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Contentful vs Netlify: What are the differences?

Introduction

Contentful and Netlify are both powerful tools that are commonly used in web development. However, they serve different purposes and have distinct features that set them apart from each other.

  1. Data Management: Contentful is a headless content management system (CMS) that allows users to store and manage their content in a structured way, while Netlify is a web hosting platform that focuses on deploying and serving static websites. Contentful provides a user-friendly interface for creating and organizing content, making it easy to manage large amounts of data efficiently.

  2. Development Workflow: Netlify offers continuous deployment and automated build processes, which make it ideal for modern web development workflows. Developers can connect their code repositories to Netlify and set up automated deployments, making it easy to push updates to production. On the other hand, Contentful does not provide this level of automation for the development workflow.

  3. Performance Optimization: Netlify comes with built-in tools for performance optimization, such as image compression and asset minification, which can improve the loading speed of websites. Contentful, while it provides a structured way to manage content, does not offer these performance optimization features out of the box.

  4. Serverless Functions: Netlify allows developers to easily create serverless functions that can be used to handle dynamic content or execute server-side logic without the need for a separate server. Contentful, on the other hand, does not provide a built-in solution for creating serverless functions.

  5. Hosting Environments: Netlify provides multiple hosting environments, such as staging and production, along with easy ways to switch between them. This makes it simple for developers to test changes in a staging environment before deploying them to production. Contentful does not offer hosting environments as it is focused on managing content rather than hosting websites.

In Summary, Contentful and Netlify serve different purposes in web development, with Contentful focusing on content management and Netlify specializing in web hosting and deployment processes.

Advice on Contentful and Netlify
Kamil Debbagh
Product Manager at Wooclap · | 8 upvotes · 111.2K views
Needs advice
on
ContentfulContentfulprismic.ioprismic.io
and
StrapiStrapi

Hi StackSharers, your help is dearly needed as we're making a move to which we will commit for the next few years.

Problem: As our Marketing team gets growing needs to publish content fast and autonomously, we're trying to add a CMS to our stack.

Specs:

  • This CMS should have fairly advanced marketing features: either natively built, and/or be open source, so we can either find third parties' plugins suiting our needs or build our own plugins homebrew.

  • "Advanced marketing features" like these: Non-devs should be able to handle content autonomously, Should have a non-dev friendly interface, should allow creating a library of reusable components/modules, should show the preview before publishing, should have a calendar with all publications, should show the history/tracking, should allow collaborating (Google Docs like), should display characters limit optimized for SEO.

Solution: We're considering an SSG + Headless CMS combination. We're fairly confident for the SSG (Gatsby), but we're still uncertain which CMS we should choose.

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Replies (3)
Recommends
on
ContentfulContentful

Of all the content management systems out there, contentful seems to be the most flexible. It consist of an user interface with an API a front end app can retrieve data from.

It makes no assumptions about how your data is presented or structured, and you can form any kind of content in the interface. Architectural portfolio with square footage attributes? Check. Carousel section on a page? Check. A blog? No problem. Entire landing pages consisting of sections that have child items in them and attributes for each child? Not an issue. Image hosting / cdn and resizing? No problem. Character limits? Widely supported. Multilingual? Easy peasy

There are two parts of the interface. Content types and content items. Content types is just a definition of how a content item is structured, you can add fields such as title, unique id, image, rich text, lists of child content items, etc. And then the API will just return a list of content items in JSON array or object format.

There is service integration with common apps, or data sources.

Because it’s just an API call, you can use literally any tech stack with it. It won’t stop you from using MySQL or any other technology alongside it. No messing about compilation, Java, maven, like with AEM. No being constrained to the CMS’s programming language or hosting environment like with Wordpress (to an extent, wp has an API too). You can integrate it with any app, whether it be serverless, on a vm, or inside a docker container.

Downside is the front end is really up to you. It’s just a cms for structuring your data. No preview though. How you present it is not handled by contentful. It is it’s greatest strength and not a weakness though

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Krassimir Boyanov
Independent IT Consultant, CEO at KBWEB Consult · | 3 upvotes · 69.5K views

Hi Kamil, Have you considered Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)? It is not completely open-source but is built on top of many open source modules - like Apache Sling, Apache Felix, has a great deal of open-sourced core components, supports SPA - React and Angular Recently and can be deployed as a cloud service. Good luck in your search!

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Gagan Jakhotiya
Engineering Manager at BigBasket · | 1 upvotes · 57.7K views
Recommends

I'd like to share my experience for a similar use case.

A couple of months back I was in a similar place while facing some similar set of challenges within our SEO and Content Team. We were working with WordPress at that moment and for some parts - we still do. While WordPress is a very fast, intuitive and comprehensive tool to power static pages, it's not ideal for: 1. The content team as it requires some level of technical skills 2. Code reusability perspective - impacts performance in a longer run 3. Performance and user experience can easily go for a toss considering content team may not be diligent with everything outside the scope of the content

While evaluating we were looking at these key criterias: 1. SEO, Performance and UX 2. Ease of use for Content Team, developer independence 3. Learning Curve for devs and more importantly content creators 4. Support for complex design cases 5. Cost

Being part of a small org on a tight budget our natural inclination was for open-source solution, Strapi, and so we gave it a go for a smaller project before jumping the marketing wagon.

Strapi is a great tool, easy to learn and pick up. You get most of the design use cases out of the box baked for you. It's a Node.js service so you'll need to manage the service (meaning you'll have to handle monitoring, logging, cdn, auth, etc) and DB - which requires quiet some dev bandwidth. Now Strapi is still very young in term of DB migrations (not a seamless deployment yet - no schema diffing mechanism), setting up different environments required effort and you can do content modeling only in development environment (the db migrations complexity) - which becomes really critical when you want devs, design and content to collaborate simultaneously and don't want repeated work for modeling. Over a 5-6 weeks of use we realised that more and more dev bandwidth is required to do progressive addition of new content and hence we did another PoC with contentful.

Comparing this with contentful - which is a managed service, comes with inbuilt environment and preview setup, gives on-the-fly content modeling (replacing all the dev bandwidth dependency for managing migrations, cdn, auth, service, etc) gives a huge advantage of speed and developer independence at a very moderate price. Plus, the UI is very intuitive (taking some concepts from Tag Manager).

Few other thing to highlight: - Both Strapi and Contentful have plugins for common tooling. - Both the dashboard supports custom data type and UI extensions. I found Contentful UI extensions much more easier to implement. - Contentful has only US based availablility zone. Simple in-memory caching can be used to improve costing and SLA.

Hope this helps!

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Maxim Filimonov
Needs advice
on
ContentfulContentfulprismic.ioprismic.io
and
SanitySanity

Hi Community, Would like to ask for advice from people familiar with those tools. We are a small self-funded startup and initial cost for us is very important at that stage. That's why we are leaning towards Sanity. The CMS will be used to power our website and flutter cross-platform mobile applications.

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Replies (1)
Recommends
on
ContentfulContentful

Former Prismic.io developer here. If you want something robust vs "looks good from a distance," I would recommend Contentful. They are the biggest for a reason. Their CMS handles a lot of use cases and has great documentation. Prismic.io will work well in simple blog-esque use cases. Their more complex features break easily and their documentation is confusing. It has fallen quite a distance behind Contentful. Sanity appears to be a much newer CMS and you might come to regret the lack of features, but I've only briefly reviewed their product.

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Decisions about Contentful and Netlify
Howie Zhao
Full Stack Engineer at yintrust · | 7 upvotes · 213.1K views

We use Netlify to host static websites.

The reasons for choosing Netlify over GitHub Pages are as follows:

  • Netfily can bind multiple domain names, while GitHub Pages can only bind one domain name
  • With Netfily, the original repository can be private, while GitHub Pages free tier requires the original repository to be public

In addition, in order to use CDN, we use Netlify DNS.

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Pros of Contentful
Pros of Netlify
  • 30
    API-based cms
  • 17
    Much better than WordPress
  • 11
    Simple and customizable
  • 5
    Images API
  • 3
    Free for small projects
  • 1
    Extensible dashboard UI
  • 1
    Super simple to integrate
  • 1
    Managed Service
  • 1
    Tag Manager like UI
  • 45
    Easy deploy
  • 43
    Fastest static hosting and continuous deployments
  • 22
    Free SSL support
  • 22
    Super simple deploys
  • 15
    Easy Setup and Continous deployments
  • 10
    Faster than any other option in the market
  • 10
    Free plan for personal websites
  • 8
    Deploy previews
  • 6
    Free Open Source (Pro) plan
  • 4
    Great loop-in material on a blog
  • 4
    Analytics
  • 4
    Easy to use and great support
  • 3
    Fastest static hosting and continuous deployments
  • 3
    Great drag and drop functionality
  • 3
    Custom domains support
  • 1
    Canary Releases (Split Tests)
  • 1
    Supports static site generators
  • 1
    Tech oriented support
  • 0
    Django

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Cons of Contentful
Cons of Netlify
  • 5
    No spell check
  • 5
    No repeater Field
  • 4
    No free plan
  • 3
    Slow dashboard
  • 2
    Enterprise targeted
  • 2
    Pricey
  • 2
    Limited content types
  • 1
    Not scalable
  • 1
    No GraphQL API
  • 7
    It's expensive
  • 1
    Bandwidth limitation

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What is Contentful?

With Contentful, you can bring your content anywhere using our APIs, completely customize your content structure all while using your preferred programming languages and frameworks.

What is Netlify?

Netlify is smart enough to process your site and make sure all assets gets optimized and served with perfect caching-headers from a cookie-less domain. We make sure your HTML is served straight from our CDN edge nodes without any round-trip to our backend servers and are the only ones to give you instant cache invalidation when you push a new deploy. Netlify is also the only static hosting service with integrated continuous deployment.

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What are some alternatives to Contentful and Netlify?
Wine
It is a free and open-source compatibility layer that aims to allow computer programs developed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems. Wine also provides a software library, known as Winelib, against which developers can compile Windows applications to help port them to Unix-like systems.
WordPress
The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.
Strapi
Strapi is100% JavaScript, extensible, and fully customizable. It enables developers to build projects faster by providing a customizable API out of the box and giving them the freedom to use the their favorite tools.
Drupal
Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.
AEM
It is a web-based client-server system for building, managing and deploying commercial websites and related services. It combines a number of infrastructure-level and application-level functions into a single integrated package.
See all alternatives