Contentful CMS: Everything You Need to Know

If you’ve ever considered going headless, you must have pondered how your team will manage content across multiple channels. You know you’ll need a content management system (CMS) that works for headless specifically, and you think Contentful CMS may be it for your business.
To help you make a well-weighed decision, we at Digital Suits would like to share our headless commerce development expertise with you. Read this Contentful CMS review to find out:
Contentful is a cloud-based headless content management system (although the Contentful team prefers to call it a “composable content platform”).
Its core advantage is Create Once, Publish Anywhere. Contentful lets you add and reuse content blocks on any channel. It relies on APIs to do so.
If you want to dive deeper into what headless means, check out our guide on headless commerce.
Here are the core features that Contentful has to offer you:
Contentful CMS pricing is quite flexible. At the moment of writing, Contentful had three plans to choose from, as follows:
Plan | Price | Features |
---|---|---|
Free | $0 | • 5 users • 2 locales • 4 standard roles • Tasks and Compose apps |
Basic | $300/month | • 20 users • 4 locales • 4 standard roles • Tech support available • Tasks, Compose, and Launch apps |
Premium | Custom (charged annually) | • Unlimited users, roles, and locales • Custom roles • Advanced governance, compliance, and security features • Upgrades for spaces available |
The existence of the free plan is good news for startups and small businesses. It means you can reap the key benefits of this CMS at no cost. For growing businesses, the Contentful CMS price remains competitive, however.
Let’s say you have a blog and want to use Contentful CMS to manage its content. Here’s the gist of how you can do it:
Switching to content modeling can be challenging if you’re not used to thinking in such terms. Luckily, Contentful has a comprehensive help center to get you and your team started.
Here are the five pros of Contentful that make it one of the best headless CMSs for e-commerce:
But, of course, every CMS has flaws. Although they are few, here are the five cons you should take into account:
Brands like Costa Coffee, Danone, Atlassian, and Notion have all entrusted Contentful with their content management needs. Here’s how they and others make good use of this CMS. H3 Creating and maintaining knowledge bases and support portals Contentful allows creating, publishing, and updating content at lightning speed. And there’s no other type of content where speed is more crucial than in knowledge bases and support portals. That’s because the information contained there is prone to becoming outdated fast.
Contentful CMS makes knowledge bases and support portals easy to maintain and tweak. This reduces the resources required to keep them up to date.
Cases in point:
Composable commerce is a step beyond going headless. Composable commerce tenets include:
Contentful CMS is one of those best-in-class tools designed specifically for content management. Since it’s frontend-agnostic by definition, you can use it for managing content on any channel, from websites and mobile apps to smart devices.
Cases in point:
Global brands struggle with keeping their brand consistent across different markets, all while allowing enough autonomy for local marketing teams. Contentful CMS is built to facilitate maintaining this tricky balancing act.
Thanks to Contentful’s content model sharing feature, brands can keep their brand unified across unlimited channels without infringing on editorial autonomy.
Cases in point:
Contentful CMS is a headless composable content platform with a big promise: Create Once, Publish Anywhere. And deliver on this promise it does.
You can easily deploy your content to any channel and device thanks to content modeling and single-click omnichannel distribution. Thus, your team becomes more efficient, flexible, and productive, reducing the resources you need for marketing.
Want to see how exactly your business can benefit from implementing Contentful CMS? Drop us a line to discuss your headless project – and we’ll get back to you within a day.
Contentful is a content management system, in principle. However, if you’ve worked only with traditional CMSs (e.g., WordPress, Magento), Contentful differs from them in one major way. It decouples content from the presentation layer.
In other words, content creators and managers add content blocks to Contentful once and then use them across multiple channels without copy-pasting or repeat uploading.
Other differences include:
Both Cloud and Contentful are headless CMSes, so they come with the same set of benefits: content decoupled from the presentation layer, increased reusability and scalability, and more efficient content management.
However, in the Cloud CMS vs Contentful comparison, Contentful comes out on top thanks to a broader range of features that Cloud can’t boast:
Cloud CMS, on the other hand, can also offer something Contentful can’t, notably phone support and on-premise deployment.
CEO and Co-Founder at DigitalSuits
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