Contentstack Adaptive Digital Experience Platform

My main use case for Contentstack is as a CMS, which manages omnichannel content delivery. This included a mobile application and a website which are managed in one place.

This was for a multi-country perfume and cosmetics retailer located in the Middle East.

The best features Contentstack offers are its localization and management of multi-country, multi-language, multi-purpose applications. In my example, it was a mobile application and a website which had two languages, Arabic and English. Each country had specific requirements and there were thousands of labels and different small content entries which are managed in a single place.

Contentstack's localization features helped my team manage all those languages and country specifics by grouping them in bulk content entries which helped local teams to put proper translations. As developers, we were handling only the internal application labels and then we left the content team to manage all of those localizations to make sure it fits the screen, to make sure it's translated properly, and the localization is clear and understood by local customers.

Contentstack has impacted my organization positively by helping us to deliver an application with a very good quality in terms of how it looks and feels. For our client, it was very important to have good ratings in the App Store and the results were impressive. I mean, we spent a lot of time polishing the application, making sure that all translations, and Arabic is right to left, fit the screen, it's clear, it's simple, and it's understood by people. There were multiple variations which were tested by a first cohort of users. This is about building a very well tested product.

The documentation was easy to read, but it was hard to find a specific article. When we were searching for a specific capability, I didn't know how to start the search or where the starting point was. I do believe some AI tools in documentation would be helpful.

I've seen many other CMS tools such as SAP Commerce built-in CMS, which is called SmartEdit. Contentstack is much more complex and advanced technology. I think there are still some UI improvements which can be done to simplify the work. I can give an example of Contentful, which is a little bit more user-friendly from a UI perspective. However, this is a solid product.

We didn't have a lot of customers, so we never faced any scalability issues. However, talking about the dev environment and then switching to prod, it was good enough. I mean, we had five to ten users of the dev environment and then we were able to switch to the production environment which had 10,000 daily average users. It's an inaccurate evaluation. I would rather say it's a top-level evaluation. The organization never had millions of users.

The previous CMS system was something which was tightly integrated. I don't remember the name, but it wasn't headless and it was not very enterprise grade. It was probably PHP based, web based, and completely outdated. By the time of the project, we clearly saw that we needed something more powerful.

Contentstack is deployed in my organization as a public cloud installation. We paid for multiple environments. One of those was used only for dev purposes, the other one was QA1 and the production.

I can say that the content management routine was decreased by 30 percent in time. That was one of the metrics from the content authors we heard. The other metrics which are app rating are more related to the application itself rather than Contentstack. However, I do believe that Contentstack contributed to this high rating of the application.

The best advice I would give to others looking into using Contentstack is to install a demo environment and to play with it yourself. Another recommendation is to go through documentation and see the videos because they are simple and easy to understand. I think a certification, the simple one, which is Contentstack Associate or Contentstack Basic User, will really help a person to understand the product, its concepts, its data model, content model, and how those capabilities can be used. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.