TinaCMS
The Git-backed headless CMS — content lives in your repo as Markdown/MDX, editors get visual editing.
About
TinaCMS is an open-source headless CMS (Apache-2.0, roughly 13,200 GitHub stars) with an unusual premise: content is stored directly in your Git repository as Markdown, MDX, JSON, or YAML files, so version control is the database. You define the schema in a TypeScript config (tina/config.ts); Tina generates a GraphQL data layer with filtering, sorting, and pagination, and editors get a contextual sidebar with live visual editing whose changes commit straight back to Git.
It is aimed at Next.js and static-site-generator workflows: start with npx create-tina-app@latest. Self-hosting is free; TinaCloud managed hosting offers a free tier with paid plans (third-party directories list paid tiers around $29/mo). Honest limits: content scale is bounded by what Git handles comfortably, and the editing experience assumes your site already has a build pipeline. No published performance benchmarks found.
What it can do
- Content stored in Git as Markdown, MDX, JSON, or YAML
- Auto-generated GraphQL API from a TypeScript schema
- Real-time visual editing with a contextual sidebar
- Changes committed back to Git with a full audit trail
- Rich content modeling: collections, references, nested objects
- Works with Next.js and major static site generators
Setup
Run npx create-tina-app@latest, define collections in tina/config.ts, and connect your GitHub repo to TinaCloud for the hosted editing experience.
Prerequisites
Node.js and a Git repository; a Next.js or static-site project to attach it to.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (VERIFIED tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Apache-2.0 license and ~13.2k GitHub stars via repo indexes; Git-backed architecture, GraphQL data layer, and visual editing corroborated across three sources. Strengths: full content ownership in your repo, transparent portable content, editor-friendly without a separate CMS silo. Docked for: (1) Git-as-database puts a practical ceiling on content scale and concurrent editing; (2) assumes an existing build pipeline — not a standalone publishing product. License: Apache-2.0 (open source).
★ 13,245 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 9.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · ~13.2k GitHub stars; content stored in Git as Markdown/MDX/JSON/YAML; schema in tina/config.ts.
- · Auto-generated GraphQL data layer; visual sidebar editing commits back to Git; npx create-tina-app.
- · Git-as-database bounds scale and concurrent editing; assumes an existing build pipeline; no published benchmarks.
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.