Where MDX loses: if your editors aren't developers and nobody's building them a visual editor, rich text with a WYSIWYG wins, and it isn't close. JSX tags, props, nesting, escaping rules. That's a real learning curve for someone who wants to fix a headline. Be honest about it before you pick MDX for a marketing team.
An MDX CMS stores content as MDX, a superset of Markdown that allows JSX components inline. Markdown needs a renderer, which every platform ships. MDX needs a compiler and a component map, which no platform ships by default. Draftbase stores raw MDX in typed richText fields and registers components with typed props, so a missing component is caught before publish.
That compile step is the whole tradeoff. A stray { takes the document down. Compile at request time and it takes it down in production. Markdown just bends. Indented code blocks and autolinks don't work in MDX either, per the official docs, so pasted Markdown that relied on four-space indentation breaks on arrival.
Now the claim that gets repeated everywhere. Search "MDX headless CMS" and the roundups name Contentful, Sanity, and Strapi. Go read their docs. What they have is a long-text field. That's a genuinely good anti-lock-in pattern, but the CMS can't check a component, can't show editors what's available, and can't stop a broken reference from shipping.
The test is one question: does the CMS know the names and prop types of your components? No means "MDX support" is "we have strings".
The Git-based side has its own problem worth naming. Contentlayer was the default pick for years. Its last release was June 29, 2023, and its last commit landed September 23, 2023, after the maintainer lost sponsorship. Content Collections picked up the pattern with a Zod-based schema API. Plenty of tutorials still recommend Contentlayer.
Also worth knowing: MDX only travels one way. Markdown up to MDX is free. MDX back down means stripping every component and replacing it with something.
Definition, the two kinds of MDX content management, and the full limitations list are on the canonical: What Is an MDX CMS?.
Sincerely, MDX earns its keep on docs, changelogs, and technical blogs, and nowhere else. Draftbase serves it over REST or GraphQL with no deploy to fix a typo. Hobby is free. Argue formats at r/draftbase_cms.
