Directus wins CMS Idol 2024

By Janus Boye

Cool dashboards are not something we are used to seeing among CMS vendors, but it’s one of the things that stood out from the winning Directus demo at the prestigious CMS Idol 2024 contest held last week at CMS Kickoff 24 conference in Florida.

Ben Haynes from Directus on stage showing a live demo

Directus is a popular open source composable CMS. CEO and Cofounder Ben Haynes did a one-man-show which won both a big majority of the votes and also the stamp of approval from the three judges.

With each vendor being given only six minutes to their pitch, Ben managed to start by showing slides from his prepared deck (download as PDF) and then elegantly moved into the demo. Besides impressing with the product, it was clear that Ben also read the room to strike the right balance between business and tech lingo.

A very happy CEO and Cofounder Ben Haynes from Directus shortly after the big win was announced. From left to right: Janus Boye, Mark Demeny (host) and the three judges Marli Mesibov, Matt Garrepy and Matt McQueeny

He also managed to mention some impressive stats from the Directus adoption on Github, where Directus is:

Towards developers Directus actually positions itself like this:

“The Modern Data Stack 🐰 — Directus is an instant REST+GraphQL API and intuitive no-code data collaboration app for any SQL database.”

Ben opened his pitch with a relevant and timely problem statement: Modern digital experiences are powered by more than just a CMS and as companies grow, so does complexity.

In most enterprises less than 5% of users are in technical roles and capable of making substantial changes to their digital platform. Directus aims to change this by introducing ‘citizen developers’ effectively empowering non-technical users to leverage their domain expertise and by using no code, they can also democratize access to data.

As a part of the Directus demo, we also a sample project visualizing data points for submarine cables on a map

CMS Idol provides a glimpse into the future of our industry

The other contestants this year also deserves credit for showing live demos from the cutting edge of what’s happening right now:

  • Agility CMS from Canada, which came with a big win from Europe in November, where they won the 2023 Small Feature Award. Joel Varty showed collaborate editing in their CMS.

  • Kajoo.ai, also from Canada, which showed several key features including unlocking the potential of AI and easing digital experience migration journey from monolith to composable

  • Magnolia which deserves extra credits from bringing an experience implementation partner, namely Crescendo Collective, on stage to show how Magnolia can help both enforce design guidelines and enabling non-technical users to make design changes

  • Umbraco, joining us all the way from Odense, Denmark, with an act that engaged the entire room in singing based on implementing a website for a band in their open source CMS

  • Uniform, which impressively showed personalized experiences based on a “Uniform Content Model” pulling in data from multiple sources - which appropriately was Agility, Contentful, Directus, and Umbraco.

The three judges in front and with the 6 contestants behind them with host Matt Garrepy peaking from the left

The 2024 CMS Idol was hosted by Matt Garrepy from CMS Critic who was accompanied by these three judges:

After each demo, the judges offered constructive off-the-cuff feedback, sometimes combined with a reference to sentences used in American Idol.

The CMS Idol 2023 winner, Contentstack, unfortunately didn’t make it.

Live demos makes a big difference

To keep the art of the live demo going, we’ve integrated them to our conference for the past decade and you can experience it next at these upcoming events:

You can also read more about live demos in these posts: