Within the wild and vibrant world of content management systems, one of the rising stars to have emerged is the Berlin-based headless CMS of Contentful.
As one of the leading CMSs, it has plenty of strong points yet there is no such thing as perfection in our mortal world. It also comes with some weak points, too.
In order to bring an air of clarity to the minds of those whose job revolves around the content management system industry, we have collected and curated the good and the not so good of Contentful.
We’ve brought together the opinions of those that use it – whether they’ve been using it for years or are new to the system – and are passing on their own words about what they think. To respect their identities, we’ve decided not to provide their names.
So here goes. Let’s begin with Contentful’s strengths.
The strengths
“Once I integrated Contentful in my project, it was really easy to use and I think it’s very useful and powerful.”
“Contentful allows me to create new pages for my company website easily, without infringing our standardized UI and UX. The biggest benefit of Contentful for my team is that it has allowed our web developer to focus on larger initiatives, while handing the power to create high-quality, visually-appealing webpages.” 
“Contentful is a fantastic tool for writing and managing content. It makes it easy to edit content dynamically.”
“The fact you can create your own data structure and data relationships is so useful and enables complete flexibility within projects.”
“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 Gatsby, Netlify, and Github.”
“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.”
“It is taking almost a minute to build a sample project. UI is simple that can create and edit your content without drowning in the ugly menus.”
“It has a good balance of cost and features. Their API is feature rich allowing us to extend Contentful and tightly integrate it with our systems.”
“Contentful is a content management system solution which has a great API focus and allows us to develop our own data relationships and data structure.”
Now let’s get into the not so good.
The weaknesses
“There are aspects that are difficult, and sometimes hard to keep tabs on what is active and hard to back track if something does go wrong.”
“It hasn’t got anything that really annoys me but it could do with a better dashboard or something rather than the current ‘Space home’ page.”
“I also get frustrated when I make an existing field that is required and there is no notification that the content doesn’t match the new criteria.”
“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.”
“It is much better for new projects than for legacy ones, as importing prior content is very painful – there is some tool for it, but it can still be pretty complex.”
“Depending on your dev skills, you can always figure out a way to get your Contentful content to work without necessarily buying a shortcut from a third party.” 
“Custom Validation didn’t allow us to cross compare fields, different user levels are only available on higher plans.”
“Since I use JAMStack static site generation I don’t need a ton of API calls per month. However, I would love to add users, locales, and per-user permissions.”
“There is no true support for branching and merging of content. The sandbox environment is helpful, but we have had to build our own custom scripts and processes to simulate branch and merge.”
“The product is a bit slow to use – Content State management could be improved – meaning when I delete a linked content, it sometimes leads to unexpected issues.”
PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Contentful consultancies. Contact us to see how we can work together.
