Completely hide DatoCMS branding from clients (100% white label)

Agreed, I should have stated more clearly above that my primary motivation for this feature request is client UX and not having to explain a further concept to less technical clients.

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Thank you very much @convincible @nicos and @webworkshop for your insights. They are very useful to us!

I see your point and I generally agree with your views, but we’ve recently changed to this approach. You can read more details here: https://www.datocms.com/blog/what-happened-in-last-three-months/#the-new-dashboard-with-the-merging-of-users-and-accounts

So yes, we are less white label than before, but this change has reduced quite a lot the confusion for the users that do know about Dato and were trying to log in multiple projects. We are hearing now these requests from developers like you but we have close to zero reports from editors that cannot login or understand what’s going on. They ask you directly, which we think it’s better than asking us as it’s a wast for us and it doesn’t really make sense.

So, we’ll surely discuss more internally what you are suggesting as they are good suggestions, we just need to find a way to make it work for developers, editors and us as well :slight_smile:

We’ll think about something :wink:

Unfortunately, my firm will have a tough time choosing DatoCMS until we can 100% whitelabel all branding for all of the reasons spoken prior.

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A passing thought, as this continues to be a pain point for me, and by the looks of things, others too.

You could offer a full white label option that’s still compatible with universal accounts. Say newly-invited users first enter their email address rather than explicitly choosing a sign up/sign in option. If the entered email already has a Dato account (or if by some other mechanisms such as cookies or local data, you establish that this user most likely has a Dato account), you could offer to log them in. For example: “We’re using Dato behind the scenes to provide our content management solution. It looks like you already have a Dato account, would you like to connect your existing account to #company for easy access, or create a new one with a different email address?”

I understand the problem, but I think it’s solvable on the front end as a UX piece, and doesn’t fundamentally conflict with your architecture (which, as I’ve posted numerous times online, I think is great!)

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Thank you again for the suggestions @webworkshop

Currently there’s only one way to go full white label, is to use SSO https://www.datocms.com/docs/guides/single-sign-on

So that you get rid of all the invite emails and the dashboard login. If that makes sense. We offer that only on Enterprise plans at the moment, but if you are interested please be in touch at support@datocms.com so that we can discuss this further.

Thanks @mat_jack1. You’re right that if we want to skip DatoCMS login process then SSO is the only option.

However, white-label is more about the visible branding not the actual process, if you see what I mean?

Really, the key changes that this feature request requires are cosmetic. In particular:

  • Hide DatoCMS logo on login screen and in related account emails
  • Hide What’s New for non-admin users
  • Hide Docs/support/chat for non-admin users

The product is already 99% white-label in this respect. The DatoCMS brand still appears in a few places and that is the last 1%.

thanks @convincible makes sense. We’ll add that option for the Enterprise plan, that has already SSO integration option.

Adding this for Enterprise only will stop smaller agencies (mine) from moving things to Dato unfortunately. If I moved all of my current clients to Dato,the cost of Enterprise would be fine, but the reality is that I’d bring clients on as I land them as new clients or, for existing clients, if I redesign their site and 1500/month for a small handful of clients isn’t really justifiable. During this phase, I’d like to have them each setup with a Pro account with the ability to move them all under the umbrella of an Enterprise account later. Thus, for us, white labelling in Pro accounts would be critical.

Frankly, for Pro on up, white labelling should be an option. At that point, we’re paying you and there’s no real benefit to having your branding in the product. I just discovered Dato and am doing a live test by redoing my site with it on the Developer plan and completely understand not white-labeling there. But the moment I begin to pay you, I need the ability to white label.

@rick both on the develeoper and professional plan you can already customise the domain of the CMS and add your logo/color scheme. There’s only a small DatoCMS logo in the login screen.

The only issue is with signing up, which we need to do, at least the first time, from the dashboard on dashboard.datocms.com .

Apart from that, from the second login you can login directly on your custom domain. Double check that, it might be good enough for you.

Full white label at the moment means having also Single Sign On login, so that you don’t need to pass from the dashboard to create the user. Without that option we currently cannot do anything better unfortunately.

Hi @mat_jack1 I do agree with @rick that the Enterprise plan is sadly not appropriate for me now, but once we go past the Developer plan, whitelabelling should come automatically. Most specifically, because it doesn’t even make sense for you (Dato) to sell to/gain brand awareness with our clients.

Our clients do not have the knowledge or setup required to make use of a sophisticated technical tool like Dato. Frankly they don’t even understand it, and this name (plus process of registering an account with Dato) confuses them (start asking questions, what is Dashboard, what is Dato, is this something dodgy? etc.).

Rant over! – let me get to the point. You can easily enable whitelabelling without SSO just by implementing the following for anything above Developer plan:

  1. Hide DatoCMS logo on login screen
  2. Hide What’s New inside the app for non-admin
  3. Hide support chat inside the app for non-admin

And/or implement these as new permissions for role types.

Then I can simply create an account for my Client, using my domain name, e.g. name.client@agency.com. I then tell them the username/password to use to login. So now they never have to see Dato or understand the Dato signup process, nor have a Dato account directly (which it doesn’t make sense for them to have anyway).

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Thank you for the feedback.

Support links should be already hidden for non-editors. Hiding the changelog makes sense in any case, we can consider that.

Regarding the logo, it’s really the only thing and only in the login screen. We can consider adding an option on the Professional plan to remove that, yes. Surely not on smaller plans though. I don’t think there are many other headless CMSs that are so “white label” at our price point :slight_smile:

hello @mat_jack1
just wondering if this option is now added? we have a company which are happy to buy Pro or Scale plans but we want to be able to white label the stuff for our client. So when adding new users to a project, we dont want the email to come from dato and we dont want our clients to create a dato account - can you guys add that option?

hey @DatoUser currently the only way to remove our dashboard from the process is with SSO. With that you can manage users in a third party system and the users can log in directly from the branded login page, skipping our dashboard.

This is effectively giving a 100% white label solution, and we don’t think implementing anything different soon.

Hey @mat_jack1

Please can I just try one more time with you on this. It really would be a very small change.

When I really think about this, all I really need is to remove the DatoCMS logo from the login screen. That is it. Only for paid plans, of course.

I can’t emphasise enough that the only reason for this is because my clients have zero understanding of what Dato even is. There is nothing you can gain from showing them your logo. Literally all it does is confuse my clients, which makes it harder for me to sell them websites built with Dato.

Please consider it!

I am happy to discuss further if you’d like to understand where I’m coming from on this.

Thank you.

@convincible it’s currently possible to completely white-label the UI. It’s an Enterprise-only feature as it makes sense only together with SSO. Without SSO you would still need to sign up for an account from datocms.com

If you are interested in that feel free to reach out at support@datocms.com and we can discuss your need and provide a custom enterprise quote.

Hi @mat_jack1 thanks for replying.

I create the accounts for my client, e.g. client@mydomain.com, so they never need to sign up. This doesn’t require SSO, and it’s a much better client experience.

That’s fine, still the white label is a custom feature that requires a custom quote, even without SSO. The feature is there though! :slight_smile: