Meet the headless Express CMS that integrates with your app using a straightforward API. Smooth, simple, and tasty content integration — that’s Butter.
So easy to use. So easy to customize. You’re going to love the content you build better with ButterCMS.
Handy integration with Express.js
Our Express CMS has a simple content API and drop-in Express SDK that makes the magic happen in minutes, not hours.
A truly zero-maintenance solution
With ButterCMS, you’ll never worry about security upgrades, hosting, or performance again.
Powerful CMS for Express . Zero headache.
Drop our API-based CMS into your Express app in minutes.
ButterCMS provides a component-based CMS and content API for Express and Express.js apps. Use ButterCMS to enable dynamic content in your apps for page content, blogs, and anything else. Most customers get our Express CMS set up in one hour or less.
That leaves plenty of time for you and your marketing team to do what you do best: create killer apps with killer content.
See how Butter’s API enables you to compose flexible page layouts and easily reorder components, without a developer.
“Best CMS on the market”
After shopping the market, it was clear that ButterCMS was the perfect choice. It allows our developers to build powerful components and makes it easy for our marketing team to drive a better customer experience.
Hampton Catlin Creator of Sass and Haml
Deploy our Express Starter in 30 seconds!
Or follow the below commands to clone a copy of the repo from github, install dependencies, set your free Butter token, and
run your local server on localhost:3000/.
$ git clone https://github.com/ButterCMS/expressjs-starter-buttercms.git
$ cd expressjs-starter-buttercms
$ npm install
$ echo 'EXPRESS_BUTTER_CMS_API_KEY=your_free_butter_api_token' >> .env
$ npm run dev
Built to make content marketing easy
ButterCMS is the best headless CMS for Express for a simple reason: Express developers can build solutions that marketing people love. Our API allows your content gurus to quickly spin up high-converting, dynamic landing pages, SEO pages, product marketing pages, and more, all using simple drag-and-drop functionality.
Our mission was to make it easy to integrate Butter with your existing Express app in minutes. It’s so simple! To demonstrate, here’s a mini tutorial to give you a feel for the process of adding marketing pages to your Express or Express.js app.
See how easily you can integrate the ButterCMS Pages API with your Express.js app.
Seamless Express components
Empower your marketing team with dynamic landing pages that align perfectly with your Express components.
Components are the essential building blocks of any Express app, and ButterCMS handles them with ease.
Our drag and drop interface makes it simple to structure your content to match existing Express components and to create new reusable components whenever you need them.
One Express CMS with everything you need
There’s a reason so many developers are choosing a headless Express CMS. It’s easy to set up, offers flexible, customizable content modeling, and gives you access to our full Express API.
To display posts we create a simple /blog route in our app and fetch blog posts from the Butter API. See our API reference for additional options such as filtering by category or author. The response also includes some metadata we'll use for pagination.
var express = require('express'); var butter = require('buttercms')('your_token'); var app = express()
Next we'll create an EJS template for displaying our posts and pagination links. This guide uses EJS templates but Butter works with any templating engine like Jade, Mustache, and React. If you need help after reading this, contact us via email or livechat.
The template for displaying a full post includes information such as author and publish date. See a full list of available post properties in our API reference.
<h2><%= post.title %></h2>
Published <%= published.getDate() %>/<%= published.getMonth()+1 %>/<%= published.getFullYear() %>
ButterCMS is an API-based headless CMS. We're a hosted service and we maintain all the infrastructure. We play nicely with an expanding list of leading technologies, including:
No database required! We're a SaaS CMS or CaaS. You simply call our Content API from your app. We host and maintain all of the CMS infrastructure.
Do you host my templates?
Unlike CMSs you might be used to, we don't control or host any of your templates. The design of your app (HTML + CSS) lives in your application along side the rest of your app. Your application calls our Content API and we return your content in JSON format. You can then render this content in any way you'd like.
Can I import my content?
Yep. To import existing content from another platform, simply send us an email.
How do you compare to WordPress?
In short, we offer all the same easy-to-use editing capabilities of WordPress but are significantly easier for developers to setup and maintain. This means you spend less time working on your CMS and more time focusing on things important to your business.
Can I self host Butter?
No, we're a SaaS CMS or CaaS. You simply call our Content API from your app. We host and maintain all of the CMS infrastructure.
For more information on how we compare to a traditional CMS, check out API-based CMS vs Traditional CMS on the Butter blog. Do you have more questions? Read our FAQ below, or feel free to chat with us directly.