Storyblok vs Contentful – A Side-By-Side Comparison

The digital world is witnessing a significant shift towards headless content management systems (CMS) and a MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless) architecture. In this landscape, Storyblok and Contentful have emerged as two leading platforms that we support at Bright IT. This article dissects their similarities and differences, providing insights for business decision-makers and technical managers.

The comparison between Storyblok and Contentful will be based on several key factors: Ease of use, customization and flexibility, integration and scalability, content management and delivery, security and reliability, and pricing and plans.

However, before we dive into the details, let's briefly introduce both vendors:

What is Storyblok?

Storyblok is a modern, platform-agnostic headless CMS. A core feature of Storyblok is its real-time visual editor that provides a live preview, simplifying the content management process for creators. For developers, it provides a flexible and robust backend, supporting custom plugins and various integrations. Its design caters to a wide range of digital projects, from websites to mobile applications, making it a versatile tool in the headless CMS market.

What makes Storyblok stand out for us is its content model. The split between stories and bloks is easy to grasp for both content creators and developers – and often makes feature estimation and implementation somewhat quicker and more straightforward compared with many other vendors. We also particularly like the high-level content structure (e.g. folders and folder settings) within Storyblok, which, however, also introduces limitations as to the standard use cases envisioned and supported by the vendor.

Screenshot: Content (Stories) organised in a tree structure in Storyblok

What is Contentful?

Contentful represents a major player in the headless CMS arena, known for its API-first approach. It offers a truly scalable and flexible content management platform, ideal for businesses aiming for a comprehensive digital presence. Contentful's strength lies in its cloud-native architecture and developer-friendly environment, facilitating complex content modelling and seamless integration with existing systems. It's particularly suited for enterprises looking to build intricate digital experiences.

Contentful particularly stands out for its support of multiple environments, which allow for the parallel development of new sophisticated features and the related migration of content when rolling out changes to production. In our experience, Contentful is a great fit for large and complex projects e.g. where there is a need to support multiple languages across multiple user segments and/or channels. We consider its architecture less opinionated and more flexible when compared with other vendors.

Screenshot: Contentful visual modeller showing content model and relation between content types

Ease of Use

Storyblok: The platform's visual editor is its hallmark, offering an intuitive interface that significantly eases the content creation and management process. Its block-based approach allows non-technical users to build and manage content with ease. The ability to organise stories into folders and a built-in mechanism for fetching content based on folder paths are a huge help for content editors and developers.

Contentful: While Contentful boasts a flexible API-first approach, it requires a steeper learning curve. It’s more developer-oriented, offering robust capabilities at the cost of initial complexity for new users. While Contentful also features visual editing capabilities, its content organisation is substantially more complex to grasp and make use of compared with Storyblok. If you use Contentful as a CMS for your website, you may need to build a custom application to manage website pages efficiently (or you can give Arboretum a try).

As a rule, it is the project requirements that show us which platform is the better choice. From a user and developer perspective, we cannot express a clear preference here.

Customization and Flexibility

Storyblok: Highly customizable, Storyblok allows for the creation of tailored content structures. Its extensibility with custom plugins and integrations makes it adaptable to various business needs. However, the extensibility in our experience is limited compared to Contentful.

Contentful: Contentful excels in content modelling and provides extensive flexibility for developers to create bespoke digital experiences. Its API-centric design supports a wide range of customizations. For a consistent look and feel, Contenful also features a set of components that allow for the creation of custom extensions that perfectly fit Contentful.

Screenshot: Arboretum - an example of custom application built (by Bright IT) with a help of visual components from Contentful

Integration and Scalability

Storyblok: Storyblok integrates seamlessly with numerous technologies, making it a fit for diverse digital ecosystems. Its scalability is suited for businesses of many sizes, adapting as they grow. Compared with Contenful, its APIs are less sophisticated and mature, which however does not necessarily cause any headaches in case your project has no complex integration requirements.

Contentful: With the support of Delivery Functions, External references and its Content Delivery API, Contentful is the clear winner when it comes to sophisticated integration and content synchronisation. As a cloud-native platform, Contentful offers exceptional scalability and reliability. It's designed to handle high-traffic scenarios and complex integrations, meeting the demands of large enterprises.

Content Management and Delivery

Storyblok: The platform simplifies content management across various channels, thanks to its intuitive editor. The API-driven approach ensures efficient content delivery to any front end. For content delivery you can use both REST and GraphQL APIs.

Contentful: Contentful’s API-first design facilitates robust content delivery across multiple platforms. Its advanced features cater to even the most complex content distribution requirements. As is the case for Storyblok, content delivery in Contentful also may happen using REST or GraphQL APIs.

Security and Reliability

Both Storyblok and Contentful prioritize security and compliance, offering robust features to protect data and ensure system reliability. Their cloud-based architectures contribute to high uptime and consistent performance.

Pricing and Plans

Storyblok: Offers a range of pricing plans, from free options for small projects to enterprise-grade solutions. Its flexible pricing structure caters to businesses at various growth stages. In our opinion, the license model of Storyblok is beneficial for website projects with a higher number of on average simpler content components compared to the license model of Contentful.

Contentful: Contentful’s pricing tiers are designed to scale with business needs. While it can be more costly for smaller projects (compared with Storyblok), it provides comprehensive features for large-scale digital operations that Storyblok does not provide at all. For medium and large ongoing projects, we would recommend checking out those features in detail – before making a decision on which of the two vendors is the better fit.

Pros and Cons

Storyblok

Pros: User-friendly, high customization, suitable for various project sizes – but in comparison with Contentful on average smaller projects. Better entry-level pricing with e.g. substantially more included content types compared to Contentful.

Cons: May not be a good fit for non-website-focused use cases. Features much less sophisticated developer features and APIs compared to Contentful. To us, it seems to show occasional growth pains due to its current momentum and rapid market share gain. Still lacks some of the features of the more mature Contentful in the details.

Contentful

Pros: Highly scalable, robust for complex projects, extensive integration capabilities. Outstanding feature for the ongoing development of complex and ever-changing digital experiences of all kinds. Very well suited for scenarios focused on omni-channel content distribution.

Cons: Higher cost, more suited for technically proficient users. Much less user-friendly and intuitive for content creators out of the box – for smaller projects and occasional use therefore probably not a good fit. Compared with Storyblok it is much easier to create a content mess/chaos that is hard to clean up.

Conclusion

Storyblok and Contentful cater to different segments of the market. Storyblok is ideal for those seeking an intuitive, flexible CMS for more standard website projects. At the same time, Contentful is suited for enterprises needing a powerful, scalable solution (be it a large number of smaller or one big complex digital experience). The choice depends on your specific business needs and technical capabilities.

At Bright IT, we have extensive experience working with Storyblok and Contentful and are happy to advise you on making the best choice for your organisation. Reach out to us to talk about your digital project requirements.