Contentful vs KeystoneJS: What are the differences?

Introduction

Contentful and KeystoneJS are two popular content management systems (CMS) that are used to build and manage websites. While they both serve the purpose of managing content, there are several key differences between the two platforms.

1. Hosting and Infrastructure: Contentful is a cloud-based CMS, which means that all content and data are stored and managed on Contentful's servers. On the other hand, KeystoneJS is a self-hosted CMS, allowing users to have more control over the hosting and infrastructure setup. Users can deploy KeystoneJS on their preferred hosting providers or even on their own servers.

2. Programming Language: Contentful is language-agnostic, which means it can be integrated with websites built using any programming language. This flexibility allows developers to choose the programming language that best suits their project. In contrast, KeystoneJS is built on Node.js and can be considered a JavaScript-focused CMS. It provides a JavaScript-based development environment and allows developers to leverage the power of Node.js ecosystem.

3. User Interface Customization: Contentful offers a fully customizable user interface (UI), allowing users to tailor the CMS interface to their specific needs and branding. Users can create custom entry fields, design layout views, and add personalized branding. On the other hand, KeystoneJS has a more opinionated UI, with a predefined admin interface that is designed to be developer-friendly. While it can still be customized, the level of UI customization in KeystoneJS is relatively limited compared to Contentful.

4. Database: Contentful uses a proprietary content infrastructure that is designed to provide a scalable and fast content delivery experience. It abstracts away the details of the underlying database and provides a unified API for content retrieval and management. In contrast, KeystoneJS allows developers to choose the database of their choice. It supports multiple databases including MongoDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. This flexibility allows developers to leverage their preferred database technology or integrate with existing database infrastructure.

5. Content Modeling: Contentful provides a rich content modeling system, where users can define custom content types, relationships between them, and add validation rules to ensure data integrity. This allows for a flexible and structured content organization. KeystoneJS also offers content modeling capabilities, but the approach is more code-centric. Developers define their data models using JavaScript code, leveraging KeystoneJS's built-in data modeling API.

6. Developer Ecosystem and Extensions: Contentful has a large and active developer ecosystem, offering extensive documentation, SDKs, and a marketplace for extensions and integrations. Users can choose from a wide range of pre-built extensions or create their own custom extensions to extend the functionality of Contentful. KeystoneJS also has an active developer community, although it may be relatively smaller compared to Contentful. It offers a plugin system for extending the CMS functionality and allows developers to create and share reusable plugins.

In summary, Contentful and KeystoneJS differ in terms of hosting and infrastructure, programming language, UI customization, database options, content modeling approaches, and developer ecosystems.