Storyblok is the closest replacement and adds the visual editor Contentful never built, at $99 against $300.
Sanity suits teams with developers, and Prismic publishes the most graduated price ladder here.
Nothing else matches Contentful's locale model, which is the reason most teams stay.
Every tool here is assessed against the same criteria, scored before any commercial conversation. Read the full method. No entry on this list is a paid placement.
People look for a Contentful alternative for three reasons, and which one applies to you changes the answer completely.
The first is cost. The step from the free plan to $300 a month is the largest single jump of the nine platforms we ranked, with nothing in between, so a project that outgrows the free limits has nowhere small to go. The second is the editing experience: there is no visual page editor, so a marketing team that expected to assemble landing pages finds itself filling in forms. The third is architectural. The content model lives in Contentful's database, and while there is a genuine command line tool, a migration language and a diff app, the files remain a copy rather than the source.
What is much harder to replace is the reason most companies bought it. Locales, granular permissions and editorial workflow are core concepts here rather than features bolted on, and if you are publishing one body of content into several markets with approval crossing departments, several of the platforms below will feel like a downgrade whatever else they do better.
So read this as eight answers to three different questions, ordered by how completely each replaces Contentful rather than by which is best in isolation.
What these eight publish
The four facts that decide most switches, gathered so you do not have to open eight pricing pages.
- Entry price above free · Prismic $10, then $25, $150 and $675 by seat count. Storyblok $99. Hygraph $199. Sanity $15 per seat. Strapi Cloud from $35 per project. Directus $499. Statamic is a one-time $349 per site rather than a subscription. Payload publishes nothing above its free licence.
- A visual page editor · Storyblok and Prismic only. Everything else presents structured forms and previews elsewhere, which is the same arrangement you have now.
- The content model in version control · Sanity, Payload, Strapi and Statamic keep it as files in your repository. Directus holds it in the database but exports and applies it as a YAML file you can commit. Storyblok, Prismic and Hygraph keep it in the vendor's interface, same as Contentful.
- Self-hosting · Strapi, Payload, Directus and Statamic. Sanity self-hosts the editor but not the content API. Storyblok, Prismic and Hygraph are hosted only.
One pattern worth noticing before you read further. Hygraph and Directus both jump from a free tier straight to $199 and $499 with nothing published in between, which is the same shape of step that sends people looking for a Contentful alternative in the first place. Prismic is the only platform here with a genuinely graduated ladder.
Before you switch
The content will move, because everything here exposes it over an API. The work does not. Content models, editorial habits and any custom interface all get rebuilt, so treat this as a decision with a real switching cost rather than a trial you can reverse cheaply.
The tools, ranked
1
Storyblok
★★★★★3.5 / 5Headless CMS built around a visual editor that previews your live front end while editors work on it.
- From
- $99/mo
- Free plan
- Yes
- Best for
- Marketing teams who need to build and change pages themselves without waiting on a developer.
- Pricing basisPer plan with seat caps; $15/mo per extra seat
- Free tier1 seat, 20,000 stories, 2 locales
- Editing experienceVisual editor against your live front end
- Self-hostNo, SaaS only
- AI agent supportOfficial MCP server; can change component schemas as well as entries
Where it falls short: The published plans cap how many people can have access at all, not merely how many are included, so a large editorial team runs out of room and lands in a quoted tier. Locale allowances on the lower plans are tight enough to force an upgrade on their own.
2
Sanity
★★★★★4.0 / 5Headless CMS with a configurable editing studio you build yourself, aimed at teams whose front end is already custom code.
- From
- $15 per seat/mo
- Free plan
- Yes
- Best for
- Product and engineering teams building a custom front end who want the editing experience shaped to their content model.
- Pricing basisPer seat, not per site
- Free tier20 seats, 10,000 documents, public datasets only
- Editing experienceStudio you configure in code, with live preview against your own front end
- Self-hostStudio yes; the content API is Sanity-hosted
- AI agent supportRemote MCP server at mcp.sanity.io, 40+ tools spanning documents, schema and releases
Where it falls short: Nothing exists for an editor to open until a developer builds and deploys the editing interface, so a marketing team without engineering support is buying a blank page. Per-seat pricing also means the bill follows the org chart rather than usage.
3
Prismic
Headless CMS built around reusable page sections, aimed at marketing and engineering shipping landing pages together.
- From
- $10/mo
- Free plan
- Yes
- Best for
- Teams shipping frequent marketing pages who want editors composing from a fixed library of developer-built sections.
- Pricing basisPer plan, stepped by seat count
- Free tier1 user, 4M API calls, 2 locales
- Editing experienceSlice-based page builder with preview
- Self-hostNo, SaaS only
- AI agent supportOfficial MCP, free on all plans; cannot delete or publish
Where it falls short: The lower tiers are stepped by seat count and the entry plan is a single user, so a small team moves up the ladder quickly. Its MCP server deliberately withholds delete and publish, which is a safety property but a constraint if you intended to automate publishing.
4
Hygraph
GraphQL-native headless CMS with content federation, pulling other APIs into one graph alongside its own content.
- From
- $199/mo
- Free plan
- Yes
- Best for
- Teams assembling content from several systems who want one GraphQL endpoint in front of all of it.
- Pricing basisPer plan with fixed seat counts
- Free tier3 seats, 1,000 entries, 20 models
- Editing experienceStructured editor, no visual page editor
- Self-hostNo, SaaS only
- AI agent supportOfficial MCP server, Early Access
Where it falls short: Free for three seats and then $199 a month with nothing published in between, so it repeats the pattern of a large step that sends people looking for alternatives in the first place. Its MCP server is in early access rather than generally available.
5
Strapi
★★★★★3.5 / 5Open-source Node.js headless CMS with a large plugin ecosystem, run self-hosted or on Strapi Cloud.
- From
- $0 self-hosted, $35/mo on Cloud
- Free plan
- Yes
- Best for
- Teams who want to own the stack and extend the CMS itself, rather than work within a hosted vendor's limits.
- Pricing basisPer project, not per seat
- Free tierCommunity edition, self-hosted, unlimited entries
- Editing experienceBuilt-in admin panel, no visual page editor
- Self-hostYes, MIT licence
- AI agent supportBuilt-in MCP server, entries only; content types via the separate AI assistant
Where it falls short: Self-hosting moves the cost from a licence to a person, and that person has to apply the updates, hold the backups and be available when it stops. The generated admin panel is also competent rather than distinctive, with no visual page assembly.
6
Payload
★★★★★3.5 / 5TypeScript-native headless CMS and application framework that runs inside a Next.js app rather than alongside one.
- From
- $0 self-hosted
- Free plan
- Yes
- Best for
- Next.js teams who want the content model, admin panel and API defined in the same repository as the front end.
- Pricing basisFree self-hosted; hosted and Enterprise quoted
- Free tierUnlimited, self-hosted under MIT
- Editing experienceGenerated admin panel, no visual page editor
- Self-hostYes, MIT licence
- AI agent supportFirst-party MCP plugin; content model is TypeScript in your repo
Where it falls short: The benefit assumes Next.js, and most of the argument disappears on any other framework. Nothing above the free licence carries a published price either, so hosting and enterprise cannot be costed before a sales conversation.
7
Directus
Data platform that layers a headless CMS and admin app over any existing SQL database rather than owning the data itself.
- From
- $0 self-hosted, $499/mo Team
- Free plan
- Yes
- Best for
- Teams with a database already in production who want editors working on it directly, not on a second copy of the content.
- Pricing basisPer plan with seat and collection caps; $50/mo per extra seat
- Free tier3 seats, 25 collections, 5 flows
- Editing experienceAdmin app over your own tables, no visual page editor
- Self-hostYes, on every tier at no software cost
- AI agent supportOfficial MCP server on every tier including free
Where it falls short: Free for three seats and then $499 a month with nothing published in between, which is a larger gap than the one you are leaving. The database also remains the source of truth, so an edit made in the interface drifts from your snapshot file.
8
Statamic
Laravel-based CMS that stores content as flat files in your repository, usable headlessly through its REST and GraphQL APIs.
- From
- $349 one-time per site
- Free plan
- Yes
- Best for
- Laravel shops and agencies building many sites who want content version-controlled in git alongside the code.
- Pricing basisOne-time per site, not a subscription
- Free tierCore, one admin user, no headless API
- Editing experienceControl panel with live preview
- Self-hostYes, and content lives in your repo
- AI agent supportNo official MCP server found; content is flat files an agent can edit directly
Where it falls short: It is a Laravel product, so it presumes a PHP toolchain your team may not have, and the free tier has no headless API at all. We have not trialled it, so the flat-file workflow here rests on the vendor's documentation rather than on our own use.
Pick by the reason you are leaving
The price step. Prismic, which publishes four tiers before Enterprise starting at $10, or Storyblok at $99. Both give you somewhere small to go, which is the thing Contentful does not.
No visual page editor. Storyblok first, Prismic second. Storyblok renders your live site beside the page as editors compose it from blocks; Prismic builds pages from slices defined in your codebase.
The model living in a vendor's database. Sanity if you want a hosted content API with the schema in your repository, Payload if your front end is Next.js, Strapi if you want to own the whole stack. All three put the model in version control, which none of the hosted platforms can offer.
Licence cost in general. Strapi or Directus self-hosted, or Statamic's one-time fee if you run many small sites. Remember that self-hosting converts a subscription into somebody's ongoing attention, and for a team without operations support that usually costs more than the subscription did.
Nothing, actually. If you are publishing into several markets with approval crossing departments, stay. The locale model and the permissions are what you are paying for, and none of the eight above replaces them properly. The honest recommendation in that case is to negotiate the Enterprise figure rather than to migrate.
The one to look at first
For most teams leaving Contentful it is Storyblok, because it keeps the hosted, structured, organisation-ready shape while fixing the editing experience and lowering the entry price. Check the seat ceiling before you commit, since that is where it bites and it bites as a wall rather than a bill.
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