StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Cloud Content Management System
  5. Contentful vs Netlify

Contentful vs Netlify

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Contentful
Contentful
Stacks838
Followers955
Votes70
Netlify
Netlify
Stacks3.6K
Followers2.1K
Votes207

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.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Contentful, Netlify

Kamil
Kamil

Product Manager at Wooclap

Jul 17, 2020

Needs adviceonGoogle DocsGoogle DocsGatsbyGatsby

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.

122k views122k
Comments
Maxim
Maxim

Web developer

Apr 14, 2020

Needs adviceonSanitySanity

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.

108k views108k
Comments
Howie
Howie

Full Stack Engineer at Yintrust

Aug 13, 2020

DecidedonNetlifyNetlify

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.

238k views238k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Contentful
Contentful
Netlify
Netlify

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.

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.

Platform agnostic headless CMS; GraphQL and REST APIs; Fast delivery with global CDNs; Images API; Language and framework agnostic; Extensible web interface; CI/CD-ready; Flexible data; App Marketplace integrations; App Framework for building your own; Scheduled publishing, teams, tasks & comments; Localization with fallbacks
Global Network;Global Network;Instant Cache Validation;Atomic Deploys;API proxying;SSL for custom domains;Continuous Deployment;Link to Github or Bitbucket
Statistics
Stacks
838
Stacks
3.6K
Followers
955
Followers
2.1K
Votes
70
Votes
207
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 30
    API-based cms
  • 17
    Much better than WordPress
  • 11
    Simple and customizable
  • 5
    Images API
  • 3
    Free for small projects
Cons
  • 5
    No spell check
  • 5
    No repeater Field
  • 4
    No free plan
  • 3
    Slow dashboard
  • 2
    Pricey
Pros
  • 48
    Easy deploy
  • 43
    Fastest static hosting and continuous deployments
  • 23
    Super simple deploys
  • 23
    Free SSL support
  • 16
    Easy Setup and Continous deployments
Cons
  • 7
    It's expensive
  • 1
    Bandwidth limitation
Integrations
Algolia
Algolia
imgix
imgix
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
Saleor
Saleor
Twilio
Twilio
Mailgun
Mailgun
Cloudinary
Cloudinary
GraphQL Playground
GraphQL Playground
commercetools
commercetools
Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform
GitHub
GitHub
Bitbucket
Bitbucket

What are some alternatives to Contentful, Netlify?

GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages

Public webpages hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live.

DomainRacer

DomainRacer

It is a blazing fast hosting solution that provides Customer Satisfaction driven Web Hosting services since 2016.

Vercel

Vercel

A cloud platform for serverless deployment. It enables developers to host websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and require no supervision, all with minimal configuration.

Sanity

Sanity

Sanity is a headless, real-time CMS where the editor is an open source React-based construction kit and the backend is a graph-oriented cloud datastore with a globally distributed CDN.

Surge

Surge

Surge makes it easy for developers to deploy projects to a production-quality CDN through Grunt, Gulp, npm.

Webflow

Webflow

Webflow is a responsive design tool that lets you design, build, and publish websites in an intuitive interface. Clean code included!

Divshot

Divshot

Divshot makes building and hosting front-end web applications simple. Build locally and deploy using a simple command-line interface. Divshot supports multiple environments, pushState routing, atomic deploys, and more.

Tipe

Tipe

All your Apps have text and your developers don't want to manage it. Create and manage your text or assets with powerful editing tools and access it from anywhere with a GraphQL or REST API.

prismic.io

prismic.io

Prismic is a Content Management System, a tool for editing online content, also known as a headless CMS, an API CMS, a content platform, a disruptive content-as-a-service digital experience.

Cockpit

Cockpit

An API-driven CMS without forcing you to make compromises in how you implement your site. The CMS for developers. Manage content like collections, regions, forms and galleries which you can reuse anywhere on your website.

Related Comparisons

Postman
Swagger UI

Postman vs Swagger UI

Mapbox
Google Maps

Google Maps vs Mapbox

Mapbox
Leaflet

Leaflet vs Mapbox vs OpenLayers

Twilio SendGrid
Mailgun

Mailgun vs Mandrill vs SendGrid

Runscope
Postman

Paw vs Postman vs Runscope