Website & CMS platforms

Contentful vs Storyblok

Updated September 2026

Storyblok if your team builds pages: editors compose them from blocks against the live site, and the entry plan is $99. Contentful if one content set serves several markets and a large editorial team, which is what the $300 step and the deeper locale model are actually for.

Both tools are assessed against the same criteria, scored before any commercial conversation. How we rank.

These two land on the same shortlists because they answer the same brief on paper: a hosted, structured content platform that a marketing organisation can standardise on. In practice they were built for different daily jobs, and picking the wrong one produces the same outcome either way, which is a team that quietly goes back to asking developers for changes.

The deciding question is not about features. It is: does your team spend its time assembling pages, or publishing one body of content into many places?

If the answer is assembling pages, Storyblok's visual editor is the entire argument and very little else needs weighing. If the answer is many places, Contentful's locale model and permissions are the argument, and the visual editor you would be giving up was never going to get used.

What we tested, and what we did not

We walked both editors in August 2026. On Contentful we reached a blank space and modelled a content type from nothing, which is the from-zero experience a real buyer gets. On Storyblok we walked the demonstration space, which shows the editor working well but says nothing about how long it takes to reach that state.

That asymmetry matters and we would rather name it than average over it. We have first-hand evidence of Contentful's setup effort and of Storyblok's finished editing experience. We do not have the reverse of either, and neither platform has been run by us in production.

The short answer

Contentful

3.5 / 5

Pick Contentful if Pick Contentful when one body of content has to reach several brands, regions or languages, and the people writing and approving it sit in different parts of an organisation. The locale model and the permissions are what you are buying.

Where it falls short: There is no visual page editor at all, so a team that expected to assemble landing pages will be filling in forms and previewing elsewhere. The first paid step is also $300 a month with nothing between it and the free plan.

From: $0 for 10 users; Lite $300/mo
Free plan: Yes

Visit Contentful Read our Contentful review

Storyblok

3.5 / 5

Pick Storyblok if Pick Storyblok when the daily user is a marketer building pages. The live site renders beside the page as it is composed from developer-defined blocks, which is the single most reliable predictor of whether a CMS gets used rather than worked around.

Where it falls short: The published plans cap how many people can have access at all, not merely how many are included, so a growing editorial team hits a wall rather than a bill. Locale allowances on the lower plans are tight enough to force an upgrade on their own.

From: $99/mo
Free plan: Yes

Visit Storyblok Read our Storyblok review

Side by side

	Contentful	Storyblok
What an editor looks at	Structured forms, with preview happening elsewhere	The live front end beside the page, composed from named blocks
Tooling around the content model	Space export, a migration CLI with a JavaScript DSL, and a diff app	A command line tool that exports rather than owns the model
The first paid step	$300 a month, with nothing between it and free	$99 a month, including five seats
What the bill follows	Spaces and their quotas	Seats, plus traffic, requests and story counts per plan
Room to add people	10 on the free plan, 20 on the paid platform plan, custom above it	Five included and ten maximum at $99; fifteen and twenty at $349
Localisation	Locales and multi-market delivery are core concepts	Two locales on the lower plans, ten on the tier above
Roles and editorial workflow	Custom roles, teams and workflow aimed at large organisations	Roles and space configuration, without the workflow layer
What an AI agent can reach	Entries and content types over MCP	Entries, component schemas, assets, roles and space configuration
The free plan	10 users, one Starter Space, 100K API calls a month, hard stop rather than overage	One seat, 20,000 stories, two locales, 100 GB traffic
Self-hosting	Not available at any tier	Not available at any tier

Which one, given what you have

A marketing team that builds its own landing pages. Storyblok. This is what it is for, and the block library means giving people that freedom does not cost you the design system.

Six markets, three brands, a large editorial department. Contentful. The locale model and the permissions are the product, and the $300 step is small next to what the alternative costs in duplicated work.

A growing team on a budget. Storyblok gets you moving for less, but check the ceiling first. Because the seat maximums are walls rather than prices, the cheaper entry point can become a forced migration at exactly the wrong moment.

Content that is data rather than pages. Contentful, or neither. A product catalogue or a research library gains nothing from visual page assembly, and you would be paying for Storyblok's defining feature while never opening it.

A codebase where an AI agent does much of the work. Storyblok reaches further, since its MCP server covers component schemas, roles and space configuration rather than entries and types alone. Neither keeps the model in your repository, so both leave an agent querying an API to discover what the model currently is.

What neither of them gives you

On both platforms the content model lives in the vendor's database and your files are a copy of it. That means no pull request review of a schema change, and no guarantee that what is committed is what is running. If that property matters more than either platform's headline strength, this comparison is the wrong one and Payload, Strapi or Sanity is where to look.

Frequently asked questions

Which is better, Contentful or Storyblok?

Storyblok if your team assembles pages, Contentful if it publishes into several markets. That question decides it more reliably than any feature list, because each platform's main strength is the other's deliberate omission rather than a gap either intends to close.

Does Contentful have a visual editor like Storyblok's?

No, and it is a deliberate architectural choice rather than a missing feature. Contentful treats content as something reused across channels, so editors work in structured forms and preview elsewhere. If watching the page while building it is what your team expects, Storyblok is the one built for that.

Which is cheaper?

Storyblok at the entry point, at $99 a month against $300. That can invert as you grow, because Storyblok's published plans cap the number of people who can have access at all, so a large team lands in a quoted tier while Contentful keeps scaling on Spaces. Figures read from both vendors' pricing pages on 8 September 2026.

Which handles multiple languages better?

Contentful, clearly. Locales are a core part of the model with the permissions and workflow built around them, whereas Storyblok's lower plans allow two locales and the tier above allows ten. If localisation is why you are buying, this is the deciding difference.

Can either be self-hosted?

Neither, at any tier. Both are hosted services, so a data residency requirement has to be resolved with the vendor rather than by running the software yourself. The open-source options in this category are Strapi, Payload and Directus, and none of them offers a comparable visual editor.

How did we assess these two?

Partly first-hand and unevenly, which is worth stating. In August 2026 we modelled a content type from scratch in a blank Contentful space, and separately walked Storyblok's demonstration space to see the visual editor working. So we have evidence of Contentful's setup effort and of Storyblok's finished editing experience, and not the reverse of either. Pricing was read from both vendors' own pages on 8 September 2026.

Still torn?

Tell us how you’d use it and we’ll tell you which of the two we’d pick.

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