The headless and MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless) architecture approach is consuming the digital world, with good reason. Headless gives businesses the opportunity to deploy different technologies for the front and back end of their website, offering the freedom and benefits to create unique customer experiences. Additionally, headless encourages a best-of-breed approach to building online stores, with the liberty to pick and choose the best solutions for your use case. While still somewhat relatively new, MACH is quickly building popularity for how it helps businesses. MACH technologies are focused on supporting a composable approach, meaning each component is pluggable, scalable, replaceable, and can be continuously improved. MACH architecture offers businesses the freedom to select from the best tools available, while maintaining a structure that is easy to add, replace, or remove those tools in the future.
Today, let’s take a deeper look at two emerging heavyweights in the Headless space: Storyblok and Contentful, analysing their similarities and differences, their ease of use, customisation options, flexibility, integration and scalability content management and delivery, security, reliability and offering insights for CMO’s, CIO’s and business decision-makers.
What is Storyblok?
Storyblok is a modern, platform-agnostic headless CMS. A core feature of Storyblok is its real-time visual editor offering live preview before going live, simplifying the content management process for creators and content editors. For web developers, it’s flexible and robust, supporting custom plugins and a range of integrations. Its design makes it suitable for a wide range of digital applications, from websites to mobile apps, making it versatile.
What makes Storyblok stand out is its content model. The split between stories and bloks is easy to grasp for both content creators editors and developers.
What is Contentful?
Contentful is known for its API-first approach. It is a genuinely scalable and flexible content management platform, ideal for businesses looking for a comprehensive digital presence. Contentful’s strength comes from its cloud-native architecture and developer-friendly environment, supporting complex content modelling and seamless integration with existing systems. It’s particularly suited for businesses looking to build intricate digital experiences.
Contentful stands out for its support of multiple environments, which allow for the parallel development of new sophisticated features and the related migration of content when rolling out changes to production.
Ease of Use
Storyblok: The platform’s visual editor is its hallmark, providing an intuitive interface that significantly eases the content creation and management process. Its block-based approach allows everyday editors users to build and manage content with ease. The ability to organise stories into folders, supported by its built-in method for fetching content based on folder path is very helpful for content editors and developers.
Contentful: While Contentful offers a flexible API-first approach, it does demand a slightly steeper learning curve, that come with its robust capabilities. While Contentful also features visual editing capabilities, its content organisation is more complex to grasp and make use of compared with Storyblok. If you deploy Contentful as a CMS for your website, you may need to build a custom application to manage website pages efficiently.
Customisation and Flexibility
Storyblok: Supports the creation of tailored content structures. Its extensibility with custom plugins and integrations makes it adaptable to various business needs. Highly customisable.
Contentful: Excels at content modelling and provides extensive flexibility for developers to create bespoke digital experiences. Its API-centric design supports a wide range of customisations. For a consistent look and feel, Contenful also features a set of components that allow for the creation of custom extensions that perfectly fit Contentful.
Integration and Scalability
Storyblok: Integrates with ease across a variety of technologies, making it a great fit for diverse digital ecosystems. Its scalability is suited for businesses of any size, adapting as they grow. Compared with Contenful, its APIs are slightly less sophisticated/matured, however this does not pose an issue for projects without complex integration requirements.
Contentful: With the support of Delivery Functions, External references and its Content Delivery API, Contentful is a true leader when it comes to sophisticated integration and content synchronisation. As a cloud-native platform, Contentful offers exceptional scalability and reliability. It’s designed to handle high-traffic scenarios and complex integrations, meeting the demands of large enterprises.
Content Management and Delivery
Storyblok: The platform simplifies content management across various channels, thanks to its intuitive editor. The API-driven approach ensures efficient content delivery to any front end. For content delivery you can use both REST and GraphQL APIs.
Contentful: Contentful’s API-first design facilitates robust content delivery across multiple platforms. Its advanced features cater to even the most complex content distribution requirements. As is the case for Storyblok, content delivery in Contentful also may happen using REST or GraphQL APIs.
Security and Reliability
Each of the platforms have a strong focus and priority for security and compliance. Both provide robust features to protect data and ensure system reliability. Both also come with cloud-based architecture offering solid uptime and performance outcomes.
Conclusion
Whether you are deploying a new site from scratch or replatforming, selecting the most appropriate headless solution for your project and business is a pivotal decision, which should be informed by a deep understanding of the business’s unique needs and objectives, both now and into the future.
Give strong consideration for platforms offering solid customisation capability, that will allow you to tailor user experience. Look for platforms that support a variety of front-end frameworks, with robust API support for seamless integration with other systems and technologies. Scalability is crucial. Don’t just think traffic or transactions. Think feature growth, new channels and markets – without the need for a rebuild. The developer ecosystem is also key. How large is the developer pool? Will support be easy to find? And, of course, cost and ROI (Return on Investment). Do the numbers stack up for you?
Storyblok and Contentful have a lot of crossover but at the same time also tend to cater (at their core) to different ends of the market. Storyblok is an excellent choice for businesses looking for an intuitive, yet flexible Headless CMS focused on more standard website projects. Contentful tends to lend itself toward businesses seeking powerful, scalable, and more complex digital experience.
The choice depends on your specific business needs.
At Newpath, we have extensive experience working with both Storyblok and Contentful. We are technology agnostic, meaning we will spend time with you, getting to know your business and your project goals, and give you best practice advice eon which platform is right for your needs both now and into the future.
