Storyblok

Storyblok  is primarily used for website development for many of our clients, as we use it as a headless CMS.

One specific project where we used Storyblok  as a headless CMS is a CSR initiative where we transformed the client's CMS from Squarespace  to a headless CMS and improved the performance by many folds.

Storyblok has positively impacted our organization by helping our clients move away from traditional CMS and achieve a high-performance website along with reduced costs. Moving to a headless CMS has greatly enhanced maintainability and reduced license costs.

I don't have specific numbers, but the site became much more performant, and maintainability improved because the previous CMS was a monolithic stack, allowing us to go with open source and separate the code from the content management system.

The best features Storyblok offers include a preview environment where business editors can see their content before it goes live, and for developers, it provides all the APIs, whether CDN  APIs or management APIs, to update the content or schema.

The preview environment helps business editors edit and see the content in real time, and the APIs make the developer's life easy in bringing the content and integrating it into the website.

There are many other features of Storyblok, including assets and the ability to integrate plugins for many other functionalities.

Storyblok can be improved by offering more flexibility in terms of schema creation, and it could also possibly improve the way assets are saved and persisted.

Storyblok can be improved in the assets area to make it more appealing to business editors.

I have been using Storyblok for five years.

In my experience, Storyblok is stable.

The scalability of Storyblok is fine, as we have grown from a few pages to thousands of pages already and I see it as a fairly scalable and stable platform.

Customer support for Storyblok is great, as we get urgent responses and day-to-day issues are also addressed.

We previously used Adobe AEM, but it had a high license cost and the maintenance was also very costly because it required a lot of AEM expertise.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that pricing and setup are all fine and well-documented, and compared to the features it provides, the price is fairly reasonable.

There is a great return on investment because when our client moved away from the monolithic CMS, it saved a lot of cost. Even though initially employees who were trained on the other CMS took some time for training, they are now proficient with it and we don't need as many employees.

Before choosing Storyblok, we evaluated other options including Strapi .

I haven't tried the AI features of Storyblok yet because clients have not given their consent to it, but I would love to try sometime in the future.

I haven't used the AI features of Storyblok, so I cannot comment on its accuracy and reliability, but I have heard about it through videos, having never worked on it.

My advice to others looking into using Storyblok is that it is a good platform if you want to go with a headless CMS because it provides all the features including a preview feature and is easy to integrate within frameworks like Next.js, along with all the kinds of APIs needed for developers.

Overall, my additional thoughts about Storyblok are that it's great and good to use. I would rate this review a 7 out of 10.

My main use case for Storyblok  is mostly blogs and landing pages. I have used Storyblok  for landing pages using Astro and Next.js, and one example is the physical space landing page for TAI Group. It is an Astro project that is connected to Storyblok and regenerates using the webhook functionality from Storyblok to push changes.

I use Storyblok in tandem with Vercel for landing pages.

The previous solution I used before Storyblok was Strapi , but it required payment if I wanted to use it in the cloud; otherwise, I would have to deploy it myself.

Before choosing Storyblok, I evaluated Contentful , but I simply could not use it. There was a strange error when I tried to access it.

The best features Storyblok offers are the blocks building, how easy it is to use, the tag management, and the ability to easily manage pictures and assets in general.

Regarding block management, by making blocks, I can create anything I can think of, how I divide them by universal component or pages, and blocks. Storyblok offers many components and options to build those blocks, and it is highly customizable. The user experience is excellent.

Storyblok has positively impacted my organization by being easy to use. Since I have been using it, I have not needed to build easy content management myself or worry about deployment or other headless CMSs. The free tier works well for these small landing pages.

I am uncertain if this issue with tags has been improved, but when I used it for tags, whenever I changed the content in pages, the changes were not pushed through the webhook. It did not push an event when tags were modified on the page, which is something that could be improved.

Also, the pricing is a little expensive, but the features offered justify the cost. If it were not for the limitations on pricing and rate limiting, I would say it would be greater.

I have been using Storyblok since 2023.

In my experience, Storyblok is stable and works well.

The scalability of Storyblok is good enough; it is quite good.

The previous solution I used was Strapi , but it required payment if I wanted to use it in the cloud; otherwise, I would have to deploy it myself.

Regarding my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Storyblok, I primarily used it on the free tier myself. I have helped some people with using it and introduced others to it.

Before choosing Storyblok, I evaluated Contentful , but I could not use it at that time. There was a strange error when I tried to access it.

My advice for others looking into using Storyblok is to be strategic about it and use it with patterns such as incremental static regeneration and for static sites first. If you need to scale it further, design your system beforehand and try to reduce the use of it as much as possible. The rate limiting and costs can add up. I would rate this product an 8 overall.

The main use case for Storyblok  is developing websites with content management system ideas, so we manage all the content by using a React structure, mapping the blocks inside Storyblok . There were also some import features. We created scripts to import content from other CMS into Storyblok.

One project that illustrates my use of Storyblok is the Louisiana portal, which is a government portal. They decided to use this real-time editor, CMS, and real-time viewer. The idea was to build all the design in a React Next.js project and then map the components into Storyblok. They would be able to build their content based on the structure of the old website, but in the new design and new CMS. The idea was to import everything into Storyblok and let them make the edits and create new pages. We had two or three main templates, and then they were free to create different page variations there according to their necessity. They had a lot of content, which was really challenging because of the different menus and structures, resulting in different templates as I mentioned before. It was really great to work on that project.

The best features that Storyblok offers include the components mapped into blocks inside Storyblok and the Storybook block. I believe this mapping between React components into blocks is the most interesting feature. The live preview is also very good, but this is something we see in other CMS; however, this mapping was the first time I have seen that.

The unique feature of mapping between React components and blocks helps my workflow and the team's productivity because blocks are very important. We do not need to keep repeating ourselves all the time. We just build a block that receives the properties, and properties mean we can provide that information via the management portal we have inside Storyblok. We can click over that block and provide the properties, making this the most powerful tool I see because we can leave the user or add to the user this capability to make all the edits with real-time just by dragging and dropping components. The idea is basically to create a set of components based on the design system so they can use them without any restriction, just dragging and dropping, which provides a lot of flexibility and ensures the design system stays consistent.

Storyblok has positively impacted my organization because we delivered this website to a very important customer, and they were very happy with the management system. They were able to easily create new content or make updates on the existing one. They had a few necessities to add some notes or messages for the users, such as banners with announcements. They were very happy they could manage that very easily. This became a very interesting use case for a customer and thus a use case in our company.

The only downside I would mention about my use of Storyblok in these projects was the cache management system that Storyblok has; it was not very good, but all the rest was amazing. I liked the idea to have React components and map them into blocks inside Storyblok and then have the live preview. You could drag and drop components, rearrange everything, and see the live preview. That was a really amazing experience working with a headless CMS such as Storyblok, one of the best I have ever worked with.

Storyblok can be improved in terms of cache issues, as it was not resetting the cache. The customer was making edits to the website and wanted to see that in real-time right after publishing the changes, but they were not live at that moment. Sometimes they needed to wait two minutes, thirty seconds, or sometimes more than five minutes to see the changes getting applied to the live website.

I used Storyblok in three projects, and I have been working with Storyblok for more or less two years.

Storyblok is stable.

Storyblok's scalability is pretty good.

I did not use the customer support, but I believe those who used it in the company told me it was a good experience.

I did not previously use a different solution because I just received this project, and they already decided on Storyblok; it was not my decision to use Storyblok, but I was very happy working with it from the first project. Then the second project was more or less the same, and in the third project, I chose Storyblok because they wanted to use a CMS. I explained how Storyblok works, and they agreed to use it instead of WordPress, which they were initially tending to use, and I convinced them to switch because I showed them it is much easier than WordPress.

Before choosing Storyblok, I evaluated other options, with my main experience being with WordPress. There was another CMS I had experience with in two projects, but I do not remember the name as it was a very old CMS. They were not options because the previous experience I had with them made me sure that I wanted to use Storyblok instead, as it is much better for managing the content and building the solution. I also remember Umbraco and Sitecore, but they are .NET, so the client wanted something such as Node.js or PHP; therefore, they were not options. However, even if they were options, I still would go with Storyblok instead.

I believe a ten is something unreachable because once we have something that is ten, it means nothing can be improved. I would say a nine is the best I will ever rate. If I rate something a nine for regular people, it will mean ten, but I do not believe ten is something we should use because once we set ten, nothing will get improved. I would say it could be nine, but the idea here about this high number, because it is really high, is that it is pretty easy to set up. It is intuitive, not just for development, but also for who manages the content. I had experience with WordPress, and WordPress does not have that ease. It is pretty hard to make content updates on their system, and they had a lot of plugins that make it a bit easier, but not as easy as Storyblok. The real-time features with the blocks makes it very easy for end users or for users who do not have experience with CMS. You do not need to have experience with CMS; a kind of ten minutes with someone explaining how to manage the content there is enough for you to make edits on the website. That is why I would say eight or nine as the rate.

I do not have relevant numbers to share as metrics, such as time saved or reduction in support requests; it is out of my scope, so I did not have enough access. However, the website was pretty quick, and I believe we reduced the loading time with Storyblok's cache, making it faster than the previous website. But I do not have enough data to provide.

Storyblok is pretty intuitive, and you do not need to worry about anything. I would rate this review eight out of ten.

My main use case for Storyblok  is that we use it as the content management system for our client websites, so we're an agency and nearly every website we build will use Storyblok  as the system that we choose.

A specific example of a client project where we used Storyblok is one we did recently for a charity association where we live, and we integrated Storyblok into Laravel as the platform for running the website. Storyblok enabled us to build the templates and all the blocks that they required for the pages on the website to create all the content. What was useful about it, because it's platform agnostic, is we could also then use a Filament back-end as well on Laravel, allowing charities to have an individual back-end just for their content, but the richer branded pages we built fully in Storyblok so that our client could manage everything very easily and quickly, such as building new pages based off the block library we created for them, and enabling things including automatic image optimization, allowing them to choose icons, color them from their palettes using custom Storyblok plugins, and other features.

Storyblok gives us the flexibility to rapidly respond to client needs because every client project is going to be different, and it allows us to manage that in a simple interface which we love and our clients love too.

The best features Storyblok offers, from a developer perspective, are how easy it is to set up and the ease of working with their API, which gives me lovely structured JSON data that I can use for building the websites. From a marketer perspective, it's going to be the visual editor, which is really important, I think, for less tech-savvy people. The interface is actually surprisingly simple because you can design your content around what it represents, such as a service, a person, or a call to action. As you're modeling your data to match its requirement, it makes it easy to talk about and understand for people.

The visual editor specifically helps my clients because it gives peace of mind to them; they can see what they're editing as they're editing it. In some other platforms, there's more of an abstraction between the editing experience and the actual content and the presentation of that content, but with the visual editor, they can go and view the page they want to edit, click on the content they need to edit, and then the UI will update and just show them the content for that block. In terms of the JSON API, because I actually develop the Laravel Storyblok package, it gives an expected output and a structured output from what's been created in the visual editor. If a client wants to add a hero block and maybe a text block beneath and a call to action below that, I have that structure, so it allows me to then design or build the HTML for each block individually, and no matter how they're used on the website, it will then render them correctly. Or we can very easily drop in on a page specific variants of blocks if needed, and the API is just very simple to work with.

Storyblok has positively impacted my organization by giving us the scope and flexibility to be more creative with what we do, as we're very much a design-led business where we want to produce beautiful-looking websites that also perform well. Because you are making blocks or components that represent different types of content within a website, it's just a very quick and easy workflow for us to use. I could create a block and within my Laravel package, I can run a single artisan command and it will write me a blade template which automatically pulls in all the data with the correct file name. It just works out of the box for us, integrates very quickly, and all I have to do is apply the styling to that block because the whole integration is just working.

Storyblok is a great platform, and it's definitely the best CMS I've ever used, but maybe some of the more advanced features such as custom plugins have a little bit of a learning curve to implementing them. When you're on the lower plans, there's a bit less flexibility with how you can set up your system, such as user roles, and we've had cases before where clients went in and actually edited block definitions because they clicked on the wrong buttons. That's more of an issue with the cheaper plans or the free plan, which is great, but it doesn't give you the control that you need, but that's understandable and expected.

I don't want to add more about needed improvements in terms of documentation, integrations, or support, as the support is really good. I'm an MVP for them, so I probably get more direct support than other people, and the docs have been fine, but as I've written the package and that's been going for a couple of years now, I barely need to touch the documentation because things just work as they need to.

I have been using Storyblok for five or six years.

Storyblok is stable.

In terms of Storyblok's scalability, it's not the best place to answer that as we only use it at a small scale, but I've seen some of the other MVPs, seeing what they're working on, and they're doing really large enterprise-scale deployments of it, but it also scales all the way down to some of the projects that I work on, which are small websites for smaller companies, and it seems to work well for both big and small deployments.

Customer support for Storyblok has been good when I've needed to use it; they've always been responsive, helpful, and friendly. I do have the advantage of being an MVP, so I've got kind of backdoor access to some of the team, but they've always been really nice.

We previously used all different CMSs before, with the primary one being a bespoke one built in-house on top of Laravel. We switched because while it was different to go to a hosted solution from a company, it just gives us much better flexibility. It means we don't have to manage the maintenance of it as well because one of the headaches with web development is keeping the content management system up to date as much as you're keeping the website up to date. We've also used, not by our choice, other platforms in the past such as WordPress, which we really don't prefer, but occasionally there were client requests to use that. We'd always try to push them towards Storyblok if we could.

Before choosing Storyblok, I did evaluate other options, but it was many years ago now. It would have been things such as Contentful  and some of the other headless platforms I looked at then.

I don't have any specific metrics because we never measured those; it's just a small agency, so it's not one of the factors that we do, but in terms of our turnaround time, it's definitely quicker and changes are way easier. In the past, using systems we had before, we didn't have the scope to add additional fields or adjust fields, and it just gives us the freedom to operate more flexibly.

I don't have any actual figures for return on investment, but it's definitely time saved because we can do a lot more in a lot less time.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Storyblok starts with the free plan, so obviously that pricing is brilliant. They did change the pricing about 18 months ago, and at the lowest paid tier, they did take away a bit of the features or the number of seats you can get, so it can get expensive quickly, which is an issue when you're working with smaller clients who still want to have some flexibility. They seem to have plans that are on par with other platforms that I've seen, but it'd be nice to have a bit more flexibility at the lower tiers for small websites just to be able to have more seats, even if you don't get more features, but just bringing more users in would be very helpful.

Regarding Storyblok's AI capabilities, I haven't really used them very much; I think you can bring your AI models along if you want to, or you can use theirs, but it's not something I've played around with.

Regarding the accuracy and reliability of output based on my experience or what I've heard with Storyblok's AI capabilities, I've not used it enough to know. From what I've heard from some other people, I think it still has some issues to be resolved and some things to be worked out to make it work as well as it can, but they're definitely pushing the development there. Generally, from what I've heard, the feelings are good, but there are possibly some useful features to be added around controlling brand voice and making sure that the output is of the correct tone for individual companies.

The advice I would give to others looking into using Storyblok is to make sure that you are ready to go to a headless content management system. It is a big change when you change to any content management system, but the integration is straightforward; it's not necessarily simple, but it's platform agnostic, so you can integrate it with any stack that you want. As with anything, you've got to review it and make sure that within your pricing tier, it's going to have all the features that you require for your team because it can be a big investment.

I didn't purchase Storyblok through the AWS Marketplace ; I got it directly, so I didn't use AWS .

I gave this review a rating of 10 because Storyblok is really great.