Payload Outperforms Competitors by 700% With MongoDB Atlas

Developers face increasing demands to create websites and apps that wow the user, and according to James Mikrut, the founder of Payload, they’re often building with platforms they dislike. That’s where his self-hosted, open-source platform comes in.

“Developers hate headless CMS platforms,” he explains. “Payload is the developer-first platform where headless CMS meets application framework.”

Unlike competing products, developers have more control in Payload and can build more complicated websites and applications without hitting roadblocks. But the developer experience isn’t the only thing that sets Payload apart. It’s also super-fast and high performing, and that’s partially due to MongoDB Atlas.

When Mikrut spoke at MongoDB.local NYC in 2023, he described MongoDB Atlas as “blazingly fast” after running a performance test against two of its biggest competitors—Strapi and Directus, which use PostgreSQL relational databases. Running on MongoDB Atlas, Payload outperformed Strapi by 700% and Directus by 300%.

As a general purpose document database, MongoDB is better suited to Payload’s needs. Atlas, the developer data platform, offers greater flexibility and scalability, which is exactly what developers need to work faster and manage the peaks in traffic that you’d expect when building e-commerce websites. MongoDB maps its data structures to popular programming languages, which allows developers to write less code.

As the only database Payload’s CMS platform supports, customers can run the Community Edition of MongoDB on their own servers or take advantage of Atlas as part of Payload Cloud’s one-click deployment.

“With MongoDB Atlas, one admin can cross-reference content, build highly dynamic and related entries, and render it into a product that’s very deliberate,” adds Mikrut.

Next, the company is exploring how to use generative AI extractions for metadata and looking to Atlas Vector Search to keep everything in one data platform. “That’s a game-changer. You won’t need to go out and sign up for other vendors. You’ll just go with MongoDB Atlas and you should be done.”