Content workflows have become simpler for non-technical teams but could offer deeper features
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Contentful is optimizing images and videos. While people use Contentful to build websites, Contentful does not provide an inbuilt image and video optimizer. ImageKit fills this gap, allowing people who use Contentful to optimize their images and providing a digital asset management solution inside the Contentful UI itself. That is the kind of integration I am working with in Contentful.
I have a website and want to optimize my images and videos using Contentful to build that website, which is very easy. I can use my own frontend and then use the API to build that website, while also integrating ImageKit, which is my current organization. It is a mixture of these two approaches.
What is most valuable?
The best features Contentful offers are its APIs and how easy it is to integrate them. Feature-wise, the majority of CMSs are the same; I have used Strapi, and feature-wise, those are similar. The ease of use and the way Contentful provides the APIs and how easy it is to fetch the data directly and use it in your frontend is the best part. I have not explored many features, having mostly built a basic web page, so there could be features that I am not aware of, but the ones I have used were quite intuitive and easier to use.
Contentful's impact on my organization is that we do not use it very much. Contentful has not helped my organization or our customers achieve any measurable benefits, such as saving time or improving workflows, as we have not measured that. It does help customers who are using Contentful, but I have not quantified it.
What needs improvement?
Contentful works well for me; I might need to explore it a bit more to identify improvements. As I mentioned, I have been using it for a specific task, which it accomplishes quite well. I built a web page and integrated ImageKit successfully, so it works well in that way. Perhaps in the future, I can provide more feedback for this question.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Contentful for around a year, mostly integrating it with my current company, ImageKit, which is an image CDN and image and video CDN, and that integrates well with Contentful. That is how I started working on Contentful.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Contentful is stable in my experience; it is quite stable. The UI works well, as I did not encounter any issues with it and the APIs seem to work without problems.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I have not scaled Contentful to that level, so I would not be able to comment, but I would assume it is scalable.
How are customer service and support?
I have not had any experience with customer support, as I managed to figure out the majority of things using the documentation and other resources. Therefore, I did not need to reach out for support.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have used multiple solutions before Contentful because I work with many customers using different systems. I have used WordPress, Magento, Shopify, Strapi, and then Contentful. Strapi and Contentful stand out to me because they are next-generation CMSs, where the APIs and functionality are much easier to understand. It is JavaScript-based, making it a very easy way to start building websites. While I have not switched away from others, I see a definite improvement compared to WordPress and other traditional CMS systems.
How was the initial setup?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that I did not use the price plan; I was using the free plan, which did what I wanted it to do. Therefore, I cannot comment on the cost. The setup was easy, which I think would be the same even for the free plan and the pricing plan, but since I have not used the paid tier, I cannot speak on it.
What about the implementation team?
I was using the free plan which did what I wanted it to do. Therefore, I cannot comment on the cost.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment with Contentful, as it definitely saves time. Even if someone is not technical, they can provide a structure, and then someone from the technical team can pull data. Contentful gives a lot of control in terms of what you want, allowing even non-technical people to contribute positively. As a SaaS, it also helps significantly since you do not need to host it and deal with associated complexities.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that I did not use the price plan; I was using the free plan, which did what I wanted it to do.
What other advice do I have?
Contentful works well for me; I might need to explore it a bit more to identify improvements. As I mentioned, I have been using it for a specific task, which it accomplishes quite well. I built a web page and integrated ImageKit successfully, so it works well in that way. Perhaps in the future, I can provide more feedback for this question.
Contentful has not helped my organization or our customers achieve any measurable benefits, such as saving time or improving workflows, as we have not measured that. It does help customers who are using Contentful, but I have not quantified it.
My advice to others looking into using Contentful is to definitely try it because if they have a use case of providing some sort of tool for their non-technical people to build things, Contentful stands out. I have used Strapi, which can be a little more technical and tougher for people to understand. Contentful, in contrast, enables non-technical users to build things while their technical team can then integrate it.
I would rate my overall experience with Contentful as a 7 out of 10.
Structured content has accelerated multi-channel updates but still needs simpler modeling
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Contentful is managing dynamic content separately from the front end so apps and websites remain flexible, fast, and easy to scale.
I use Contentful to manage products and marketing content for a shopping website. What I stored in Contentful was product titles, descriptions, images, and category-wise shoes. I also use promotional banners in homepage sections, hero banners, and featured products. On the front end, I use a UI front end such as React and Next.js, fetching data using the Contentful API, primarily REST or GraphQL.
How has it helped my organization?
Contentful has positively impacted my organization by facilitating faster campaigns for marketing content, reducing the dev workload, and shortening the time to market, with no hard-coding of content, a clean API-based architecture, and reusable components. Developers can focus on the future instead of content changes, resulting in a faster development cycle and less repetitive work. There is better scalability and structure, as the content models keep everything organized.
The positive outcomes and metrics from using Contentful include a massive reduction in content update time. Before, changing a banner tag required a dev ticket and a deployment, taking one to two days. Now, after implementing Contentful, the content team updates directly, taking only five to ten minutes, which is an 80% time reduction. There are fewer deployments; previously, there were frequent small deployments just for content, but now content updates happen without deployment, reducing content-related deployments by 50% to 70%. Developer productivity has improved as they no longer handle minor text and image changes or repetitive updates, saving 20% to 30% of their dev time for core work, leading to 30% to 40% faster feature development with reusable components, models, and an API-driven structure.
What is most valuable?
The best features Contentful offers include separating content from the front-end UI. I can fetch data via an API such as GraphQL, which works with any front-end tool such as React, Next.js, mobile apps, and even smartwatches. Instead of pages, I create content models such as products, blog posts, and banners, breaking content into reusable pieces such as title, image, and description.
Using APIs such as GraphQL has helped my workflow by allowing me to get only the required fields instead of too much unnecessary data, which means a smaller payload and faster front-end performance. It makes handling the nesting of referenced content easier, as in Contentful everything is connected, such as product categories, homepages, and featured products. With REST, there are multiple API calls and manual mapping, but with GraphQL, one query gets everything needed properly, leading to better performance and cleaner code for the GraphQL API.
In addition to the previously mentioned features, I find webhooks very practical. Contentful can trigger events when content changes, allowing me to rebuild a site, clear the cache, or trigger deployments. For example, when content is published, a webhook triggers a Next.js rebuild. Localization is also significant for real products since I can manage multiple languages inside some content models, with fields such as the title available in English, French, and Hindi, saving considerable effort versus having separate systems. The Preview API is very important and underrated because it lets me use draft content before publishing, which is essential for content authors.
What needs improvement?
One area where I believe Contentful can be improved is better handling of complex content relationships, as when content is deeply nested with references inside references, the queries can get messy and hard to manage on the front end. A more intuitive way to visualize and manage relationships, with built-in tools to simplify nested data handling, would be beneficial. Another improvement could be performance with large data sets, as with many entries, API responses can slow down and pagination can become tricky; better query optimizations and smarter caching tools built-in could help. Lastly, content modeling can get complex since designing models requires experience, and it is easy to over-complicate; better templates and guided modeling with suggestions based on use cases, such as e-commerce or blog, could improve usability.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have worked for the past four years in my current field.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Contentful's scalability supports both small apps and large enterprise systems, with a global CDN aiding in scalability.
What other advice do I have?
My advice to others looking into using Contentful is to get content modeling right from day one, not to rush into creating a content type, and to think about reuse and relationships. A bad model leads to a messy API and a painful front-end later. Use it for the right use case; Contentful shines when you need dynamic content across multiple platforms such as web and mobile, and when non-dev teams also need to manage content. For very simple websites or small static projects, it might be overkill. Plan your API strategy, preferring GraphQL for flexibility to avoid over-fetching, and structure queries clearly to maximize performance. Always handle edge cases from the start since real-world content is messy. Work closely with content and marketing teams to explain the content structure clearly, add validations, and set required field limits to ensure the CMS is usable and prevents breaking the UI.
Contentful is not just a CMS; it is a content infrastructure tool that works well when you treat content as structured data and design it as a system, not just pages. It is really powerful for medium to large-scale apps, teams with developers and content marketing people, and multi-platform needs such as web plus mobile. That is the real value of Contentful. You need to be careful with small-scale projects, as poor content modeling can get messy and requires upfront thinking. Personally, I have learned that the biggest takeaway is that Contentful's success depends less on the tool itself and more on how well you design your content model and workflows.
I would rate this product a 7 out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Content modeling has supported complex websites but has highlighted costly gaps in publishing workflow
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Contentful since 2018, for eight years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Contentful is stable. It is really stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
I had a team of five developers dealing with Contentful, but we are facing some bugs, and the support was not as good.
What was our ROI?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
Satisfied
What do you like best about the product?
Structured data, content modeling, fast delivery
What do you dislike about the product?
Limited as free, no visual page bulider
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Saves time
Robust for devs, but clunky for authors
What do you like best about the product?
Contentful seems to be very developer-oriented in its in-depth features, and the way they are presented. The new Studio experience seems quite exciting, and should make the solution a lot easier to use.
Integrating the main Contentful API with our website build system was incredibly straightforward.
The support team (once you're a prospect or a paying customer) are very responsive, quick, and helpful. This even extends to their Engineering team being available to look at issues on their open source repos.
What do you dislike about the product?
While the developer-facing features are top-notch, the actual content authoring experience is frankly sub-par, particularly for an enterprise oriented platform like this.
There are frankly no collaboration features to speak of, and it's too easy for multiple authors to accidentally overwrite each others' changes. Commenting can only be done a field level (so if the field is, say, a very long textarea, it's not very useful).
Many features have UX complexities that make sense from a database POV, but feel clunky from an author POV. Being able to completely customise the editing interface is frequently touted as the jewel in their crown - but we found that even for simple things (e.g. allowing authors to define a custom HTML attribute for links) you'll end up having to cut a completely custom WYSIWYG editor plugin from scratch.
The sales team could only offer custom development services from their partner agencies as a solution - and so it was difficult to see the ROI on spending five figures for a licence for software we'd have to spend six figures on to develop all the missing features.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We were looking to identify a solution for a headless content management, to simplify our content editing process.
An incredibly powerful CMS with many trap door decisions
What do you like best about the product?
How customizable it is. You can either use it lightly or make it like a really complex powerhouse database.
What do you dislike about the product?
How early decisions you make about your content models can make or break your experience.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It allows our sites authors/editors to contribute without needing to write code.
Flexible but Complex
What do you like best about the product?
I like that once you create a module or component it's easy to reuse and modify
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes too rigid, and I don't like clicking through a million layers to get to a component.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We have a complex website that contentful allows many types of users to keep updated
Great platform with occasional loading problems
What do you like best about the product?
Version history for content entries is helpful and intuitive. Options for referencing between entries are easy to understand and manage. Overall, using a headless system enables effective iteration.
What do you dislike about the product?
It would be helpful if there were a version history for content model changes—in the current state, it's challenging to track what changed when dev identifies that something has broken.
Loading multiple entries at once often results in inaccurate error messages that go away when the pages are reloaded.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Our business needed a better foundation for managing content in our help center. Contentful has effectively allowed us to move toward a "write once and publish everywhere" approach.
Good software for web content
What do you like best about the product?
Ease of use to update information. It is easy to preview new data.
What do you dislike about the product?
Adding existing content requires too many clicks. Also, adding new rows to the current list requires clunky dragging, and the row often gets added to the wrong place by accident.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It allows me to update the information displayed on our website so that the public can see our roster of clinicians that are available to them.
the goal in our company was to do a revamp of our legacy websites, we decided to use contentful so
What do you like best about the product?
The possibility to have multiple spaces, and the potential to handle multiple languages
What do you dislike about the product?
The default contentful long text editor is very limited, it forces us too integrated some application like tinyMCE which is paid
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
As we have many brands, Contentful lets us have a solid backend code, so we don't have to re-code each time we want to sort out a new brand; we can handle it on Contentful, much faster and less time consiming
