A headless CMS should be judged by the publishing workflow it supports. For Strapi, model one real content type with relationships, images, localization, and a preview. Ask an editor—not only a developer—to create, revise, approve, and unpublish an item.
Check field validation, permissions, and which API fields anonymous visitors can read. Test media storage and a content migration using representative records; preserve slugs and relationships. Publish to a staging site, then roll back a mistaken change. Review the Strapi documentation for the exact version and plugins you plan to run.
Compare the engineering effort of hosting, upgrades, backups, and custom code against a managed alternative. The decisive result is whether editors can work safely and developers can reproduce the content model, not how quickly a blank project starts.
Akousa