Constructive Feedback: Stability vs. Feature Velocity in Payload CMS

[MarvinVrdoljak]

Hi Payload Team & Community 👋

First off, let me say how much we love working with Payload. Its modern architecture, flexibility and the vision behind it are truly impressive. This post is not meant as a rant, but rather as constructive feedback based on our real-world experience using Payload over several years.
We’ve been working with Payload since September 2022, starting with v1. We’ve now transitioned from v2 to v3 and witnessed firsthand how the CMS – and the web tech landscape around it – has rapidly evolved. We actively use Payload across multiple client projects (always with Localization) and even our clients appreciate its modern approach and developer-friendly design.

That said, we’ve been struggling significantly with the sheer number of bugs that make it into stable releases.
Every update feels like a gamble: “What will break this time?” During the last community call, there was excitement around the fact that 500 bugs have been fixed since May – and while it’s great that these issues are being addressed, we honestly find it alarming that so many bugs made it into stable versions in the first place.
We understand that no software is perfect and bugs are part of development. But when almost every weekly release introduces regressions or breaks previously working features, it becomes extremely frustrating and costly to maintain projects.

Features: Yes, Please – But Stable Ones. We’re always excited about new features. But please – quality over quantity.
We would much prefer fewer, well-tested releases over a high velocity of new features that introduce new issues elsewhere. If you want to iterate quickly, that’s totally fine – just please consider shipping them under clearly marked beta branches or opt-in flags.
Keep fixing bugs fast, absolutely. But new features should not come at the expense of overall stability.

In the last community call you mentioned Payload v4 and that gives us cold sweats. We recently completed a significant upgrade across all our client projects from v2 to v3 – which took several weeks of work, including rewriting our custom plugins, fixing breaking changes or manually testing everything again.

And this was partly driven by the fact that v2 lost support after just one year. That’s a very short support window for production-grade software and makes it hard to sell Payload as a long-term solution to clients.

To the Payload team:

• Are you aware of all this?
• Do you have any internal roadmap or plans to improve release stability?
• Do you plan to have versions with long-term support in near future?
• Would you consider shifting to fewer, larger and more stable releases for core versions?
• We've observed that many issues stem from localization problems. Do you plan to put more emphasis on testing for multilingual websites in the future? This would significantly help teams working with international and multi-language setups.

To the community:

• Are you experiencing similar issues?
• How are you handling update workflows and maintaining stability across projects?

Again – we’re big fans. This message comes from a place of appreciation and a strong desire to see Payload thrive and grow sustainably.

We want to continue using and advocating for Payload, but right now, maintaining it over time is far more effortful than it should be. We hope this feedback resonates and opens up a constructive discussion about how we can all contribute to a more stable and scalable future for Payload CMS.

Thank you for your hard work and for listening. 🙏

Have a great day!

[tyteen4a03]

I concur with many of the sentiments shared here.

I'm hoping that with Figma's resources, Payload can now expand the team and be more on top of bugfixes, as well as DX improvements that aren't as flashy but would make developers more productive (like Storybook)

[PP-Tom]

Thank you for taking your time to post.

I was recently faced with a very large project, we were consistently hitting bugs and waiting for releases that fixed those bugs, but then would break previously working functionality. The main one that made me really question the unit tests was switching languages would completely crash the UI.

It felt like there was consistently a hard place on choosing which bugs are the lesser of two evils.

It did make me question at times whether I made a mistake choosing Payload.

However, each time I found myself asking that question, and started revisiting the CMS market, there just isn't a CMS that comes close to Payload at its core.

There was plenty of times that Payload made difficult custom functionality a breeze.

And I think this is why this post and other people agreeing with it are so passionate about more stable releases, because we love Payload and completely see its potential.

Recently I've been coming across less bugs during development and it feels like new functionality are under flags.

It feels like things are moving in the right direction and I'm sure the Payload team share this goal.