CMS003: Contentful vs ContentStack
Context
Contentful is an API-first content platform that empowers digital teams to build experiences faster. Designed to be the heart of the modern tech stack, Contentful aggregates, structures and delivers content across an organization’s digital ecosystem and stages of the customer journey.
So how is this different from a CMS like Contentstack? And what does Contentful’s content platform offer developers and content teams that vendors like Contentstack do not?
Headless CMS vs content platform: What’s the difference?
A headless CMS is a content management system that separates, or decouples, the content repository “body” from the presentation layer “head.” Content that is housed in a headless CMS is delivered via APIs for display across different devices. This is different from traditional CMSes that have a prescriptive approach around where content can be displayed. Contentful pioneered the headless-approach to content management and is now pioneering its evolution to a platform-first approach.
A content platform is the next-generation content management system (CMS). It aggregates, structures and delivers content across an organization’s digital ecosystem but, most notably, it gives users the ability to create custom applications and run native applications directly on top of the software. This means the software acts as a foundation for applications to be developed, providing end-users with the flexibility to address complex workflows, personalization and other aspects of the content life cycle.
Contentful vs. Contentstack
How does Contentful stack up against Contentstack?
| Manage and create new capabilities | Contentful’s App Framework enables UI customization, content automation and seamless integrations, helping digital teams quickly adapt their content platform to business needs. This enables teams with the context they need to direct content to the right end user experience. This goes beyond the API extensions of headless CMS vendors. |
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| Work more efficiently | Contentful streamlines content workflows by giving developers and content creators the tools to build custom editorial capabilities, integrate third-party services, automate tasks and increase content reusability across tech stacks. While headless CMS competitors focus on content delivery, Contentful connects the entire content life cycle, helping teams to create, collaborate and launch content more efficiently. |
| Create multi-channel experiences | Contentful does not define its pricing by limiting channels or domains. One Contentful space serves unlimited channels, domains and experiences as opposed to competitors pricing models that charge for each new digital property. Contentful’s scalable multi-space offering ensures greater consistency and content reuse. Contentful’s content spaces offer governance and scalability to manage content operations on global and local levels. This means teams can work in their own content spaces, while contributing content seamlessly across digital touchpoints. |
| Automate versioning | Some vendors make it challenging to change the data structure of content types with many entries, like when a document is updated and the URL changes. This forces users to frequently implement URL redirects if they have many content assets that need to be updated on a weekly or monthly basis. Contentful offers world-class content delivery capabilities, supporting continuous software delivery and content management, enabling customers to scale up according to demand or when unpredictable situations arise. |
| Extend anything, anytime | Contentful doesn’t require customers to contact its support team to build or enable extensibility. With a wide range of integrations from customized UIs to workflow management, Contentful provides customers with the freedom to independently extend the platform and build apps with the simple click of a mouse. |
| Help developers get started right away | Contentful offers a free community tier for developers to start building today. This includes detailed documentation, access to GraphQL and self-service training. Developers trust Contentful and it shows — on average, they download Contentful packages 16 times more often than Contentstack. |
Decision
Because of the benefits that outweigh the use of ContentStack along with a competitive pricing structure we took the decision to use Contentful.
Consequences
- N/A
Summary
Contentful is much more feature rich and enables content creators and developers to have more freedom by being extendable.