# Headless CMS

URL: https://xodia.ai/glossary/headless-cms
Description: A headless CMS stores and serves content through an API without deciding how it looks, so any site or app can fetch the content and render it in its own design.
Last updated: 2026-11-08

A headless CMS stores and serves content through an API without deciding how it looks, so any site or app can fetch the content and render it in its own design.

Updated November 8, 2026

## What it is

A traditional CMS owns both the content and the pages that show it. A headless CMS keeps only the content, in structured types with fields, and delivers it as JSON. The website is a separate project that asks the API for what it needs at build time or on each request.

Editors get a dedicated interface for drafting and publishing, and developers keep full control of the front end.

## In Xodia

Xodia's Content tab connects to Sanity, Contentful, Storyblok and Prismic with a token you create in the CMS. It lists the content types as collections, edits entries as forms and shows each one's status, such as draft or changed, beside the live site that renders them.

Edits go to the CMS, not your repository, and publish the way that CMS publishes. The stack packs for each CMS tell your AI how its queries, previews and tokens work.

## Read more

- [Xodia CMS](https://xodia.ai/product/cms)
- [Sanity in Xodia](https://xodia.ai/integrations/sanity)
- [Sanity in Xodia](https://xodia.ai/integrations/sanity)

## Related terms

- [Git-based CMS A git-based CMS is a content management system that stores content as files in your site's git repository and saves edits as commits, instead of keeping it in a separate database.](https://xodia.ai/glossary/git-based-cms)
- [Draft mode Draft mode is a way for a site to show unpublished content to editors, such as a draft post in a CMS, while visitors keep seeing only what has been published.](https://xodia.ai/glossary/draft-mode)
- [CMS schema A CMS schema is the definition of a site's content types and their fields, such as a blog post with a title, a date, an author reference and a body, that every entry must follow.](https://xodia.ai/glossary/cms-schema)

[See every term in the glossary](https://xodia.ai/glossary)

Glossary