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Squidex/squidex
Headless CMS and Content Managment Hub
Squidex is a self-hosted headless CMS built on ASP.NET Core, supporting MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQL Server as backends. It targets teams that want a Contentful/Sanity alternative they can run themselves, with a GraphQL + REST API, OData filtering, and a visual schema builder. The cloud SaaS version exists, but the open-source path is the main draw.
The multi-database story is genuinely implemented — not just MongoDB with a SQL shim bolted on. The extension/plugin architecture is thorough: 20+ rule action integrations (Kafka, Algolia, ElasticSearch, Typesense, SignalR) that follow a consistent pattern and are easy to follow as examples for custom ones. CQRS with event sourcing is baked into the core rather than tacked on, which makes audit trails and rebuild operations first-class. Deployment coverage is broad and actually documented — Docker Compose, Kubernetes, Azure, Render, Heroku — each with working one-click links, which is more than most self-hosted projects bother with.
Still on .NET 8 while .NET 9 is stable and .NET 10 is shipping, which means it will fall out of support in November 2026 without a version bump. Essentially a one-person project (one core maintainer, no active secondary contributors in the directory tree), so bus factor is real and release cadence is unpredictable. The i18n tooling is a custom hand-rolled translator CLI rather than using any standard approach, which adds maintenance surface without obvious benefit. GraphQL support exists but isn't prominently documented, and schema modeling for complex relational content (references between types) is noticeably harder to reason about than in Contentful or Sanity.