Contentful Composable Content Platform

My main use case for Contentful  is that I built my personal brand called immediatetiger.com and I needed a section called blog where I could post articles from time to time about anything that I found interesting and related to my work. I needed something where I could log in and manage my articles with a basic API that would expose my data and I could read them through a microservice.

Because I use the Next.js framework, I found Contentful  very easy to integrate and basically expose that to the front end so I can see articles and manage them through Contentful's content management system.

I use Contentful solo. I worked at one company and integrated Contentful as well, but for my personal brand, it is literally just a solo solution to manage my personal blog. That's why I also have a free account, because I set up my account a long time ago, but I didn't have a real solution that I could utilize Contentful for. I can see that right now it works for me long-term, so it's a great choice.

I have only four articles so far because it's been since January 2025, so it's just basically this year and we're currently in March, so it hasn't been a long time. What I found very interesting is that I can upload images. Because I can upload images and publish them through Contentful, that simplifies a lot of things because usually I use Google Cloud  storage. When you write articles, it's better to keep images and articles in one place in Contentful because it's just so easy to think about. For now, because I'm very slow with doing my articles, it's a really great choice. I know that Contentful also does GraphQL, which is great as well.

Contentful offers several valuable features. The most valuable feature is Content, where I can create new articles. I also found the Media section interesting, where I can upload my images. When I look at the content, I found it interesting how I can model content. When I click on my article, I have ID, title, description, and images fields. This feature where I can add fields of a specific type is really great when you look at a project in the initial stage, because you never know how long-term you will expand or what will happen with the project.

Apart from these features, I found that it's easy to integrate, and the documentation is easy as well. I could easily create the API key and everything else. When you look at the API keys feature, I think it's very stable. I never had any problem. Webhooks also exist, but I don't use them right now. Maybe I will use them at some point. Because I publish my articles very slowly and not many, I use mainly these features for now.

Contentful has positively impacted my work because I have people browsing Google and because I use SEO as well, and my articles are indexed and written by me. People come and read them. The most valuable part is that some people find them attractive and actually read about topics like the difference between chatbots or agents, what is a chatbot, what is fine-tuning, or remote work. These are actually my articles, which are quite important looking at the market right now. Some people come and view and read them.

To be honest, I don't work so deeply with Contentful to see anything that I would change. Based on what I do, everything is really done in the sense that I don't need any changes. Maybe in the future something will change, but at this specific moment, I think I got everything I need from Contentful.

The only thing I would mention is basically fields and types. That's what I found quite difficult at the beginning to understand how all that works. So there is some space to improve. Apart from that, I didn't have really any big requirements in terms of any changes. I would need to look very deeply once again at what I did because I did that some time ago. For now, I don't need any updates from Contentful. At least, I don't see it at this specific moment. The job I really do by using Contentful is really little. I don't post every week or every single day to basically expect something more in terms of quality.

I just noticed that there's a new AI Automation tab. I have not seen that before. At this specific moment, I think everything works in a really great way. It's very stable. That's the most important when you post content. The last thing you want to see is that the service disappears or your content is somehow changed. For me, it's been very stable. Even though I have just four articles, they're very important for me, and my personal brand is very important for me as well. I just try to make sure that I stick to basically stable solutions. For one year and six months, I never had any problems with Contentful. Even when I was updating the module, I never had any problems.

I have used Contentful for about one year and six months, starting when I began building my personal brand and one of my sections is a blog, where I needed to manage my blog articles somehow.

At this specific moment, I think everything works in a really great way. It's very stable. That's the most important when you post content. The last thing you want to see is that the service disappears or your content is somehow changed. For me, it's been very stable. Even though I have just four articles, they're very important for me, and my personal brand is very important for me as well. I just try to make sure that I stick to basically stable solutions. For one year and six months, I never had any problems with Contentful. Even when I was updating the module, I never had any problems.

In terms of Contentful, I would rate it 10/10 based on my usage and driven by the stability of the service. When I was building my personal brand for the last one year and six months, I never saw the service go down or break my articles in any way. So there was no downtime. At least I have not noticed that. This is the reason why I rate it 10/10 because when you publish your content and you have articles, even though you have just four of them, the company Contentful may not understand the value of my ideas and why I do it. However, it is very important that there are no downtimes periodically since I bought my domain and I build a lot of other things on that domain as well. My service is quite big. When I choose companies, I look at how stable they are, what's the downtime, and if I had any problems during the time I was working with that actual integration or something. There are companies where things fail and so on. To be honest with Contentful, since I signed up and used this service twice, I didn't have any problems in terms of downtime.

Contentful scalability in my experience is great.

There were challenges because when I was creating a solution, I didn't know Contentful very well. I found a lot of problems with types and matching in TypeScript types with the fields I was using and with the API and the full module. The biggest problem I found was to actually set up correctly and match types so I could build the project and deploy that correctly. This was causing me at the beginning a lot of problems when I was trying to pull data and display my articles. Also quite challenging was displaying the image. It took me a while before I actually did that. However, I managed to display everything the way I want it.

I was using Drupal  and Joomla  a long time ago. I was also using WordPress. However, all these systems are not headless. I was using those content management systems for a while for different reasons. For my personal brand, I was looking for a solution where I could create different types of fields and I could connect to the API and get the actual values of these fields.

I found a lot of problems with types and matching in TypeScript types with the fields I was using and with the API and the full module. The biggest problem I found was to actually set up correctly and match types so I could build the project and deploy that correctly. This was causing me at the beginning a lot of problems when I was trying to pull data and display my articles. Also quite challenging was displaying the image. It took me a while before I actually did that. However, I managed to display everything the way I want it.

I use Contentful solo. I worked at one company and integrated Contentful as well, but for my personal brand, it is literally just a solo solution to manage my personal blog.

For one year and six months, I never had any problems with Contentful. Even when I was updating the module, I never had any problems.

Contentful has positively impacted my work because I have people browsing Google and because I use SEO as well, and my articles are indexed and written by me. People come and read them. The most valuable part is that some people find them attractive and actually read about what the difference is between chatbots or agents, what is a chatbot, what is fine-tuning, or remote work. These are actually my articles, which are quite important looking at the market right now. Some people come and view and read them.

I'm on a free plan just because I don't post a lot and the basic setup is free. So at the moment, I'm on a free plan.

I was looking at Netlify or something, and looking at WordPress.

I do use Google Analytics. I track my views and I can see how popular my articles are. It's not a lot of views, but people systematically come and read something, which is good.

I didn't check support, but when I was doing that I found out that it's easy to generate the API key and easy to look at the documentation and easy to integrate Contentful with Python as a module. Contentful's module in Python is easy to set up, plus the ability to create the API key easily. Looking at Contentful itself, adding articles is really easy. You upload the image first, then you create the content, you publish, and that's it. It works. Because of that, I think it's good as well. The UI is very normal. I could suggest to Contentful that maybe there are some ideas in terms of content. Now we have AI and a lot of great designs you can create with basically AI. Maybe that's where Contentful could look at, how to innovate or reinvent that part. Even though it looks good, maybe there is space to innovate something.

Make  sure your API key is safe. That's what I would suggest. Focus on your content and try to divide your content into different sections and think about what type of section that is and what type of format that should be. That's how I would advise people to look at Contentful. Think about what you want to do, what you want to build, divide this into smaller pieces and think about what type of field that is, and then try to match this with Contentful fields.

There is an AI and automations tab. I didn't look at this section, but I don't see any chatbot available on the app when I sign in. Agents are very important right now because, for example, if you had a section when I look at content, I may have a question about anything. I could ask anything about my article and there's no chatbot that I could talk to when I log in myself. Probably something very important right now is that if you build an article and you are very new to Contentful, it's very hard to understand everything at once. Even though it may look very simple, it's actually not when you build and integrate the module in Python, for example, and then you need to expose that to the front end and so on and so on. You need to use Postman, make requests, and try to understand how it all works. It's actually a lot of things. A chatbot would help your clients for sure because they will have questions. For example, how to connect Contentful through GraphQL and how to connect Contentful through REST. Even though documentation is there, I think questioning an agent is actually much better for me.

I rate this product 10 out of 10.

My main use case for Contentful  is as a headless CMS.

For a New York-based hospital, I developed a blog from scratch using Contentful  and Next.js as a headless setup.

Other ways I use Contentful include managing content across different environments that I created and playing around with the preview feature of Contentful for local development.

In my experience, the best features Contentful offers include the way it provides a layer so that the front end can call APIs and GraphQL API endpoints to get the specific content. Additionally, the ability to switch between environments and work on draft content, not just on the Contentful site but also on the code part, is very useful.

To access content from Contentful efficiently, there is some kind of mechanism required, and Contentful provides GraphQL endpoints by adding a third-party plugin into Contentful and using that to access the data on the local machine and integrate it into the view. When switching between environments, having a production and non-production environment helps us do a quick round of testing before we publish content to production servers, which are mostly user-focused, while non-production servers are just for internal application development.

The draft content and preview feature in Contentful have been helpful in overall development because sometimes content creators can store content in a draft stage. Once in draft mode, it can be accessed locally if preview mode is on, which has been very beneficial for development purposes.

Contentful has positively impacted my organization by enabling us to manage multiple blogs seamlessly without any issues, and overall feedback has been positive. It easily integrates with the latest tech stack and creates a headless CMS experience, making my overall experience with Contentful really good.

Contentful provides a feature to create spaces, and with multiple spaces, it is possible to create multiple blogs, meaning we just need a front-end setup to point to a particular space to get a blog up and running. The setup time required is minimal, and content updates are seamless, allowing anyone to update content on the go. Even if not manually saved, Contentful auto-saves it and moves it to draft mode.

From a user experience perspective, I believe there can be enhancements in terms of accessibility, and the content publication process can be improved. While it is currently easy, enhancing workflows would help not just content creators but also developers. Creating some kind of SDK to reduce the onboarding time for developers by fifty percent or so would be ideal, allowing developers to simply input the space ID and URLs to start collecting data.

Documentation can certainly add additional benefits to Contentful, as the person managing content can change frequently, and a feature that documents processes would help ensure continuity. Additionally, it would be great to have Contentful incorporate some AI capabilities and possibly some sort of MCP server.

I have used the solution for about one year.

In my experience, Contentful has been very stable, and I have not encountered any issues.

Contentful has great scalability, as I was able to create different types of content and multiple blogs on a single account.

I have found customer support for Contentful to be really good and helpful overall.

I have not used many solutions before; I just used WordPress prior to Contentful, but it is quite different from what Contentful offers.

Contentful has saved a lot of time in creating a blog from scratch, as I had one existing blog already running on Contentful headless CMS, and creating a new blog was very easy and time-saving, thus saving a lot of effort as well.

I have had an overall good experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing.

Before choosing Contentful, I did not evaluate other options; it was just recommended to me by a colleague, and that is why I started using it.

My advice to others looking into using Contentful is that it is really good if you are into headless CMS and using the latest tech stack such as React or Next.js, as it provides the right tools to set up your blog and work seamlessly with your content.

Overall, based on my experience, I find Contentful to be a really good tool for managing content, specifically when working with headless CMS on the latest tech stack such as React and Next.js, and I would definitely recommend it to my colleagues and peers. I have rated this review with a nine out of ten.

My main use case for Contentful  is to create the content for a website for a bigger company as mine, and I'm also a backend developer and design the Contentful  model and the content that uses it. A quick specific example of how I used Contentful for my website is the e-commerce website for a bigger company in Germany.

In my experience, the best feature Contentful offers is the application plugin mechanism. The add applications I can add to Contentful to customize the application is highly beneficial.

What I appreciate most about the application plugin mechanism is everything around the deployment and the chosen front-end framework for my project was great, and React also. There are some limitations, which is in the nature of how the plugin mechanism was designed. The iframe technique was the blocker to implement SSO  for connecting to other services. However, there are other techniques you can use.

Besides the application framework, something that stands out about the features is that the publishing mechanism can be improved further. With the start of 2025, the local-based publish was introduced by Contentful. That is a great feature, but it had some limitations. Backend implementation for validation, the bulk validation was no longer supported for this feature. This is a big bug. Contentful never lined out the timeline when it can be fixed, and I have two bugs open on Contentful now. That is not favorable for me.

Contentful can be improved to have a full-featured free account, perhaps with fewer content types. However, with all features, a free developer could test everything without having a company that subscribed to an enterprise account, which would be great.

The rate limit on the management API is a big deal for most developers and is something that would make Contentful better. The inability to search for JSON objects, meaning content types that contain fields with JSON objects and looking for some field values in the JSON, is not supported. It would be nice to have something like this.

I have been using Contentful since 2018, for eight years.

Contentful is stable. It is really stable.

Contentful's scalability is fine. Sometimes it was going slower, but most of the time there was a fix available by Contentful. The stability and scalability were good.

The customer support reacts relatively fast if you have the right subscription. I would rate the customer support a nine on a scale of one to ten.

I previously used a different solution from IBM. I do not remember the name. It was a well-known system from IBM. On one hand, and on the other hand was Drupal . Both were on-premise, and the company looked for a SaaS solution. Contentful made sense a few years ago, and we developed for a few years with Contentful.

I cannot tell you much about the pricing, setup cost, and licensing. It was in the field from another colleague. I think it was easy, and I cannot tell you anything about that.

I had a team of five developers dealing with Contentful, but we are facing some bugs, and the support was not as good.

There was no return on investment. It was very expensive to implement all the needed specialties a company needs for its public publish strategy, to publish the content in different countries, different markets, and different languages. This was a concept that Contentful does not support out of the box, and we had to deal with a complicated content model. It was very expensive to implement, but we had chosen Contentful, and so we had to deal with it.

I evaluated other options before choosing Contentful. I do not remember the names we evaluated. It was in late 2018, and I cannot recall which specific alternatives were considered.

Contentful  has positively impacted our organization because it is seamless and almost 60% of the content is flowing well with no dependency on any particular part of AEM. We are directly using the content we create with GraphQL into the UI.

There are many time savings and positive outcomes after switching to Contentful . Product owners who use Contentful are very happy because they can create content themselves, which eliminates the need to depend primarily on developers. This is a significant positive point.

Deployments could be somewhat easier for migrating content from lower environments to higher environments, which is a challenge we are currently experiencing with Contentful.

My advice for others looking into using Contentful is that they can use it seamlessly with no problems. I would rate this review as a positive recommendation for Contentful.