Best Headless CMS with Visual Editing for AI-Built Sites

Your coding agent built the site in an afternoon. A week later, someone in marketing wants to change a headline, and the only way to do it is to open the code or ask the person who can.

That’s the gap a headless CMS with visual editing is meant to close. Search for one and you’ll find plenty of lists, most of them written by a CMS vendor about itself and a few friendly competitors. We make two of the tools in this guide, so we’ll say so now. Fimo is ours, and Strapi was created by Fimo’s co-founders. That’s a reason to keep the comparison honest: every tool here gets credit for what it does well, and each section says who it suits.

What is a headless CMS with visual editing?

A headless CMS stores your content and hands it to a website that’s built and hosted somewhere else. Visual editing adds a live view of that website inside the CMS, so an editor clicks a headline on the real page, changes it and sees the result before publishing. Without it, editors work in forms and guess how the page will look.

The catch is that “visual editing” covers very different things. In some tools you click a piece of text and land on the right field. In others you drag whole sections around the page. And in nearly all of them, a developer has to connect the CMS to the site’s code before any of it works.

What changes when a coding agent built the site

A site built with an AI coding tool already has its pages, its components and its content, written straight into the code. That changes what you should ask of a CMS.

• Does it work on the existing site? Most headless CMSs want the content moved into their own model first. That means describing every page type to the CMS and rewiring the site to read from it. Your coding agent can do that work, but it’s still a project.
• Who sets it up, and who maintains it? If visual editing breaks every time a new component is added, your team will go back to asking a developer.
• What can a marketer actually change? Text and images only, or the layout too?
• Can someone approve a change before it goes live? This matters more once AI is making changes as well as people.
• What happens after launch? A CMS stores content. It doesn’t notice a broken link, a stale price or a page that AI assistants can’t read.

Every CMS in one table

Prices and plan limits from each vendor’s own pricing page, checked in November 2026.

Fimo: visual editing on the site your coding agent already built

We’ll start with ours, so weigh this section knowing who wrote it.

Fimo takes a different route from the rest of this list. Instead of asking you to move content into a separate system, it connects to the site your coding agent produced. A developer or the coding agent links the site once, and nothing is rebuilt. From then on your team clicks the text, links, images and video on the page itself and publishes when they’re happy.

It’s also more than a CMS. Hosting is included, every change gets a preview, and agents work on the site after launch: fixing broken links and meta tags, refreshing stale pages, and making pages easier for ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity to read, on a schedule or whenever something changes. You choose whether agents publish on their own or wait for your approval, and every earlier version is kept.

There are limits you should know about. Fimo works with sites built on Next.js, Astro, SvelteKit, React Router, TanStack or Vite. Visual editing covers content, so a design change goes through the chat or your coding agent. Hosting moves to Fimo, and the code sits in Fimo’s private Git repository for now, with GitHub sync coming soon.

Price: free to start, then $99 a month for Starter and $299 a month for Pro, with unlimited sites and members on every plan.

Pick it if a coding agent built your site and you want editing, hosting and upkeep in one place.

Strapi: the open-source standard, from the same founders

Strapi is the most widely used open-source headless CMS, and it was created by Fimo’s co-founders, Pierre Burgy and Aurélien Georget. So this is the second section to read knowing who wrote it.

Strapi gives developers full control. You host it yourself or on Strapi Cloud, shape the content model as you like, and send content to a website, an app or anything else. The free Community edition has no limit on users.

For visual editing, Strapi’s Preview opens your site from the editing screen. Live Preview, on the paid plans, puts the form and the page side by side, and double-clicking a piece of content on the page opens the matching field. A developer sets this up on the site.

On an AI-built site, the content has to move into Strapi first, as with most tools here. That’s the right trade when the same content feeds several products. For a single marketing site that a coding agent already wrote, it’s more setup than Fimo asks for, which is why we built Fimo.

Price: the Community edition is free and open source. Growth is $45 a month for three users, with Live Preview included and $15 for each extra user.

Pick it if you have developers, want an open-source CMS you control, and publish the same content to more than one place.

Sanity: the one coding agents know best

Sanity is one of the CMSs AI assistants name most often for sites built with coding tools, and there’s a reason. Its content model is written as code, so Claude Code or Cursor can write and change it as easily as the rest of the site.

Visual editing in Sanity works through its Presentation tool. Your site loads inside Sanity, and clicking any piece of content opens the matching field. It works with Next.js, Astro, SvelteKit and others, once a developer has added the editing layer to the site. Sanity also has a Content Agent that audits and edits content in bulk, with every change waiting for review.

What Sanity doesn’t do is host the site or look after its code. Content lives in Sanity, the site lives wherever you put it.

Price: the Free plan includes visual editing and up to 20 seats with two roles. Growth is $15 per seat a month.

Pick it if you have a developer, or a coding agent you trust with setup, and want a flexible content system that can grow with you.

Storyblok: the most complete visual editor

Storyblok built its name on its Visual Editor. Editors see the page beside a panel of blocks, change the text, reorder sections and add new ones from a library, all with a live preview.

To get there, each component of your site is declared in Storyblok as a block and mapped to its code. On a site that was written straight into code by an agent, that’s the main piece of work. Once it’s done, marketers can build whole pages without help. Our Storyblok vs Fimo comparison goes through this in detail.

Price: the Starter plan is free for one seat. Growth is $99 a month for five seats, and each extra seat is $15.

Pick it if your marketers want to assemble new pages themselves, and you can invest in the setup.

Prismic: page building from ready-made sections

Prismic is built around slices, which are page sections a developer creates once and editors reuse. Its Page Builder lets a marketer stack those sections into a page, edit them in place and preview the result. The Page Builder, live editing and previews are included in every plan.

For an AI-built site, the sections you already have need to be recreated as slices. Prismic’s developer tool is made for this, and it also offers a connector for Claude and ChatGPT so an assistant can create and edit pages.

Price: free for one user, then $10 a month for three users and $25 a month for seven, billed yearly.

Pick it if you want an affordable page builder and your site is made of clear, repeatable sections.

Builder.io: drag and drop on your own components

Builder.io comes closest to a design tool. Its visual CMS lets editors drag your site’s own components onto a page and arrange them freely. A second product connects to your GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket repository and lets an AI agent change the code itself from a visual view.

That makes it one of the few options here that works directly on an existing codebase. The trade-off is that it’s two products to learn, and AI usage is metered in credits.

Price: free for one user, then $24 per user a month on Pro and $40 on Team.

Pick it if your team wants to change layout as well as words, and is comfortable working close to the code.

Payload: open source, inside your Next.js site

Payload is an open-source CMS that installs into a Next.js project, so the CMS and the site share one codebase. Coding agents handle it well for the same reason they handle Sanity well: everything is code.

Its Live Preview shows the page beside the editing form and updates as you type. It’s a preview more than click-to-edit, so editors still work in fields. There are no seat prices, because you run it yourself, which also means hosting, the database and updates are yours to manage.

Price: free to self-host. You pay for your own hosting.

Pick it if you have developers, want full control and no per-editor bill.

TinaCMS: visual editing that saves to your code

TinaCMS keeps content as Markdown files in your repository and adds visual editing on top. An editor clicks the page, changes the text, and Tina saves it back to the code. That fits AI-built sites whose content already lives in Markdown, such as blogs and documentation, on Next.js or Astro.

It’s less suited to pages where the text is written directly into components, which is how coding agents often build marketing pages.

Price: free for two users, then $24 a month per project for three users.

Pick it if your content is mostly Markdown and you want it to stay in your own repository.

Contentful: for teams that already run on it

Contentful is the enterprise standard for structured content across websites, apps and other channels. It offers live preview on its plans, while Studio, its drag-and-drop visual editor, is part of the Enterprise plan.

For a single AI-built marketing site it’s usually more system than you need. If your company already uses Contentful, though, connecting the new site to it keeps everything in one place. Our Contentful vs Fimo comparison covers plans and pricing.

Pick it if Contentful is already your company’s content system.

How to choose

Start from the site you have and the people who will edit it.

• A coding agent built the site, and marketers need to edit it this week: Fimo, because nothing is rebuilt.
• You want an open-source CMS you host and control: Strapi or Payload.
• You want a content system developers and coding agents can shape freely: Sanity.
• Marketers will build new pages from blocks: Storyblok or Prismic.
• The team wants to change layout visually: Builder.io.
• Content lives in Markdown and should stay there: TinaCMS.

One more thing to weigh. Every tool here helps people change the site. Only some of them help when nobody has time to. If your site tends to go stale between launches, look at what each tool does on its own after launch, not only at its editor. Our comparison of tools for an AI-built website puts that side by side.

Scan your site for free to see what Fimo’s agents would improve, or start on the Free plan with no credit card.