Agility CMS

What is Agility?

Agility was born in 2002 in Canada. That makes it one of the oldest CMS in our Discovery Hub. It wasn’t headless from the very beginning but eventually turned into one of the biggest Jamstack promoters, organizing a lot of meetups and webinars. You can find great content on their website. They educate people about the modern headless approach to building websites.

User Interface

The UI feels a bit old-fashioned. It reminds me a bit of classy Windows enterprise apps. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. I bet some people are so used to this style they don’t want to change anything. And that might fit perfectly with Agility’s target audience.

Even though the UI looks clunky, it works quite well. You can quickly switch tabs on the left sidebar, from the main dashboard called Home where you can find links to documentation, tutorials, and some basic usage stats. Next are Content and Pages. The latter is a representation of your content in a sitemap kind of structure.

You can organize content in folders. Top pages like home, about, etc can have children which become sub-pages. This should be a very familiar way of structuring content for most editors.

Getting started with Agility

When you sign up Agility welcomes you with a quick starters screen. You can pick Next.js, Gatsby, Nuxt.js, Eleventy, or start with a blank instance that you can customize yourself.

Seamless integration with Next.js and Vercel

I used the default Next.js starter and connected it to Vercel. What surprised me is the great integration between those tools. It took literally 3 clicks. Agility automatically sets up Previews Mode which means you can edit content, click preview and you will see changes in a new tab. That’s a great implementation of Next.js Preview feature. Out of the box. That’s kind of the developer experience that makes Jamstack shine.

It took about 5 minutes to set everything up.

Agility maintains an official gatsby-source-agilitycms plugin that integrates the CMS with the Gatsby GraphQL layer. It’s pretty basic integration, some features like gatsby-plugin-image are not supported yet.

Content Models

Agility offers a pretty advanced field configurator. You can choose from standard text fields to references and custom fields like color picker or video.

Using advanced settings you can set validation rules like a unique field and the same field value for every language.

Reports

In the reports tab, you can find a list of recent changes, items awaiting publication, and user activity. This is a nice place for a supervisor who needs to make sure what’s going on in the CMS space without spending too much time on browsing notifications.

Agility Pricing

Agility comes with a free developer plan for one project. That’s enough to test the CMS and play with it, but might be not sufficient for a real website. Larger plans start from $610/month which might be quite pricey for small projects. Agility clearly aims for mid-to-large companies and enterprises. You can find a detailed comparison of plans here.

Agility Support

Standard support starts in the Pro plan, which is currently priced at $1,220/month. There is so-called self-served which basically means all support you get is documentation and maybe a response on live chat, but without guarantee and clear ETA.

Agility Pros and Cons