While Directus has been around far longer, Payload has come out of the gate with an incredibly modern stack, focused heavily on NextJS and full open-source modularity.
We've been seeing huge companies like Disney and Bugatti moving over to Payload, and we believe that they are going to disrupt the space over the next 2–3 years.
That said, if you're looking for the most stable option that has been tried/true/tested, you're probably better off going with Directus (for now).
So for us specifically, we are looking to self-host during development, but would like to actually use their cloud for production. We were leaning toward Directus in-fact until the final checks.
Directus Cloud will host your instance on a shared environment unless you are on their Enterprise offering which starts at $15k+/yr
We simply wanted root access to the Postgres Database that we'd be transferring over to their cloud, but to have that, we'd need to be on the enterprise cloud tier.
Payload CMS on the other hand will allow you root access to your DB on their cloud offering, even on the lowest tier.
So we're going to have the main site hosted on Vercel, our CMS hosted in the CMS cloud provider so we don't need to worry as much about server maintenance and updates, and the cost difference to continue maintaining full control of the database was just too major with Directus.
Winner: Payload
Payload is doubling down on the NextJS ecosystem, which for fans of NextJS, they might see that as a win, what we like about it is that with this pivot (coming in v3) means that Payload CMS will actually be able to be hosted on a serverless architecture, like Vercel or Cloudflare Edge Functions.
Directus on the other had was built in Vue.js and requires a proper server for hosting. Depending on your project, this might work totally fine, but for us, building our site in NextJS, being able to go serverless for our web app but not our CMS was a downside.
Winner: Payload
But Directus wins just as much here unless you solely want to host Directus on a serverless infrastructure. Both tools are incredibly flexible for self-hosting.
When it comes to the ecosystem between Directus and Payload, Payload is the newer kid on the block, so Directus has had a bit more time on market to build up the ecosystem and community, just over a decade to be exact (founded in 2020 but built atop a decade-old open source project before raising money).
Payload in particular has thousands of active sites currently running on their CMS, even companies like Disney have decided to give it a shot in recent projects.
Directus on the other hand has tens of thousands of projects, even recently building out a full marketplace solution right within their tool, allowing you to install plugins like themes, upgraded WYSIWYG editors, and other functionality.
Both have a thriving Discord community and substantial engagement on X (if you post about Payload or Directus, you're sure to hear from their respective loyal fanbases).
Winner: Directus
Payload CMS in particular has seen that some modern CMS options on the market like BaseHub have been focusing more on the writing and collaboration experience (think Notion or Slite's writing experience for example).
When talking with the team over at Directus, they had mentioned they didn't see much of the need or benefit of collaborating within articles (e.g. seeing another individual is editing rich text) nor was auto-saving functionality.
This was something quite surprising to us, as we were looking for a CMS that could help us make the writing process for this site more enjoyable, versus doing the bulk of our writing in Slite and then copy/pasting it over.
Payload on the other hand has promised that writing will be a focus moving forward, and their new site redesign actually shows collaboration right within Payload, which is promising.
Winner: Payload
Both Directus and Payload CMS have most of the important data types you would expect. That said, Payload promises to have many to many relationships and support for junction tables come Payload v3.
With that, both Payload and Directus are stacked up as some of the most flexible CMS options on the market when it comes to data types and relational database support.
Winner: Both
This one for all intents and purposes is a tie unless you're doing at-least $5M/yr in revenue with your Directus project.
Payload CMS uses the MIT license, which is one of the most simple and permissive license types in the open-source world.
Directus on the other hand uses a BSL 1.1 (Business Source License) meaning that you must purchase a license if you are doing more than $5M/yr in revenue even if you are self-hosting it.
Winner: Payload
We ultimately decided to go with Payload CMS for the rebuild of this site with Directus being the main contender alongside it.
Through all of our findings, what we know for sure is that they are both incredibly promising projects, and have quite a few benefits over more traditional CMS solutions like Strapi, Contentful, and Sanity CMS.
For the reasons above Payload fit our use-case better than Directus as we wanted to eventually move to the CMS cloud solution, and signing up for an enterprise plan just to have the level of root access control we wanted with our database just didn't make sense for us.
Totally understand that this won't apply to everyone, it's just since we are using the CMS as more a layer atop the database to improve the writing experience, versus being the core foundation of the web app, Payload fit the mark quite a bit better for us.