Menestrel vs Strapi for an Astro site

Strapi is free to self-host and $35 a month per project on their cloud. What self-hosting really costs you across a fleet, and when Strapi is the right answer anyway.

Prices and features surveyed at the source on 8 August 2026. They change: check with the vendor before deciding.

Strapi is MIT-licensed, self-hostable, and one of the most capable open-source CMSes available. If you want to own your stack and you are comfortable operating a Node application with a database, it is a strong answer.

This page compares it on one axis: running a fleet of Astro brochure sites for non-technical clients.

The two ways to pay

Self-hosting is genuinely free of licence cost. It is not free of cost: you run a Node process and a database per project, you patch them, you back them up, you restore them when something breaks, and you do that as many times as you have sites. That is a real job, and on twenty brochure sites it is the job that eats the margin.

Strapi Cloud removes that work at $35 a month per project. Twenty sites is twenty subscriptions.

Where Strapi is the better choice

• You want to own everything. MIT licence, your database, your server, no vendor between you and your data. That is a legitimate and sometimes decisive requirement.
• Your content model is an application, not a site. Relations, permissions, custom endpoints, business logic in controllers: Strapi is a back end, and a good one. Menestrel models pages and collections for a site, nothing more.
• You need an API at runtime. Strapi serves content on request. We serve it at build time and nowhere else.
• You already operate infrastructure. If you have a Kubernetes cluster and a monitoring stack, one more service is marginal.

Where the difference actually bites

The client experience is not the same. Strapi’s admin is a developer’s back office: content types, components, dynamic zones, a media library with options everywhere. It is powerful, and it is a lot to hand to a shop owner who wants to change a price from their phone. Our editor shows the fields you defined and a Publish button. There is no settings screen, because there are no settings.

Publishing stops at the API. Strapi publishes into its database and fires a webhook if you configured one. What happens next, whether the build succeeded, whether the page is actually live, is not its problem. Menestrel follows the deployment through and shows the editor when the change is online.

Your site stays static and independent. With Strapi you either fetch at build time (and keep a server running for the admin anyway) or at request time (and your site now depends on that server being up). With Menestrel the published snapshot lives on a CDN: a build succeeds even while our API is off.

If you are already on Strapi with Astro

The move is mostly a content export. Strapi’s content is in your database, so the usual path is a script that writes markdown collections, then menestrel import picks them up along with your images.

The bigger change is conceptual: your content model moves from Strapi’s UI into a TypeScript file in your repository, versioned and reviewed like the rest of the project.

Honestly, the limits

• Publishing takes a build, usually one to three minutes.
• No custom endpoints, no business logic, no relations beyond what a site needs. If you want a back end, Strapi is the right tool and we are not.
• Astro only.
• We are a hosted service. There is no self-hosted Menestrel, and if that is a hard requirement, this comparison ends here.

The short version

Strapi is a back end you operate. Menestrel is a service that publishes Astro sites. If the twenty admin panels you would have to keep patched are the thing standing between you and your margin, that is the comparison.