corpusctl vs Directus: a content platform versus a database wrapper

Extra seats on Team: $50 per seat per month. There is also an Open Innovation Grant giving qualifying individuals and small organisations free access with no feature limits.

Two things to notice.

Three seats on Core. That is a developer, an editor, and one more person. The fourth participant — a proofreader, a client, a translator — is the trigger for a decision.

The next step is $499 a month. There is no $49 tier. The gap between evaluation and production is a single, large step, and SSO sits on the far side of it. If SSO is a compliance requirement rather than a convenience, that step is not optional.

corpusctl is a flat plan with no per-seat line. A user carries a separate role in each space — editor on one project, owner on another, invisible on a third — and adding a reviewer to one project does not change the price of the others.

#The part Directus leaves to you

Directus stops at the API. How published content actually reaches a visitor — caching, invalidation, static generation, the CDN — is your project. For teams that want that control, this is correct design.

corpusctl ships it. Hitting publish runs the build pipeline: content is validated, rendered, and written to an immutable, hash-addressed file in object storage, then the manifest is refreshed. A visitor's client resolves the slug to a manifest shard locally and fetches that address from the nginx edge cache — cacheable for thirty days, because the same address can never return different content.

The consequences are the point:

• Visitor traffic never reaches the API or PostgreSQL.
• There is no per-call meter, because there is no per-call.
• Read performance does not degrade as the content set grows. The manifest is sharded, so a space with ten thousand entries still downloads one small file.

If you build that layer yourself on Directus, you will build roughly this. The question is whether you want to.

#Multi-project

Directus organises by collection inside one project; running several isolated client projects means several instances, or a tenancy scheme you design and maintain in your own access rules.

In corpusctl multi-tenancy sits in the core next to auth and the module registry: one panel, unlimited spaces, and isolation enforced by PostgreSQL row-level security — in the database, below the application layer where a forgotten filter lives.

The argument is narrow: application-level isolation holds until the one query that skipped the filter, and that query gets written eventually, by someone in a hurry, in a module nobody reviews closely.

#Modules, and what turning one off means

Every corpusctl feature is a module — media, search, webhooks, SEO, GraphQL, import, analytics — and each can be removed without breaking the build. Modules may not import each other; a service registry and an event bus are the only channels between them. pnpm check:isolation fails CI if that rule is broken.

A plan downgrade sets modules to disabled and never deletes data.

#Where Directus wins

Bring your own database. The headline capability, and corpusctl does not attempt it. corpusctl owns its PostgreSQL schema, with hash partitioning and row-level security; you do not point it at an existing one.

Flows. A visual automation builder in the product. corpusctl has webhooks and an event bus — more code, less clicking.

Any SQL engine. PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server and more. corpusctl is PostgreSQL-only, deliberately: RLS and hash partitioning are Postgres features we depend on.

A free tier that is genuinely free, plus the Open Innovation Grant for small organisations.

Maturity. About 37,000 GitHub stars and a longer track record than corpusctl has.

#The honest summary

Pick Directus if you have a database already, need it wrapped rather than replaced, or want visual automation flows.

Pick corpusctl if you want the content path — build, cache, delivery — to arrive finished, several projects from one panel, and no per-seat line.

Directus prices taken from directus.io/pricing on 17 August 2026. Prices change — check before quoting.

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