· March 18, 2026
Why we chose a single Go binary over Strapi, Sanity, or a custom admin panel for Khao's content engine.
When we were evaluating CMS options for Khao Records, the list looked familiar: Strapi (powerful but heavy), Sanity (excellent but vendor-locked), Directus (flexible but complex), and the usual headless WordPress setup.
PocketBase won on three criteria: it runs as a single binary with zero infrastructure overhead, it provides auth/collections/files/admin UI out of the box, and its JavaScript SDK is lightweight enough to embed directly in our Next.js server components without bloating the bundle.
The tradeoff is ecosystem maturity. PocketBase doesn't have the plugin marketplace of Strapi or the enterprise support of Sanity. For a small label with clear data shapes and a preference for writing over configuring, that tradeoff has paid off so far.