Contentful

Score6.5 out of 10

49 Reviews and Ratings

What is Contentful?

Contentful is a cloud based CMS solution that provides the ability to manage content across multiple platforms.The editing interface allows for managing content interactively and provides developers the ability to deliver the content with the programming language and template framework of their choice.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

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Community / comment management
Users can put post/page comments through an approval process, auto-approve commenters based on their email addresses, block commenters by IP address, delete comments, etc.
Category average: 7.4
Code quality / cleanliness
Code generated by WYSIWYG editor is clean and validates according to W3C standards.
Category average: 8.3
Availability / breadth of extensions
There is a broad library of extensions, plug-ins, modules or add-ons that allow users to easily customize their websites without building custom code.
Category average: 6.9

WYSIWYG editor
What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editing tool allows users to build pages without writing code.
Category average: 7.9
Form generator
Users can build website forms for visitors to fill out.
Category average: 7.1
SEO support
The CMS helps users create the right website infrastructure (pagination, page headers, titles, meta tags, url structure, etc.) to increase the site’s visibility in search engine results.
Category average: 7.4

Jennifer Garcia View profile

Web Marketing Manager in Marketing at Lively, Inc. (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

Flexible. This CMS can be easily extended and provide access to dynamic content
Simple. The WYSWG is very easy to work with and identifying pages and content in the system is fairly easy
Clean Interface. The interface is clean and uncluttered keeping focus on the content and not other factors.

Cons

Licensing. There is no way to step up from free gracefully over time. It is free or pay big $$
Internal search is horribly lacking and thus extending site search using their product fails in comparison to other products.

Return on Investment

Agile workflow
Empowered Teams
Reusable content

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Bloomreach Experience Platform (brX), Adobe Experience Manager and Sitecore Experience Manager

Other Software Used

GitHub, Jira Software, WebStorm

Eric Mason

Lead Developer in Engineering at SaaSquatch (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

Contentful provides organized, flexible data models with support for a variety of data types and content editors (e.g. WYSIWYGs, form fields, raw text areas).
Contentful has great built-in versioning features with history and draft states so it's easy to make updates and revert when needed.
Contentful has an intuitive user interface and good support for multiple spaces (which can be helpful for companies that need separate projects for dev/staging/production).

Cons

The new Contentful "branches" feature looked promising (it appears to mirror a git-like repository) but it requires the CLI, which isn't necessarily practical for teams that aren't current CLI users. It would be nice if the management of this feature were available via the UI (without that it causes more confusion than anything).
The Contentful data modeling method makes for a bit of an awkward SDK developer experience in some strongly typed languages like Java. Most things that you might need can be accomplished, but it feels like the experience could be smoother.
It would be nice if there were a way to migrate data between spaces (e.g. from your staging space to production).

Return on Investment

Contentful has saved us valuable development time that was previously spent doing deploys for minor content updates.
Contentful has helped us maintain consistent documentation, reducing time needed to review for consistency.
Can't say we've really experienced any negative ROI impacts from using Contentful, but we've run into some limitations in adding too many content models and the next pricing tier is substantially more expensive.

Alternatives Considered

WordPress

Other Software Used

Oracle Java SE, GitHub, Eclipse

Verified User

Manager (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Contentful has been used this year to assist in compiling specific images to utilize in vast quantities from sellers. It has made accessing the images easy and straightforward versus having to rely on a multitude of different platforms or email communications. I would recommend this platform for multi user businesses.

Pros

Organization
Ease of use
Clear to understand

Cons

Multilevel user accounts causes delay
Single sign on would be useful

Return on Investment

Allowed us to quickly act on new listings
Clear and concise work flow
Easy to use

Alternatives Considered

Dropbox and Google Drive

Other Software Used

Khoros Marketing, Khoros Care, Khoros Communities

Verified User

Contributor in Engineering (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It helped to create content layer of our digital business. It also helped the marketing globally with the help of localization. It is useful when one wants to create reusable digital content. Simplifies content coordination and distribution across various channels. Provides role-based access management and workflows, and also ensures content is discoverable.

Pros

Role based access management to the content
Assembling and publishing of content
Library of shared content models

Cons

Integrations with different apps
APIs can be more efficient
Platform can become more user-friendly

Return on Investment

There was no negative impact as such.
Positive impact is increase in sales.
More work is delivered due to reusability and other features within a time and less manual effort.

Other Software Used

BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access

Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

To work with multiple platforms, Contenful allows me to manage unified content and publish it through my organization's platforms, making it easier for me to have a single point of control and change. Being a web platform, being able to work from anywhere or any device and keeping my website, e-commerce and internal sales platform updated, has been the most beneficial for the organization.