ButterCMS vs Kiln

ButterCMS is a managed, headless content management platform that delivers content through APIs. It supports websites, ecommerce sites, mobile apps, OTT services, and digital displays, with named framework support for Angular, Django, Laravel, Next.js, React, and Vue. Content tools include visual editing, live preview, SEO metadata, scheduled publishing, localization, and an AI Assistant. Security practices include encryption in transit and storage, role-based access controls, and tenant isolation. Integrations cover CDPs, CRMs, analytics, digital asset management, ecommerce, development, and delivery workflows; commerce connections include Shopify and Magento. The free plan is free and includes 50K API calls per month, 100 GB monthly bandwidth, five pages, 50 blog posts, 50 collections, and 500 assets. Basic costs $71 a month, billed annually; Advanced is $224 a month and Professional is $359 a month, both billed annually. A 14-day trial is listed. Webhooks are add-ons on Advanced and Professional and included with Enterprise.

Kiln is an open-source, click-to-edit CMS for static sites. Invited editors change content directly on a site, with edits saved as Git commits in a repository owned by the site owner. Supported content includes text, images, documents, blocks, galleries, events, and calendar items. The publishing workflow includes drafts, scheduled publishing, named versions, history, and restoration. Owners sign in with GitHub, while invited editors and members can use Google sign-in and be scoped to particular pages or sections. Reviewer seats can comment only; suggest mode lets owners approve or decline proposed changes field by field. Kiln works with GitHub repositories and hosts that redeploy on push, including Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel, and GitHub Pages. A REST API and kiln-mcp support scoped, sanitized edits by scripts and agents; optional AI assistance uses an API key supplied by the user. Site content remains plain HTML in the customer's repository, even after leaving Kiln. Self-hosted costs nothing; Kiln Cloud is $4.99 a month, and Fully managed is $14.99 a month.