— vs strapi
Strapi is the strongest open-source headless CMS in the EU. Their team is French, their values map cleanly to our buyer profile. The wedge is operational: Strapi's community edition asks you to be your own SRE, and Strapi Cloud hosts on US- headquartered cloud underneath. Estøkad is the managed-sovereign-EU option that keeps both the legal entity and the infrastructure inside the jurisdiction perimeter.
| Criterion | Strapi | Estøkad |
|---|---|---|
| Licensing | Open-source community edition + Enterprise SaaS | Managed SaaS — no community-edition self-host |
| Hosting model | Strapi Cloud is hosted on AWS (US-headquartered) with EU regions; the company is French-incorporated, which matters legally — but the hosting underlay isn't EU-domiciled. | EU-domiciled infrastructure (Scaleway, French SAS); per-country residency |
| Audit chain | Activity log; plugin-level | Hash-chained, daily Merkle roots |
| DORA evidence pack | Not a product feature | Auto-generated, downloadable |
| Schema authoring | Visual content-type builder, JSON-stored | TypeScript-first defineType() + visual builder + GitHub PR writeback |
| Visual editing | Live preview (paid plan); newer feature | Storyblok-grade overlay protocol shipped with the platform |
| Per-country residency | EU regions on Strapi Cloud (Frankfurt, Paris) | 6 EU + Switzerland regions, customer-chosen at signup |
| Approval workflows | Review workflow on Enterprise plan | Module-gated by advanced_rbac; four-eyes rule enforced API-level |
| Operational burden | Self-host: customer ops team. Cloud: paid managed | Managed by default; customer ops surface = Studio + audit chain only |
| Pricing — entry tier | Self-host: free core. Cloud Pro from €90/mo | Studio preset €499/mo — managed end-to-end |
Open-source community edition is genuinely free; for teams with the operational appetite to host themselves, that's a real advantage Estøkad doesn't match. Strapi's plugin ecosystem and community are larger and more active than ours — by years. If your buyer profile values the source-availability angle and your team can take on running the database + the application + the upgrades, Strapi Community is a defensible pick.
Per-country EU residency Strapi Cloud doesn't offer. DORA evidence pack as a product feature, not a plug-in surface. EU-domiciled hosting underlay so the jurisdiction holds at every layer. Approval workflows + field-level RBAC shipped at a tier most regulated buyers can afford (€1,699/mo Regulated preset). Managed- service ops so your engineering team doesn't become a database operator.
Open-source ergonomics, managed sovereignty.
See pricing →