Evaluating Directus for a Large Internal Real Estate Platform

Help
,
1

Hello Directus Community,

We are evaluating Directus Enterprise for a real-world deployment and would greatly appreciate feedback from both the Directus team and existing enterprise users. I am currently evaluating Directus as a potential replacement for our company’s internal property listing management system in Vietnam.

Our use case is similar to an internal MLS (Multiple Listing Service).

Expected scale:

  • 1 Owner
  • ~50 Administrators
  • ~500 Editors (can create and update property listings)
  • ~10,000 Viewers (search and view only)
  • 50,000+ property records
  • Multiple images per property (typically 5-10 photos)

I would greatly appreciate clarification on the following points:

  1. Licensing & Seats
    How are seats actually calculated in Directus Cloud and Enterprise?

For example:

  • Do Viewers require paid seats?
  • Or are seats only required for users who actively manage content?
  1. Record-Level Security (RLS)
    Can Editors be restricted to:
  • View only their own records?
  • Edit only their own records?
  • Be prevented from editing records created by other Editors?
  1. Field-Level Permissions
    Can permissions be configured per field/column?

Example:

  • Editors can update asking price and property status.
  • Editors cannot modify approval status, scoring fields, or administrative fields.
  1. Audit Logs & Revision History
    Does Directus provide:
  • Who changed a record?
  • When it was changed?
  • Before/after values?
  • Image upload/replacement history?
  • Per-record revision history?

If yes, which plan includes these features?

  1. Scalability
    Has anyone successfully deployed Directus with:
  • 50,000+ records
  • Hundreds of Editors
  • Thousands of Viewers
  • Large image libraries

Any real-world examples or lessons learned would be greatly appreciated.

  1. Proof of Concept (POC)
    Is there a way to obtain an Enterprise POC or trial environment to evaluate advanced features before making a purchasing decision?

    One final question:

    Our company currently does not have a corporate email domain, which prevents us from submitting the Enterprise sales form.

    Is there an alternative way to contact the Directus Enterprise team regarding pricing and enterprise evaluation?

Thank you very much for your help.

2 Answers

2
2

Hi there.

We’re building a real estate platform too, in a different country. We don’t have thousands of viewers yet, but I don’t expect that to be a problem at your scale.

We run around 100K+ records across collections, with a few dozen thousand images on S3, self-hosted Directus 11. Directus fits your needs.

There’s an admin panel called the Data Studio. Only users who log into the Studio count as seats. If your 10K Viewers just search/view through your own frontend (hitting the API), they aren’t Studio users and don’t count.

You can scope Editors to their own records with permission filters, so they see and edit only their own listings. Permissions are configurable per field too.

Audit logs and revision history are built in: the activity log records who did what and when, revisions store snapshots (so you get per-record history and before/after values), and file uploads are tracked.

Hope this helps.

Thank you so much for your feedback. I would like to ask about the actual user experience: does it run smoothly, or are there any errors or lag when handling large volumes of data and multiple users with granular permission settings? Our company plans to purchase the cloud-based version rather than a self-hosted one; in addition to users with view-only access, there will be several hundred users with permissions to update and edit information in the tables.

 –

I've never had performance issues, even on basic hardware. But since you're dealing with hundreds of users updating real estate listings, the cloud version is probably the way to go.

 –
3

Hey @PhuongHo - welcome to the community :waving_hand: This is one of the more thorough evaluation posts we gotten here, so let me go point by point.

Seats and licensing

A seat is anyone who logs into the Directus Studio, so your Owner, Admins, and Editors all count, if they’re working in the Studio. Your 10,000 Viewers reading through your own frontend are not seats, they’re just API consumers. And depending on your build, your Editors might not need to be either. If you put a custom frontend in front of Directus and have Editors create and update listings through that instead of the Studio, they’re API consumers too, and the seat math drops dramatically. Whether that’s worth building depends on how much of the Studio’s editing UI you actually want them in.

Record-level security

Yes to all three. Add a user_created field to your listings collection, then scope Editor permissions with a filter like user_created = $CURRENT_USER. That gives you read/edit on their own records only, a create preset that auto-stamps the creator so nobody can fake ownership, and no access to other Editors’ records.

Field-level permissions

Fully supported, per field on each action. Let Editors update asking_price and property_status, and leave approval_status, scoring, and admin fields out of their writable list. They won’t be able to modify (or even read, if you choose) what you don’t grant. Exactly your scenario.

Audit logs and revision history

Strong area, all in the core product. Activity log records who did what, when, from which IP, on which item. Revisions store full before/after snapshots per record. File uploads and replacements are tracked too, since files are records.

One real caveat with v12: retention is now tiered. Core keeps activity and revision history 30 days, Team 90 days, Enterprise configurable. For an MLS with compliance needs you’ll want long or indefinite retention, which points to Enterprise, or self-hosting where you control the database and set your own. Also lock read access on those system collections down to Admins, since they can bypass normal collection permissions.

Scalability

50K records with 5-10 images each is comfortable. Directus runs on standard SQL, so your ceiling is your database and hardware, not Directus. Index your search and filter fields properly (hundreds of editors querying 50K records at once will punish missing indexes).

On images: keep serving them through Directus rather than going straight to S3, because the assets endpoint is what enforces your access control. If you bypass it you lose permissions on the files, which you definitely don’t want on an MLS. To handle the load, put a CDN like Cloudflare in front of Directus to cache and serve the images. You keep the permission layer and get the caching, best of both.

POC / trial

I’d suggest you stand up a self-hosted instance with Docker in minutes and build a full POC for free, no sales call needed. I’d start there since it lets you test RLS, field permissions, and revisions hands-on before any pricing conversation.

Pricing and the corporate email problem

For actual Enterprise pricing, the real answer is to talk to our sales team, since it’s custom and scoped to your needs, nobody here can quote you a number. I know the form wants a business domain and you don’t have one yet. Don’t let that stop you - you can just email sales@directus.io too.

Building the self-hosted POC first is also a great lead-in, since you’ll walk into that conversation knowing exactly what you need.

Happy to go deeper on any of these. The RLS plus field-permissions combo is the heart of your MLS use case, and it’s where Directus is genuinely stronger than most solutions you’ll find.