
The short version
If you are the editor, use Decap or Sveltia and keep your money. If your clients are the editors and there are more than a handful of them, the free tool is charging you in support calls and hand-maintained configs instead of euros.