Contentful's hidden costs and governance gaps are slowing enterprise teams down

Highlights

You’ll learn about the cons of Contentful:

• Rigid content modeling: Complex references make scaling difficult
• Strict API rate limits: Can hinder CI/CD, migrations and large builds
• No native visual preview: Content editors and developers lack real-time content context
• No built-in localization workflows: Requires manual setup or third-party tools
• Limited versioning & rollback: No native tools for comparing or restoring changes
• No local development workflow: Slows down testing and automation

If you've ever asked, “Why is this harder than it should be?” while working in Contentful, you're not alone. Let’s break down the disadvantages of Contentful and explore why developers are seeking Contentful alternatives, such as Contentstack. 

Governance and workflow limitations create real operational risk

Contentful lacks essential governance and workflow controls, which can lead to operational risks, unnecessary errors and reduced agility. For complex enterprise content lifecycles, these gaps quickly become critical challenges:

• Risk of overwriting: Contentful lacks key governance controls, making it easy for editors to accidentally overwrite each other's changes due to a deficiency in true collaboration features.

• Limited workflows: The native workflow capabilities are often too limited for complex publishing needs involving multiple channels, data sources and approval stages. Core necessities like safer publishing and localization frequently depend on purchasing paid marketplace apps.

• The enterprise impact: For large organizations, these fundamental flaws in collaboration and control create avoidable mistakes and slow teams down.

Heavy reliance on developers slows teams down and limits editors

Contentful's strong focus on developers often comes at the expense of content editors, creating a bottleneck that hinders marketing speed and operational efficiency.

• Clunky authoring experience: Contentful's authoring experience is often deemed painful for non-technical users. The rigid content model limits what editors can accomplish independently.

• No true visual editing: While offering a Studio interface, it does not provide true visual editing, forcing editors to work without a clear, real-time context of the final content presentation.

• The Contentstack advantage: Contentstack is designed to empower editors with tools like modular blocks, global fields and visual builder, providing the freedom to manage and design content without constant developer intervention.

Total cost of ownership is unpredictable and often much higher than expected

While Contentful might seem cost-effective at first, its reliance on paid add-ons and unexpected price escalations result in a much higher and more unpredictable Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

• Hidden costs: Many capabilities that are essential for global enterprises — such as localization, governance and automation — require either paid apps or extra components.

• Price escalation: Costs frequently grow with increased usage and can expand significantly at renewal, forcing customers to seek more transparent and enterprise-focused alternatives. As one user noted, the pricing model became so complex that the original reason for choosing Contentful was no longer valid. Contentstack is preferred for being a more transparent offering.

Contentstack: The clear choice for enterprise agility

Contentstack is the proven alternative for global brands looking to overcome Contentful’s limitations and accelerate their digital velocity.

Contentstack's user satisfaction advantage

Enterprise customers consistently prefer Contentstack, which exceeds Contentful's user satisfaction ratings in nearly all categories on platforms like G2. Contentstack’s commitment to a superior platform experience is evident in its higher ratings for:

• Ease of admin

• Ease of setup

• Ease of use

• Quality of support

Contentstack vs. Contentful comparison

9 Contentful disadvantages

1. Rigid content modeling

At first, Contentful’s content model seems intuitive and user-friendly as you have to define content types, nest references and so on. However, as your business grows and you manage multiple languages, you begin to face real problems. In Contentful, you cannot define true relational models (e.g., one-to-many or many-to-many relationships). Instead, you face issues with references and arrays. When building a multi-author blog where authors belong to different teams and teams manage multiple categories, you must manually link everything via references. You cannot set relational rules or joins, making everything unmanageable as your digital content scales.

2. Rate limit on API calls

Contentful imposes high rate limits on APIs, depending on your pricing tier, which may hinder work during layered builds, migrations or CI/CD deployments. The free plan allows 100K API requests, but developers can easily exceed this limit in a multi-environment setup. Visual authoring experiences are limited, with no visual preview. Even building workarounds like request caching, throttling logic or paid add-ons is challenging. Contentful can lead to issues in deployments and automation. The absence of native visual preview, together with the limited authoring interface, adds to your overhead cost.

3. Limited visual authoring experience and no native preview

Contentful’s lack of a native visual preview and limited authoring interface creates unnecessary overhead. Content editors work in a rigid form-based UI with no real context for how content appears on the front end, which means you’re often sending requests to set up or troubleshoot preview environments. When discussing WYSIWYG layout builders, Contentful falls short due to its reliance on structured fields, rather than offering drag-and-drop zones. It's fine for structured content management APIs, but it leads to messages like, “Can you show me what this looks like?”

4. Lack of built-in localization workflows

Contentful CMS helps you use multiple languages, but there are no localization features, such as translation management, approval stages or translator assignment. Developers build or integrate these features into their workflows. Consequently, developers create their exclusive solutions through webhooks, status flags and third-party integrations, creating undue engineering complexity. 

This creates friction for multilingual teams and increases the likelihood of publishing incomplete or inconsistent content. Contentful is underpowered compared to other content management systems, such as Contentstack, which offer native workflow features and support for localization.

5. API-only nature can be limiting

The API-first approach and flexibility of Contentful come at a price. The core features are developed manually, as everything, including content creation and delivery, relies on content management APIs. It lacks support for versioning of content models, comparing changes across environments and rollbacks of updates. Developers require the assistance of external tools when they want to publish from staging to production, monitor revisions or deliver in batches. For teams managing complex websites, mobile apps or multiple platforms, this adds risk and reduces agility. 

6. No local development workflow

Contentful lacks support for local development workflows, which is frustrating for engineering teams used to working with Git-based CMS platforms or local content APIs. Since all content lives in the cloud and is accessed via API, developers cannot test or preview changes offline. There's no built-in local content store, mock API support or content sandboxing, making CI/CD pipelines more complex.

7. Limited extensibility without engineering support

Your development team will enjoy the flexibility of Contentful, but only when you develop custom code. Do you want to build your input field like a color picker or a YouTube embed? First, you have to create it in React, host it yourself and connect to the CMS manually. There is no plug-and-play and the App Marketplace is weak. This means that the non-technical users cannot move an inch without developers. Gradually, developers/IT professionals are required to address an increasing number of support inquiries and create tools to make the platform usable. Contentstack, on the other hand, is developer-friendly and offers built-in extensibility. 

8. Inconsistent developer support and documentation

While Contentful offers comprehensive documentation for basic tasks, you find outdated or fragmented documentation on advanced use cases, migration strategies and large-scale architectures. Often, developers must dig through forums, GitHub issues or engage in trial-and-error experimentation, which slows down development and increases the learning curve.

9. Not ideal for e-commerce solutions

Contentful cannot boast that it's built for e-commerce use. No native product modeling, inventory synchronization and pricing are available. To create a simple store with powerful features, you probably have to integrate several external services, such as Commerce Layer, Shopify or your PIM systems. Contentful has a high integration overhead, API rate limits and non-relational data, so it becomes a labor-intensive solution when building product-heavy websites.

Why are technical teams switching from Contentful to Contentstack?

Some of you might have heard about the positive reviews of Contentful, but most reviews overlook the reality. You’re constantly hacking your way to a working solution. Here’s why technical teams are switching to Contentstack, especially for its ease in developing custom apps:

Smarter, modular content modeling

Forget rigid content types and endless references. Contentstack is a composable content platform that utilizes “Modular Blocks” to enable fast modeling of flexible content structures, eliminating the need to build everything from scratch. 

Live preview and in-context editing

Contentstack's headless CMS provides real-time preview updates. The live preview and in-context editing give content creators real-time visibility, so developers don’t have to manually set up staging sites or answer “What will this look like?” five times a week.

Visual UI extensions that don’t require a hackathon

Do you need a custom field or workflow? Using Contentstack’s Extensions, you can build and drop them into the interface without wrangling OAuth flows or React from scratch, like in Contentful.

Transparent, usage-based pricing

Contentstack has usage-based pricing that is completely transparent. You will know what you're in for and won't be surprised by the recent restrictions. Additionally, you won't have to call a sales representative to continue with your project.

Quicker, cleaner setup of the environment

In Contentful, you configure new environments manually by copying content or using custom scripts. With Contentstack, you can easily clone an environment with only a couple of clicks. You can create staging, testing and production environments without adding additional efforts.

Cleaner, more efficient API responses

With Contentstack, the API provides clean, easy-to-use data, precisely what you need and nothing more. You don’t have to deal with messy layers of linked content or spend time filtering unnecessary information like you often do in Contentful.

Quick developer onboarding

Contentstack’s documentation is developer-first, and the CLI is intuitive. New developers can speed and push content within hours, not days, through trial and error.

Case study: How Contentstack increased speed and productivity

A community platform replaced its outdated CMS Contentful with Contentstack. Contentstack offered an intuitive interface, robust support and seamless integration. With features like versioning and native multilingual support, publishing speed increased by over 75%. Overall content updates increased by 40% and productivity rose by 50%.

After using Contentstack, the Director of Content said:

“The versioning feature has been beneficial... I like how fluid it is when switching over to Spanish and then plugging everything in. Because we’re a bilingual site, the language capability is critical, and Contentstack shines in that regard.”

Read the complete case study here.

Contentstack vs Contentful

Here’s how Contentstack outsmarts Contentful:

FAQs

Why is Contentful so expensive?

Contentful uses a tiered pay program, where key features and usage are capped by content types, customers and API calls. As a result, expenses rapidly expand as your project grows or you recruit more teams.

Is Contentful user-friendly?

Yes, it has a user-friendly interface for developers, but for non-tech-savvy users, Contentful is cluttered, extra complicated and has a steep learning curve.

What is the difference between Contentstack and Contentful?

Contentstack and Contentful are headless CMS solutions. However, Contentstack offers more built-in features, such as versioning, visual workflows and environment management for various platforms, which reduce development overhead costs.

How is Contentstack better than Contentful for developers?

Contentstack simplifies complex workflows with fewer APIs, a better environment setup, simpler versioning, native personalization and AI tools, and real-time previewing.