From superfans to frustrated users: Why our agency is losing patience with Prismic

Prismic Administrative Support Features
1

Hi Prismic Team and fellow Community Members,

We are writing this post with a heavy heart, but we’ve reached a point where we can no longer stay silent.

Our agency has been a loyal and happy Prismic customer for years. We’ve built over 30 projects on the platform, mostly high-end, animation-heavy marketing websites featuring interactive 3D elements. Up until recently, Prismic’s CMS features and fair pricing perfectly aligned with our workflow and expectations. We used to be your biggest fans.

Unfortunately, Prismic is convincing us less and less every day. The developer and editor experience has degraded significantly, and maintaining our portfolio has become a frustrating chore.

Here is a breakdown of the critical issues we are currently facing:

1. The Auto-Save Feature is a Disaster

What was likely intended as a convenience feature has turned into an unreliable nightmare.

  • We are constantly fighting with lost data because the auto-save simply fails or becomes unresponsive.

  • Extremely long loading times have become the new normal whenever auto-save triggers.

  • Content editors are losing trust in the system because of frequent service hiccups during editing sessions.

2. The Custom Type Builder vs. Slice Machine Flip-Flop

The constant back-and-forth between the legacy Custom Type Builder, the local Slice Machine, and the new cloud Type Builder is incredibly confusing. For an agency maintaining older, existing projects, this fragmented workflow is tedious, disjointed, and riddled with bugs.

3. JSON Inconsistency & UI Limitations

We always loved the JSON descriptions for Custom Types—it made things highly practical. However, the connection between the Type Builder UI and the underlying JSON capabilities has become completely inconsistent. For Instance:

  • RichText Labels: Why can we still not define custom labels for the RichText field directly inside the UI?

  • Link Field Restrictions: Why can't we restrict a Link field via the UI to only allow links to internal pages of a specific Custom Type? We used to workaround this by manually editing the JSON file. But now, whenever we pull from Prismic using the new Type Builder, it completely overwrites and wipes out the select and customtype attributes on Link types.

4. Critical UI Bugs (The Disappearing UID Field)

The new Type Builder UI has some terrifying bugs that put production data at risk. For example, if you have a Page type where the UID field is fixed at the top, and you simply reorder the other fields below it, the UID field quietly disappears from the UI. It’s barely noticeable at first glance. But if you accidentally pull this state to your local environment, it creates absolute chaos.

We’ve Lost Our Patience

It is honestly a shame to see what has become of a tool we used to champion. We want to love Prismic again, but the current stability issues and regressive workflows are actively hurting our agency's productivity and our clients' trust.

As a result, we are currently losing our patience and are actively looking into migrating our ecosystem to alternatives like DatoCMS or Payload.

We hope the team takes this feedback seriously. We don't want to leave, but we need a CMS that works reliably.

Best regards,

Old fans who are no longer convinced.

3

Hi @Ezekiel,

I just saw that this post was made "unlisted." To be honest, this is really disappointing.

As a loyal customer with over 30 projects on Prismic, we shared these bugs because we wanted to help improve the platform. Hiding our feedback feels wrong and feels like you are trying to hide the problems.

A community forum should be a place for open discussion. We should be able to talk about the good things, but also about bugs and frustrations. Being afraid of criticism and hiding posts only makes us lose more trust.

We really hope there is a good reason for this step. We didn't write the post to attack you, we just want Prismic to be a stable and reliable tool again.

We would still love to get a real, honest answer to the technical problems we mentioned in our first message.

Best regards,

An unhappy but still hoping-for-answers partner

4

Hey @prismic.p7urh,

We hear you! There was no intention to leave this post unanswered, apologies if that's how it was perceived. I've raised some of these issues internally to provide you a more complete response so we can properly address your feedback, and am waiting on some details to get back to you.

The forum is indeed a place for open discussion, and we welcome every kind of feedback. That's what makes us better in the long run, so we're aligned on this.

I'll be back with answers, thank you for your patience!

6

Hey @prismic.p7urh,

Getting back to you now - thanks for your patience! I'll answer point by point to make sure nothing is missed.

  • Regarding autosave:

We welcome any kind of bug reporting so we can investigate and fix those issues. Any loss of data is of course not intentional on our part, and long loading times aren't meant to be consistently experienced when using the Page Builder. I get how that would affect your trust in the Page Builder, especially in regards to content loss.

We're able to deactivate autosave on a repo-by-repo basis if you'd like, though we'd appreciate if you could share any screenshots/recordings of this happening so we can investigate the root cause and fix the actual issues. Is this something you've raised tickets about before?

  • Regarding Custom Type Builder vs Slice Machine

How many projects do you still have on the custom type builder? The Slice Machine was introduced over five years ago, and we expect most projects are now on Slice Machine. We have a guide to migrate to it whenever possible, we'd be happy to share it if it makes it easier.

You can read more about the Type Builder here and its interactions with Slice Machine: What Is the Type Builder? — Prismic Docs. Again, feel free to share any bugs here with as much details as you can. We want the experience to be pain-free and as smooth as possible, and user feedback allows us to catch anything we might have missed. We'll look into any report thoroughly and provided fixes!

  • Regarding JSON Inconsistency & UI Limitations

Richt text labels: I'll check with the team. The likelihood is that it isn't on the roadmap, and that is a product decision that they're sticking to for the moment. Could you elaborate on your use case here, so I can get back to them with a concrete example? It might help the case. Is this a feature request you've raised before?

Link Field Restrictions: If I understand what you're trying to do correctly, we recommend using a content relationship field instead. That should do what you need it to. If I got that wrong, feel free to correct me :slight_smile:

  • Regarding critical UI bugs

I've tried and am not able to recreate this - could you send me a recording of this behavior? This is indeed not supposed to happen at all, and I'd like this addressed asap as indeed there is a great reliance on the UID field for websites to function.

Let me know if you can help me with some of these. I understand the frustration, and I'm sorry the direction the product has taken as well as its bugs have driven you to this point. We want to help and make sure you feel confident and build enough trust in Prismic that you don't need to go anywhere, as we do love having you! I'm happy to continue this discussion, so any further thoughts, please let me know and I'll get back to you as promised.

Thanks!