Best MDX CMS Options Compared

The best MDX CMS options in 2026 split into two camps. Git-based tools store MDX files in your repo. API-based platforms store MDX as a database field. Tina and Keystatic lead the Git camp. Draftbase, Contentlayer, and Sanity (with a custom setup) cover the API side, each with a different tradeoff on visual editing, collaboration, and how content ships.

Already know you want MDX specifically, not Portable Text or a generic rich-text field? This guide skips the "what is MDX" detour. It goes straight to which platform fits your team.

What Counts as an MDX CMS?

An MDX CMS is any content platform where the writing surface produces real MDX, Markdown plus JSX components. That's different from a rich-text document converted to MDX-like output afterward. That distinction matters: a converted document usually can't reference a custom component the way native MDX can.

Two storage models exist. Git-based tools (Tina, Keystatic, Decap) write .mdx files straight into your repository. Content and code share the same commit history. API-based tools (Draftbase) store the MDX string as a database field. It ships through a delivery API, decoupled from your deploy pipeline.

Tina: Visual Editing, Git-Backed

TinaCMS is the most established name here. It has roughly 9,000 GitHub stars against Keystatic's 2,000 (Lucky Media). Its signature feature is in-context visual editing. An editor clicks text directly on the live page and edits it in a sidebar. The preview updates in real time.

That editing experience is genuinely rare among Git-based tools. The cost is infrastructure. Tina Cloud is a SaaS dependency for the collaborative layer, and self-hosting the backend is a real undertaking, not a config flag.

Keystatic: The Developer-First Alternative

Keystatic skips visual editing. In return, it offers a cleaner setup, tighter Astro and Next.js integration, and the more generous free tier of the two. Lucky Media's 2026 review scored Tina ahead overall (3/5 vs 2.7/5), largely on the visual-editing gap, but rated Keystatic's content editing UI as the more polished of the pair.

# Keystatic: content lives as MDX files, committed like code
npx create-keystatic-app@latest

Pick Keystatic when your team is developer-heavy. Content changes go through a normal PR review, same as any other code change.

Sanity and Portable Text: The Structured-Content Alternative

Sanity doesn't store MDX by default. Its native format, Portable Text, is a JSON spec for block content. It's an array of objects, not a markup string (Sanity docs). The pitch is real: content stays markup-agnostic and can render into any target format without a parser.

The tradeoff shows up fast. Need a code block with syntax highlighting, or a component with typed props? That's where it bites. Portable Text needs a custom serializer per content type, and getting that serializer to match your MDX component library exactly is real, ongoing work. One developer's public account of the switch put it bluntly. Syntax highlighting inside Portable Text needed custom serializer work. MDX's compile step just doesn't need that (Medium).

When Portable Text still wins

Real-time collaborative editing, the Google Docs-style experience where two editors see each other's cursors, is easier to build on structured JSON. A raw MDX string doesn't offer that structure. If that's a hard must-have, Sanity's model earns its complexity.

Draftbase: MDX as a Typed Field, No Repo Required

Draftbase takes a third path. MDX lives in a richText field on a typed content entry, not a file in a Git repo and not a Portable Text tree. Content stays in draft/published/archived states with revision history and rollback, independent of your deploy pipeline, so a content edit doesn't need a build to go live.

Components are registered with typed props, and @draftbase/renderer's MDXContent component (a React Server Component) renders them. compileMDX covers everyone else, Pages Router, plain React, React Native. Because evaluate() runs without useDynamicImport, import statements inside CMS-authored MDX throw at compile time. The components prop passed to the renderer is the only door a component has into the page. That makes it an actual security boundary, not just an API convention.

import { MDXContent } from '@draftbase/renderer';

<MDXContent source={entry.content} components={{ Callout, CodeBlock }} />

How Do I Choose Between a Git-Based and API-Based MDX CMS?

Pick Git-based (Tina or Keystatic) when your content team is comfortable with pull requests. Same call if you want content history to live in the same commit log as your code. Pick API-based (Draftbase) when non-technical editors need a normal web admin. Same call if you want scheduled publishing without a deploy, or if the GitHub Contents API's 1,000-file directory cap already worries you.

What About Contentlayer or Velite?

Contentlayer and its successor Velite take a fourth path worth naming, even though neither is a full CMS. Both are build-time tools that read local .mdx files and turn them into a typed data layer for a static site.

That's a real fit for a docs site or a blog with one or two writers who are comfortable editing files directly. It stops being a fit the moment a non-technical editor needs to publish, since there's no admin UI at all, only the file system. Content updates also wait for a full rebuild, same limit any Git-based tool shares.

Treat Contentlayer and Velite as a data-layer choice for a codebase, not a CMS decision for a team. If your writers already live in a code editor, either tool removes the parsing boilerplate a hand-rolled MDX pipeline would otherwise need. If they don't, you're back to choosing among Tina, Keystatic, Sanity, or Draftbase.

What Breaks When You Pick the Wrong One?

The failure mode isn't usually "the tool doesn't work." It's a mismatch between who writes content and what the tool assumes about them.

A Git-based tool handed to a marketing team turns every typo fix into a pull request, a reviewer, and a merge, work nobody signed up for. An API-based tool handed to a five-person engineering team that already lives in Git adds a web admin and a hosted dependency nobody asked for, on top of the deploy pipeline they already trust.

Match the tool to who actually presses publish, not to which one has the most GitHub stars.

The Underused Angle

Every comparison of these tools talks about editing experience and skips the actual security model. Git-based MDX is compiled at build time from a trusted source, your own repo, so the "MDX compiles to executable JS" risk barely applies. API-based MDX gets compiled at request time from content a non-developer wrote through a web form. That's the exact shape of next-mdx-remote CVE-2026-0969. It's a real remote-code-execution bug in versions 4.3.0 through 5.0.0, fixed in 6.0.0 with a blockJS option.

An API-based MDX CMS without a component allowlist is a bigger attack surface than a Git-based one. That's by design, not by accident. That's exactly why Draftbase's renderer disables dynamic import and only trusts the components map. Any component reachable from CMS content has to be registered explicitly, not discoverable at runtime.

Conclusion

Tina wins on visual editing. Keystatic wins on developer setup. Sanity wins when real-time collaboration matters more than MDX's simplicity. Draftbase wins when you want typed MDX fields, scheduled publishing, and no deploy step between an edit and a live page. If your content team needs a normal web admin instead of a pull request, Draftbase's MDX-native CMS is built for that gap. Start free on the Hobby plan, no card required.