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Contentful vs Netlify CMS: What are the differences?

Differences Between Contentful and Netlify CMS

Introduction

Contentful and Netlify CMS are both content management systems (CMS) that help developers create, manage, and publish content on websites. While they share some similarities, there are key differences that set them apart from each other.

  1. Hosting and Deployment: Contentful is a cloud-based CMS that is hosted on the Contentful servers. This means that developers do not need to worry about server management or deployment. On the other hand, Netlify CMS is a self-hosted CMS that requires developers to host and deploy the CMS on their own servers or using a third-party hosting service like Netlify.

  2. Architecture and Structured Data: Contentful follows a more structured data approach, where content is modeled using customizable content types and fields. This allows for easier content management and organization, especially for larger websites with complex content structures. Netlify CMS, on the other hand, follows a more flexible and file-based approach that allows developers to manage content using markdown files. This makes it ideal for simple websites or projects that do not require advanced content modeling.

  3. User Interface and Editing Experience: Contentful provides a user-friendly web interface for content editing, allowing users to create and edit content without any coding knowledge. It also offers a rich text editor and media management features. Netlify CMS, on the other hand, provides a simplified and streamlined interface that integrates directly with the website's frontend. It offers a live preview of changes and supports markdown editing out of the box.

  4. Customization and Extensibility: Contentful offers a wide range of customization options and allows developers to extend its functionality using webhooks, APIs, and SDKs. It provides a robust set of APIs for integrating with external services and applications. Netlify CMS, on the other hand, is highly customizable and extensible, allowing developers to modify the CMS according to their specific needs. It provides hooks and plugins that can be used to add custom features and integrations.

  5. Content Versioning and Collaboration: Contentful offers robust versioning and collaboration features, allowing users to track changes made to content, revert to previous versions, and collaborate with team members. Netlify CMS, on the other hand, does not provide built-in content versioning or collaboration features. Developers would need to implement their own version control system or use third-party tools for collaboration.

  6. Price and Cost: Contentful follows a subscription-based pricing model, where users pay based on the number of content entries, API requests, and users. The pricing can be high for larger projects or websites with high traffic. Netlify CMS, on the other hand, is open source and free to use, without any limitations on the number of content entries or API requests. However, users would still need to consider the cost of hosting and server management.

In summary, Contentful and Netlify CMS differ in terms of hosting and deployment, architecture and structured data, user interface and editing experience, customization and extensibility, content versioning and collaboration, as well as pricing and cost. Choose Contentful for its robust features and structured data approach, and Netlify CMS for its simplicity, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness.

Advice on Contentful and Netlify CMS
Kamil Debbagh
Product Manager at Wooclap · | 8 upvotes · 111K 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 · 69.4K 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 · 57.6K 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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Pros of Contentful
Pros of Netlify CMS
  • 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
  • 3
    Open source
  • 2
    Free
  • 1
    GraphQL API

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Cons of Contentful
Cons of Netlify CMS
  • 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
  • 2
    No relations between items

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