Why Opt for Payload Over WordPress or PrestaShop? Discover the Reasons Here!

There are solutions that are adopted because they transcend what established platforms offer. Launched in 2021 and still relatively unknown in France, Payload is such a solution. This headless CMS, which separates content creation from its presentation, meets needs that monolithic solutions like WordPress or PrestaShop sometimes struggle with, whether it’s in terms of performance, UX/UI ambition, or complex data structuring.

This belief is held by ID Interactive, which has incorporated Payload into its technology stack for several months, convinced that it would enable them to deliver more ambitious and sustainable projects. Founder Eric Doyen elaborates on its distinctive features.

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Why WordPress and PrestaShop were no longer sufficient

Based near Vannes, in Arradon, Morbihan, ID Interactive has assisted over 300 SMEs and major accounts in creating custom web applications and addressing acquisition issues. Committed to open source philosophy and data sovereignty, the agency had previously relied on WordPress and PrestaShop, which, according to Eric Doyen, covered “90% of requests”, from showcase sites to blogs to online stores. However, over the last three years, this 13-member agency noticed these tools quickly reached their limits on certain aspects of more ambitious projects:

• Performance and eco-design: A WordPress that accumulates plugins “remains very resource-intensive in server usage, bandwidth, and loading time”, observes the founder, which can be a hindrance for a client with a strong CSR commitment.
• Complex data structuring: “When a client handles a non-standard product catalog, configurators, connected client spaces, deeply embedded multi-language content, or needs to feed both a website, an application, and a physical sales point at the same time, the WordPress model becomes a bottleneck. We spend our time bypassing it with ACF, custom post types, cache plugins… It’s costly to maintain and fragile”, he explains.
• UX/UI ambition: “Our designers and clients want ambitious, animated, instant interfaces”, summarizes Eric Doyen. A quality frontend is built more easily with a modern framework like Next.js than with a WordPress theme.

Facing these challenges, and without completely abandoning WordPress and PrestaShop, which remain “useful tools when the client’s needs align”, the agency from Morbihan sought a JavaScript headless CMS that they could combine with the frontend power of Next.js, the leading React framework. In simpler terms, a content management system that radically separates the frontend and backend, offering greater freedom on the frontend. More flexible than a CMS like WordPress—“even though WordPress also exists in headless form”, Eric Doyen notes—where “these two components are more naturally fused, and the same tool manages both content and display”, which can eventually trap you in an “ecosystem of themes and plugins, with performance limits and flexibility issues as projects grow more complex”, he adds.

Choosing Payload over Strapi

Initially, Strapi, not Payload, seemed the obvious choice for ID Interactive. An “excellent product”, still highly regarded by Eric Doyen, and a “real French success in an ecosystem dominated by American players”, the agency experimented with it for several months before preferring Payload for several reasons: its native integration with Next.js, its configuration through code, its lightness—“We notice on our projects a generally lower resource consumption compared to WordPress architectures heavily dependent on plugins”, he illustrates—or its maturity on advanced features. “During our evaluation phase, Payload better met our needs in multilingual management and permission control”, the director explains. Another factor also tipped the scales. “At the time, we also felt that Strapi was gradually orienting its product energy towards its cloud SaaS offering, which moved away from our need for a 100% self-hosted and controlled solution. Payload, on the other hand, remained completely aligned with the open-source self-hosted philosophy”, he adds.

The acquisition of Payload by Figma in June 2025 does not fundamentally challenge this commitment, according to him, even though “the risk zero does not exist”. The MIT license that the project benefits from prevents any retroactive appropriation of the code, and the team has remained in place since the acquisition, with a release pace maintained. “Figma seems to want to strengthen Payload as a key piece of the bridge between design and development. At this stage, [the acquisition] is rather good news in terms of resources”, judges Eric Doyen. Payload also announced, in May, that its version 4.0, expected to be released in the next three months, will introduce a complete redesign of the user space, based on Figma’s design system.

Data sovereignty as a significant factor

While Payload stands out for its technical flexibility, its open-source architecture also allows ID Interactive to host its data with French partners, chosen for their seriousness and environmental commitment. This argument resonates differently depending on the client, but it increasingly weighs in the current context. “For public actors, industrial ETIs, and companies that handle sensitive data, like Eram, Trigano, or Le Télégramme that we support, it’s a real criterion”, he estimates. “The enhanced GDPR requirements on subcontractors are topics that have entered into specifications. Knowing that the data and admin run on French hosting, with a French agency that one can meet, becomes a reassurance factor that weighs in at the end of the decision-making process”.

The argument also finds an echo among clients committed to CSR, in addition to carbon performance. But less so among SMEs, acknowledges Eric Doyen: “The topic does not come at the top of their spontaneous concerns. What they want is a functioning, performant site, within budget. We then bring up the topic ourselves, and it is rarely rejected once it is explained.”

A more suitable solution when modeling the client’s business is needed

Still, a central question remains: does the solution fit all types of clients? All projects? On complex projects, when it is necessary to model the client’s business and “make the back-office speak its language”, the answer is yes, without hesitation, according to him. It is less obvious for blogs or institutional and commercial sites without particular complexity. In these configurations, WordPress, PrestaShop are more relevant considering the resources involved.

Payload is versatile, but it has a fundamental prerequisite: there must be a real need for editorial content management. It’s a CMS first and foremost. Without content to manage, it has no place in the project.

Eric Doyen

Founder, ID Interactive

“Finally, there is a part of our activity where Payload does not fit at all: business web applications without an editorial dimension, client spaces, configurators, management portals, dashboards. There, the issue is not ‘publishing content’, but ‘making a process work online’. We develop directly in Next.js with a dedicated database, without CMS. Putting Payload in this context would be oversized and without added value.”, adds Eric Doyen.

Payload, a more intuitive solution than it appears

Despite its apparent technical complexity, can the CMS be easily handled and fed by clients? Even those without a technical background? “That’s a real question, and I’ll answer it frankly because we tend, in the tech community, to oversell the editing experience of modern CMSs. The answer is yes, clients get it, but under two conditions”, estimates Eric Doyen.

The first relates to the structuring of content. “The Payload interface is sober, clear, in French, and it exactly reflects the structure we defined together in advance”, he emphasizes. “If we’ve done our modeling work well, understanding the real editorial uses, naming the fields with the client’s words, grouping content logically, then the contributor finds their bearings from the first hour.” The second is the support. “We systematically deliver training ranging from one hour to half a day for contributing teams and a post-delivery support period where our project managers answer questions.”

According to the head of ID Interactive, Payload offers a “more stripped-down” interface than WordPress, where clients often have to navigate through a jungle of menus, plugins, and settings cluttering the editor. In Payload, “you only see what concerns your business”, which is generally felt “as a sign of relief for contributors”, often from communication and marketing departments. “For someone who was very comfortable with Gutenberg and its blocks, there is a short adaptation phase, but we’ve never had lasting negative feedback on this subject”, he adds.

What we observe on our delivered Payload projects is that contributing teams become autonomous very quickly, they rarely come back to us for additional training. It’s probably the best indicator.

Eric Doyen

Founder, ID Interactive

A CMS not suitable for every project

While Payload has undeniable qualities, Eric Doyen does not advocate for abandoning competing solutions or an “all Payload” approach. “We remain multi-stack”, he emphasizes. “We opt for the right tool according to the need: WordPress when the project merits it, PrestaShop for classic e-commerce stores with a need for proven business modules, Shopify when the priority is commerce time-to-market, and Payload + Next.js when the project demands pure performance, custom data, or ambitious front-end experience”. A good craftsman rarely limits himself to a single tool.

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