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.

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!

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@Ezekiel

Thanks for the detailed reply and for taking the time to go through each point. I really appreciate it! Here are our thoughts on your points:

1. Autosave & General Speed

It is very hard to capture the data loss on video because it doesn't happen every single time.

Usually, the bug looks like this:

  • We are editing a page, and suddenly the "Publish" button becomes unavailable/disabled.

  • The autosave indicator shows a green checkmark (meaning everything is saved).

  • To get the "Publish" button back, we have to refresh the browser tab.

  • Once we refresh, our latest changes are completely gone.

Generally, Prismic has become much slower and less stable, and for us, this started when slice previews and autosave were introduced. I am sharing a video comparison of Prismic next to DatoCMS and Payload.

As you can see, Prismic is much slower—and in this video, I actually caught Prismic on a "good" day. When editors are working and constantly switching between documents, it gets even slower. It is not just me; our whole agency team and other developers in our network complain about Prismic's speed and reliability lately.

2. Custom Type Builder & Migrations

We still have about 5 projects on the old Custom Type Builder. To be honest, we don't dare to upgrade them. We fear losing production data, and we know it would take a lot of hours to fix if something goes wrong. We just don't trust the upgrade process enough.

On a positive note: We are currently migrating our active projects from Slice Machine to the new cloud Type Builder. That process actually works surprisingly well!

However, in our current project (naefpartner.prismic.io), we are having a major issue with the slice previews. They are broken; we either get an error, or the slices render completely without CSS. Do you have any idea what could be causing this?

3. Rich Text Labels

We use Rich Text labels to allow our clients to do custom styling inside a text block. For example, we want them to be able to style a text link to look like a button, or style an H1 tag with the design of an H2.

This is an incredibly useful feature that we rely on heavily, and it is even documented by you guys here: Prismic Docs - Rich Text Labels. It is hard for us to understand why this is treated as a "minor side-feature" and has never been fully integrated into the Type Builder UI.

4. Link Field Restrictions

We need a field where an editor can add an External Link, but we want to disable Media Links (so they don't upload PDFs there), and we want to restrict Internal Links only to a specific Custom Type (like "Page") (see also feedback Link Field Use Cases: Share Your Requests and Feedback - #22 by prismic.p7urh ).

If we use a Content Relationship field as you suggested, we lose the ability to link to external websites entirely. We really like the new repeatable link fields and variations, but we absolutely need to be able to restrict what they can link to. This functionality actually already exists in the JSON schema (using select and customtype), but it feels unfinished and gets wiped out when the new Type Builder pulls the changes.

To be honest, we have reported some of these issues to support and in the community forums in the past, but we never received a helpful answer. That is why we reached a point of frustration.

I hope this detailed feedback helps your team understand our daily workflow struggles. I would love to hear your thoughts on these points!

Here is also a video showing the UID bug.

Best regards,
Mario

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@Ezekiel

I managed to capture the data-loss bug on video:

In this recording, you can see exactly what happens:

  1. While editing, the "Publish" button suddenly becomes unavailable.

  2. As you can see, I changed the variant of a TagGroup slice and added some text content.

  3. The "Saved" indicator shows a green checkmark, and the document is in "Draft" status, but "Publish" is disabled.

  4. My only choice is to refresh the page or leave the document. In the video, I leave the document.

  5. In the overview list, the document suddenly does not show as a Draft anymore.

  6. I click back into the document, and all the data I just entered is completely gone.

  7. When I go back to the overview list again, it suddenly shows as "Draft" again—but the data is still lost.

I know this is a very tricky bug to reproduce and fix. But it happens quite often to us, and it is incredibly painful when you have already entered a lot of content and only realize at the end that the Publish button is locked. A bug like this simply shouldn’t exist in a production CMS.

For reference, my colleague experiences the exact same issue. We both use Firefox (I am on macOS and my colleague is on Windows).

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Hi @prismic.p7urh, let me investigate on the points you brought up! Thanks for those details :slight_smile: I'll get back to you later this afternoon or early next week with news.

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@prismic.p7urh, I'm back with news! Not a full answer yet, but I didn't want to leave you hanging too long.

1. Autosave & General Speed

I've pinpointed the bug you're describing, the video was super helpful so thank you for that. I've asked what can be done internally and see about a quick fix. In the meantime, I can disable autosave on any repositories that you wish if you'd like? At least until the issue with it is fixed. Let me know.

Performance/speed wise, we're aware. I completely agree with you, you're not the only user to report this performance degradation and the team has been notified. They're working on several improvements, I can't go into too much detail, but some you should be able to see. This is an issue we've noticed and don't want to ignore, so I'm hoping you see the progress very soon!

2. Custom Type Builder & Migrations

Understandable for the Legacy Builder upgrade, we can't make you upgrade but we do still recommend taking the time at some point as the feature parity and support will lessen with time. If you're making it work so far though, you're of course free to keep using it! Love to hear the transition to the Type Builder has been successful tho, the team will be happy to hear it :slight_smile:

For the slice previews, do you mean the ones in the Page Builder? If so we have a troubleshooting page here that should cover the basics: Troubleshooting: Live Editing (Slice Previews). Could you have a look and let me know if that fixed it for you?

3. Rich Text Labels

A fair point! I'll raise the question and get back to you. I'm missing some elements of answer at this stage, but I'll return.

4. Link Field Restrictions

Yeah that makes sense, I see it. I don't believe this is on the roadmap as of now, I'll create a feature request for that, as I understand your point, you just need more flexibility in the link fields to have more control over what marketers can put in there. Full transparency, I don't know if this will be addressed any time soon, but at least the team will know the need is there! I've also asked the team to tell me their thoughts on it, anything I can share, you'll know.

5. UID bug

I can reproduce now! Thank you for the video. Our team internally is working on it, as we speak, so this one should at least be resolved momentarily. I'll confirm when that's the case!

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Hi,

Thank you so much for this detailed response and for taking our feedback so seriously. Seeing you investigate these issues and acknowledge the bugs makes a huge difference, and it really makes us feel heard as long-time users.

However, I have to be completely honest with you: our next upcoming project will not be built on Prismic.

That said, we still have dozens of existing projects on Prismic that we need to maintain, and we owe it to our clients to deliver a "good", reliable CMS experience. But right now, as I am populating content for an active project, the editor experience is honestly a nightmare. Between the sluggish performance and constantly bumping into weird bugs, we simply cannot, in good conscience, sell or recommend Prismic for new projects in its current state.

Here are a few quick follow-up notes on your points:

1. Autosave & Speed

Thank you for looking into the autosave bug so quickly and for validating the speed issues. It’s a relief to know fixes are being worked on.

2. Inconsistency, Docs & Live Previews

Our main concern right now is what we call the "Windows effect"—a layer of persistent inconsistency caused by having parts of the legacy Type Builder, Slice Machine, and the new Cloud Type Builder living side-by-side.

  • UI Inconsistency: For example, clicking on "Settings" in the CMS still routes to an outdated, legacy view—even after years.

  • Confusing Docs: It makes troubleshooting very difficult. Is a forum post or guide meant for Slice Machine, or does it apply to the new Type Builder?

  • The Live Preview Issue: In our new setup, we don't even have a slicemachine.config.json containing adapter and libraries anymore—is that file even needed with the new Type Builder? The official Next.js docs on Live Previews don't really clarify this.

Cookies are not the issue on our side, and our dependencies are completely up to date. Sometimes the preview works (though without CSS styling), but most of the time it just throws an error. The connection seems to be partially there, but it’s completely unreliable. It creates a terrible impression when clients log into the CMS and are immediately met with constant error screens.

3. Rich Text, Link Restrictions & UID Bug

Thank you for reproducing the UID bug so fast, pushing a fix internally, and for being completely transparent about the roadmap regarding Link fields and Rich Text labels.

Summary: Polish over new features

To summarize our perspective: we don't need fancy new features right now.

What Prismic needs most is for existing features to be polished, stable, and consistent. Old, abandoned legacy UI parts should either be cleaned up/removed or fully integrated into the modern releases. Just a thorough sweep to tidy everything up and make the system reliable again!

We really hope Prismic gets back to that level of stability soon, as we'd love to return in the future.

Best regards,
Mario

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Hi there @prismic.p7urh,

Appreciate your patience with this :slight_smile:

I understand what you're saying completely. All I can say is that we are indeed as you've seen taking this seriously and want to make sure we keep the trust of our users, so this hasn't fallen into deaf ears. We hope that you see the improvements while maintaing your existing projects and it brings you back to Prismic fully!

Autosave: This has been registered as a bug, the team is working on it. No specific ETA which I'm sad to share, but this is being looked at actively!

Inconsistency, Docs & Live Previews:

  • Good news, as I'm sure you've seen, the dashboard has gotten a facelift. Settings are next, some are already live (the danger zone), I'm working on the rest so we can provide a more uniform UI experience. We're making time for this and you should see the result soon!
  • Because we've rolled out the Type Builder and are changing our recommended approaches to Prismic, some of the documentation is being updated as it goes. I understand it's not helping the overall comprehension of the product and I'll make a note to share this with the team and keep on top of documentation. I believe the forum, for example, goes way back and has been used to troubleshoot several versions of the editor, the legacy builder, the slice machine, and now the type builder. We've accumulated quite a lot of useful information, but I'm with you that it requires some restructuring. We're looking into this!
  • For the live preview issue, adapter and libraries are not needed anymore.​ If you're not running npx start-slicemachine, you can drop them. If the preview works sometimes, it might not be a set-up issue but something else. In either case we should have a fallback for when live preview doesn't work, so it's not an error screen that shows. Again to clarify, you're talking about the live preview in the page builder's pages? Not in the Type Builder/not the full website page preview?

The UID bug in the Type Builder is fixed :slight_smile:

I'll share the rest of your concern with the team as always. Sorry I can't do much more except report back and fix what I can from my end, but internally this is being tracked and they'll know your thoughts on the roadmap and what's coming out/being updated. We do want you here!

Any further issues, please let me know!