Strapi vs Contentful

Content management is a must for most large digital solutions. Managing content at scale requires a centralised content distribution able to handle the task. This is why CMS solutions have become a big business the past two decades.

Strapi and Contentful are two of leading players in the headless CMS space. In 2023, these two leaders of the headless CMS space have a significant market share and are used by companies like Sonos, Walmart, Nasa, Disney and Affirm.

About Contentful

Contentful is a headless feature-rich proprietary SaaS CMS solution. They have been in business since 2011, steadily growing their feature offerings and tools.

Contentful is hosted for you, which means you don’t have to think as much about the infrastructure and scalability of it.

Customers of Contentful include Nike, Disney and Affirm.

About Strapi

Strapi is an open-source headless CMS solution. They made their first public appearance in 2015 and have been ground-breaking in the open-source CMS world.

This technology stack is powered by Node.js and open in nature, allowing endless customisation, whether at infrastructure, backend or frontend level.

Customers of Strapi include Sonos, Walmart and Nasa.

Comparison

Both Strapi and Contentful are headless CMS. The main difference is that Strapi is open-source and Contentful is a fully managed SaaS solution.

With Strapi you’re responsible for the infrastructure/hosting, but a managed cloud solution called Strapi Cloud is on the horizon.

Customisation

With Strapi’s open-source nature and open architecture, it allows endless customisation. Everything in Strapi can be adapted to fit your case. This is a big factor when a company has certain security or compliance restrictions.

Strapi’s open backend approach based on Koa allows you to build custom backend extensions easily.

If a company has certain governance/compliance requirements regarding the hosting and security, Strapi can always be made to comply.

Contentful is for a big part limited by the features they offer at infrastructure and backend level. For frontend customisation Contentful has UI Extensions.

Features

Both Strapi and Contentful are feature-rich CMS systems that cover all the basics.

However each platform has at least one feature that could have an impact on the decision which CMS to use.

Strapi comes with advanced Audit Trailing in its gold plan. This allows super administrators to track all noteworthy events that happen in the CMS control panel as well as authentication events. Audit trailing is a must-have for certain compliance policies companies have.

Contentful comes with an advanced Versioning feature, allowing users to easily see and rollback to previous versions of content.

Strapi comes with a more simple draft/publish system by default. However a more advanced versioning feature is rumoured to be released this year.

Because Strapi is open-source, it is never limited by the features it offers by default, opening the possibility of custom tailored solutions for customers. With Contentful this is not possible; you are for the most part limited by what they offer.

Pricing

Both CMS offer a free license, but Contentful comes with some serious limitations: you can only have 48 content types, 25k records and 5 users. The first plan that unlocks more starts at $300/month.

Strapi’s free plan has no limitations of content types, locales, API calls, entries, environments, or admin panel users. Strapi’s paid plans (starting at $9/month) unlock access to more advanced features (eg. Audit Trailing) developed by the Strapi team.

What we offer at Division Zero

At Division Zero, we offer Strapi as a service. Division Zero will take care of the infrastructure with one of our hosting partners in AWS or Azure. The right infrastructure components will be chosen for the required compliance, SLAs and hosting budget.

Division Zero is able to offer limitless customisations in Strapi with our passionate team of Node.js developers.