Contentful

Robust and intuitive CMS platform

Hyvät puolet:

It has a simple user interface and a small learning curve. It provides a powerful open API integration that allows you to connect with any third party application. It makes it easy to configure our content workflow to fit today's needs. The tool also has editing options available for published content and preview of the changes made.

Huonot puolet:

For new users navigating the pages is a bit tricky. It is necessary that they improve the pricing models and adapt them to the needs of the companies.

Enterprise website management platform for organization’s with lot of data

Kommentit: In the few years that we have been working with various CMSs, Contentful has been very successful and one of the safest and most well-designed decisions is being made for your organization. They are both safe and have a great status.

Hyvät puolet:

I like Single Sign-On for easy and secure access of team members, It is also a great platform when you’ve got a lot of content and data for your organization and need a professional platform for categorizing your data in the shortest time. GraphsQL is great, and at last, Contentful is user-friendly and easy to understand for newbies.

Huonot puolet:

Because a team is working on a project in a short amount of time and maybe working two or three shifts to edit the content of several people, a more professional and secure log is needed to record all events in detail.

Very inflexible when it comes to styling changes, use only if you have plenty of engineers

Hyvät puolet:

It is impossible for users to create elements that are totally out of line with the corporate design. Contentful also loads faster than many other CMS.

Huonot puolet:

There isn't much I like about Contentful. It is impossible to copy entire pages without a lot of effort, which makes it very time-consuming to create new pages. While you can re-use existing elements, the problem is that if you change them, they are changed everywhere, and there is no way to just copy an element in order to use it as a new element (i.e., changes you make to it don't affect the element you copied). As others have mentioned before, it sometimes takes a quarter of an hour for changes you made to appear on the preview pages, which is just painful (Wordpress is pretty much instant). But by far the biggest pain is that there is no way for the user to simply access the CSS. We have to go back to our engineering team for every little tweak we want, even if it is just the padding of an element or the alignment of a certain style of text. Another issue I have is that it is hard to figure out where on a new page you are while you are editing it. Unlike Wordpress, where you can see the overall structure of your page elements clearly on an overview page, you can only see the rows of the page on the overview in Contentful - you have no idea what the structure inside each row looks like until you click on it. That means you're getting disorientated quite quickly as to where you need to click to edit element X of the page. Overall, I find Contentful terrible to use. It has a few benefits, but at least from a content management user experience those don't outweigh the significant downsides at all.

Feature rich, dense and mature but watch out for the hidden quirks!

Kommentit: Feature rich, dense and feels mature. Still, the "not so great bits" of Contentful ended up being deal breakers and made us switch to other options on the market.

Hyvät puolet:

For editors and copywriters the experience was intuitive enough. All I can recall are some complaints about the asset picker. For developers, I loved that there's a certification exam and a curriculum. https://www.contentful.com/help/contentful-certification/ I did the exam and that helped me structure our projects in a way that reduced development complexity – and by extension, development costs for our clients. Other developers in our company who also took it share the same feeling.

Huonot puolet:

The limits on how many content types you can have on a space. https://www.contentful.com/developers/docs/technical-limits/ Unless you're running the enterprise plan, chances are your team will quickly run out of content types. This makes working with a "component" based approach painful. For instance, if you wish to port an existing design system on a 1:1 mapping and don't have the enterprise plan you'll quickly run out of components. This was the case for one of our projects and it meant the development team had to prioritise which content types were actually critical enough to create – this frustrated both developers and the content team.

An Excellent CMS

Kommentit: Overall I find it a delight to work with. Highly recommended.

Hyvät puolet:

I love all the following: the Infrastructure as Code that allows me to define my models through software, the SDK that allows me to load or update content via automation, the apps that allow webhook integrations such as with Gatsby, Netlify and Github. Finally, I love that it is a SaaS offering where data backups and DB upgrades are not my problem!

Huonot puolet:

Thee free tier allows me to make two CMS systems. It would be nice if the free tier offered, say, up to five. The first paid for tier feels pricey if all I need was simply that third "not-free" CMS. It would be great if they had a "per CMS" paid tier that allowed a third, fourth, fifth CMS (etc.) at $3.95/month each...or something like that.