---
title: "Why we put Strapi next to Magento instead of fighting Magento's CMS"
url: https://www.axelerant.com/blog/strapi-magento-composable-commerce
published: 2026-07-22T10:00:00Z
author: "Bassam Ismail, Director of Digital Engineering"
source: Axelerant Thinking
---

# Why we put Strapi next to Magento instead of fighting Magento's CMS

> Why we paired Strapi with Magento 2 behind a Next.js frontend for a D2C commerce build, what it bought us, and what headless honestly costs.

Every Magento project reaches the same fork. The design team wants component-level flexibility across content-heavy pages. The marketing team wants to edit those pages daily without a developer. And Magento, which is genuinely good at commerce, offers you its CMS capabilities with a straight face.

On [a recent D2C commerce build for a UK kitchen manufacturer](/blog/commerce-platform-manufacturer-d2c-leap), we took the fork seriously instead of defaulting. The evaluation question was not "can Magento render content pages?" It can. The question was whether the design system and the editorial workflow the client needed could live there without permanent compromise.

### The decision context

Three constraints drove it. The design agency's system demanded flexible, composable components across brand storytelling, inspiration content, and catalog landing pages, and Magento's frontend layer could not deliver that flexibility without fighting it constantly. The client's content editors were non-technical, and Magento's admin is complex enough that "editor self-service" would have been a fiction. And this was a business entering D2C for the first time, meaning content strategy would evolve fast, faster than anyone wants to redeploy a commerce platform.

We considered keeping everything in Magento with a heavily customized frontend layer. Rejected: the customization cost lands on every future change, forever. We considered a full commerce-capable CMS or a different commerce engine entirely. Rejected: Magento's commerce depth, product types, pricing, and order management were exactly right for a manufacturer with mixed product complexity, from sample swatches to configured kitchen units.

So: Magento 2 for commerce truth. Strapi for content truth. Next.js in front of both, talking to each over GraphQL and APIs.

### How the split works in practice

The boundary rule is simple and we enforced it: if it is transactional, it is Magento. Products, pricing, stock, baskets, checkout, orders, customer accounts. If an editor touches it weekly, it is Strapi. Navigation, footer, content pages, brand modules, editorial listings. The frontend composes both into one experience, and the customer never sees the seam.

The payoff showed up in two places. Designers got a component library in Next.js unconstrained by Magento's rendering assumptions. And editors got a lean CMS they could actually operate, down to details like controlling the sort order of curated kitchen listings themselves, a capability we added as a small change request rather than a development cycle.

Strapi held up well for this shape of project: lightweight, fast to model content in, and friendly to the GraphQL composition pattern. Its job is deliberately narrow here, and that narrowness is a feature.

### What headless honestly costs

Now the part evaluation decks skip. In this architecture, a seemingly simple change can require work across multiple systems. A feature touching product data, presentation, and editorial content can mean coordinated changes in Magento, Next.js, and Strapi, with three deployment pipelines and three sets of environment configuration behind it. Our team said this plainly in the project retrospective, and it slowed us at moments when dependencies were already tight.

You buy flexibility with coordination. For this client, with a fast-evolving content strategy and a demanding design system, the trade was clearly right. For a catalog-simple store with a static content footprint, it clearly would not be. The architecture is not the point. The fit is.

### What changed

The platform launched with editors running content self-serve from day one and the design system implemented without Magento-imposed compromises. Commerce complexity, including mixed baskets that merge [3D-planner-designed kitchens](/blog/magento-3d-planner-integration) with samples and accessories, stayed where it belonged, in Magento.

### What you can take from this

If you are evaluating Magento for a content-rich D2C experience, do not ask whether Magento can do content. Ask whether your editors and your design system can live with how it does content, for years. If the answer is no, pairing it with a lean CMS is not architectural indulgence. It is the cheaper path over the life of the platform, provided you go in with eyes open about multi-system coordination cost.

Weighing a composable stack decision? We will walk through our decision record with you.

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Read on the web: https://www.axelerant.com/blog/strapi-magento-composable-commerce