Contentful vs. Netlify CMS

Coming from WordPress, Contentful feels like content management as it should be. There's no clutter to get rid of, you can simply start building from scratch, and the end product is perfectly tailored to your or your clients needs.

Incentivized

Netlify CMS is well suited when you have very less frequent updates to your content, maybe once a day and very few people need to access your data. You can connect it to Netlify, GitHub, or any platform and have multiple people access it and do as many updates as you wish, but the process is not well-defined and you need to build your own system for that. It is well suited for projects you need to pull off with very low cost, it is essentially free as the software is open source and free to use, and all you need to do is set up your schema correctly and find a deployment pipeline where you can build your static site/API to redeploy whenever the content changes. I personally used a GitHub Login -> Netlify CMS -> next app consumer of content -> GitHub pipelines to run next SSG -> GitHub Pages to deploy the built static site. It might not be appropriate for large teams where users themselves need no-code tools to modify the schema of the content.

Incentivized

• 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).

Incentivized

• Storing content data in customized schema without a database
• Full control over your content and infrastructure where it is deployed and stored
• Very low-cost way for building your own CMS and CDN

Incentivized

• Preview of changes prior to publishing
• The ability to use a spell check plug-in when working on content (it doesn't work well with Grammarly)

Incentivized

• Linking between different schema types, i.e. having some relations between content
• Better ways to define content schema, like how TinaCMS would handle using a JSON

Incentivized

Contentful was affordable and much simpler than the Java based systems and preferred over a PHP solution

Incentivized

We really can't compare it to full-fledged CMS software, like WordPress, which has a lot of community and support with widgets, plugins, and whatnot. It's not built for that, but you can compare it to Contentful, Ghost, Strapi, etc., which provide similar functionality to a headless CMS with custom schema options, but even among them, it still lacks a lot of functionality, ease of use, and support. But Netlify CMS pros would be of the opinion that compared to other platforms where most schemas need to use their own tools and frameworks, it's very cost-effective. Something new called TinaCMS has come up to compete with Netlify CMS by covering most of its shortcomings, but it's something new being built by the same team that built Forestry CMS and comes with many modern features, yet currently only supports NextJS SSG.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Helped us inject dynamic content into existing site very quickly
• Wasted a lot of time to implement when something complex, such as querying content, was needed

Incentivized