React Bricks wins European CMS Idol 25

By Janus Boye

“Can we have true visual editing coupled with a powerful headless CMS?”

This is the opening question that Matteo Frana, Founder and CEO at Italian-based React Bricks asked when he opened his winning six minute live demo at the CMS Summit 25 conference in Frankfurt earlier this month.

Held as a part of the European CMS Idols contest, React Bricks went up against five other vendors and Matteo convincingly answered his question and also showcased a new feature. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a six minute live demo (no prerecorded stuff was allowed) gives you even more to tell what a system is capable of.

Matteo Frana from React Bricks during his live demo at the European CMS Idols 2025. Photo: Marta Cukierman

React Bricks competed against Hygraph, Kentico, Plate, Sulu and Webiny and won both the votes from the conference participants and the expert jury which included:

The show was hosted by Matt Garrepy from CMS Critic.

So what did Matteo actually do to win?

An award winning demo of visual editing excellence

Matteo in action during his winning CMS Idol 25 live demo. Photo: Marta Cukierman

Matteo’s live demo convincingly answered his opening question. The primary focus was on showcasing their visual editor, which empowers content editors with flexibility in creating pages.

In-browser editing of text and images may not seem groundbreaking at first glance. However, the rise of headless CMS solutions over the past decade has often shifted the balance toward developer-centric workflows—sometimes at the expense of intuitive editing experiences. Other vendors have (re-)introduced similar functionality, but React Bricks deserves credit for taking visual editing to the next level and showing a flawless demo.

Without making his demo seem rushed, Matteo also showed a glimpse under the hood of the developer experience: Built with React and TypeScript, React Bricks offers developers a familiar, modern tech stack with type safety and component reusability at its core.

Finally, he wrapped up by showing a world premier live demo of their new AI page builder conveniently dubbed “Frankfurt”. This AI-powered content generation was interesting as it focused on safeguarding design systems and corporate identity.

A screenshot of the visual editor in React Bricks which Matteo showed as a part of his live demo

Matteo’s presentation was clearly well prepared and free of technical hiccups during the six minutes. He closed the demo by returning to his opening question, bringing the session full circle. All in all, a strong and compelling live performance—well done!

From left to right: Janus Boye, Matt McQueeny, Matt Garrepy, Matteo Frana, Baddy Sonja, Ivo Lukac and Jam. Photo: Marta Cukierman

Live demos bring out innovation

Doing a good live demo is hard and takes preparation, but live demos also bring out innovation and are worth the work. That's why live demos are a regular ingredient at our conferences, where constructive feedback from the judges gives participants a chance to see some of the latest and greatest innovation.

AI was a big thing in Frankfurt at the CMS Summit and this was also the case among the live demos. From German-based Hygraph we saw an AI-assisted importer demo and heard how they focus on using AI to clear the bottlenecks between creation and delivery.

Dutch-based Plate was also a part of the group of brave vendors and showed a brand new Content Structuring Assistant, built right into the CMS editor. They have shared a recording of their demo, which you can lean back and enjoy.

We’ve also seen innovation at past contests, including from Kontent.ai, which won CMS Idols at CMS Kickoff 25 with a better way to do content workflows.

Learn more about live demos — and see them soon again

Think about how important the driving experience is when you buy a car. Would you buy a car just based on some slides? Or perhaps more in the same price range, would you buy a house to live in just based on a fancy deck from a slick realtor? No, you wouldn't, right? But why are so many then buying enterprise software, upwards of millions of dollars, without actually trying it out?

Or like our CMS Experts community leader Matt McQueeny recently said:

“Software presentations without live demos are akin to concerts without the band playing the songs”

To keep the art of the live demo going, we’ve integrated them into our conferences for the past decade and you can experience it next at these upcoming events:

You can also read more about live demos in these posts: