Contentful

Score7.5 out of 10

55 Reviews and Ratings

What is Contentful?

Contentful is a cloud based CMS solution that provides the ability to manage content across multiple platforms.The editing interface allows for managing content interactively and provides developers the ability to deliver the content with the programming language and template framework of their choice.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

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Content taxonomy
Users can create multiple levels and types of content categories including tags.
Category average: 7.9
SEO support
The CMS helps users create the right website infrastructure (pagination, page headers, titles, meta tags, url structure, etc.) to increase the site’s visibility in search engine results.
Category average: 7.6
Internationalization / multi-language
The software supports multiple languages, countries, currencies, etc.
Category average: 7.8

WYSIWYG editor
What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editing tool allows users to build pages without writing code.
Category average: 8.1
Form generator
Users can build website forms for visitors to fill out.
Category average: 7
Mobile optimization / responsive design
The CMS helps users build webpages that work well on mobile devices – whether m-dot pages or responsively designed pages.
Category average: 8.1

Matthew Martinez

Product Manager in Information Technology at On Location (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Contentful as the CMS to service our public and private sales websites, and have created components to act as orchestration tools to call on other relevant services to complete our ecommerce processes. This means our scope is pretty large with ~10K average daily users and spikes as high as 900K daily users.

Pros

Flexibility
Access Management
Support for multiple locales

Cons

Integrations with TMS
Preview Functionality
Branch management

Return on Investment

Single source of content management
Supports multiple markets with localizations
DAM services

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Webflow

Other Software Used

Salsify, OPTIMOGOV, Optimizely Feature Experimentation

Verified User

Team Lead in Engineering (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Contentful as a headless CMS for clients which want an enterprise grade platform without the enterprise cost of entry. Contentful solves the use of complex content structures in simple and powerful way to expose content across platforms whilst empowering marketeers to build rich experience. The recent additions of a true visual editor and integrations with Ninetailed ensure we can meet the capabilities of platforms which cost many tines more.

Pros

Free tier for experimenting
Great documentation and guides
Marketplace for apps
Simple yet powerful SDK

Cons

Content type limitations can be frustrating
A "comments" dashboard is NEEDED

Return on Investment

Enabled rapid project delivery
Low cost projects for charities
They've brought us direct client work through partnership

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Storyblok, Optimizely Content Management System and WordPress

Other Software Used

React, Vercel

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Easy way to update content and add translation. Usage of Contentful apis to manage entries is also handful for our business case. Contentful webhooks integrated with Buildkite api allowed us to run builds to generate static pages. Lastly we’ve used Contentful studio for composed layouts, this was a game changer since the marketing team was able to generate new pages without any development involved.

Pros

Content management
Webhooks
Reusable layouts

Cons

UI to filter entries

Return on Investment

Fastest content deployments
Development time saving

Usability

Jennifer Garcia View profile

Web Marketing Manager in Marketing at Lively, Inc. (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

Flexible. This CMS can be easily extended and provide access to dynamic content
Simple. The WYSWG is very easy to work with and identifying pages and content in the system is fairly easy
Clean Interface. The interface is clean and uncluttered keeping focus on the content and not other factors.

Cons

Licensing. There is no way to step up from free gracefully over time. It is free or pay big $$
Internal search is horribly lacking and thus extending site search using their product fails in comparison to other products.

Return on Investment

Agile workflow
Empowered Teams
Reusable content

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Bloomreach Experience Platform (brX), Adobe Experience Manager and Sitecore Experience Manager

Other Software Used

GitHub, Jira Software, WebStorm

Eric Mason

Lead Developer in Engineering at SaaSquatch (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

Contentful provides organized, flexible data models with support for a variety of data types and content editors (e.g. WYSIWYGs, form fields, raw text areas).
Contentful has great built-in versioning features with history and draft states so it's easy to make updates and revert when needed.
Contentful has an intuitive user interface and good support for multiple spaces (which can be helpful for companies that need separate projects for dev/staging/production).

Cons

The new Contentful "branches" feature looked promising (it appears to mirror a git-like repository) but it requires the CLI, which isn't necessarily practical for teams that aren't current CLI users. It would be nice if the management of this feature were available via the UI (without that it causes more confusion than anything).
The Contentful data modeling method makes for a bit of an awkward SDK developer experience in some strongly typed languages like Java. Most things that you might need can be accomplished, but it feels like the experience could be smoother.
It would be nice if there were a way to migrate data between spaces (e.g. from your staging space to production).

Return on Investment

Contentful has saved us valuable development time that was previously spent doing deploys for minor content updates.
Contentful has helped us maintain consistent documentation, reducing time needed to review for consistency.
Can't say we've really experienced any negative ROI impacts from using Contentful, but we've run into some limitations in adding too many content models and the next pricing tier is substantially more expensive.