Directus vs Stainless

Directus is a web-based content platform supporting both API types, with localization, custom role permissions, webhooks, content preview, and asset transformations. Its free Core plan provides 3 user seats, 25 collections, and 5 flows. Team costs $499 a month with an annual commitment and includes 10 SSO seats, 50 collections, and 20 flows. Enterprise has custom SSO seats and collections with unlimited flows, but no listed price. The Open Innovation Grant offers qualifying teams full access at no software cost and free self-hosting. Directus uses a freemium model and includes a 14-day trial. Teams can choose browser-based access, then match a plan to their required seats, collections, and flows.

Stainless generates SDKs, documentation and MCP servers from OpenAPI specifications. Its SDK product lists TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, Kotlin, Ruby, Terraform, C# and PHP, with rich types, automatic pagination and retries included. The Docs Platform, built on Astro, keeps REST API, SDK and narrative documentation in sync with an API. Its listed features include AI-powered hybrid search, Markdown copying, AI-tool integration, and light and dark modes. Stainless also generates code-mode MCP servers so agents can work with SDKs and documentation rather than many endpoint schemas; the MCP product page names Claude Code and Cursor as clients. The Free plan costs nothing and allows up to five generators, five seats and 25 endpoints, with 100 preview builds per month and a rate limit of 25 per day. Email support is listed for Free. Users need a GitHub account for authentication and access to generated staging repositories. Exceeding Free plan terms triggers automatic enrollment in a 30-day free trial of a paid plan. Code generation cannot be hosted on-premise, although generated SDKs can be hosted in a private GitHub repository.