What do you like best about Contentful?
Completely open content modelling. Contentful allows to create our own content models and provides a UI to our non-technical colleagues to build entire pages in our website without any engineering interaction. The super-flexible validation options helps us ensure Contentful's data is always up to date.
Contentful's APIs are amazing, they are fast, and they allow to do anything that can be done in the UI, from fetching data to editing content models and even visual settings of the UI.
The Contentful CDN supports fetching assets with dynamic resizing, optimization, and format conversion. That has been very helpful to improve our website's performance.
The permissions are very flexible and granular.
The Compose app is a very good improvement over the traditional Contentful UI, which simplifies a lot the model for content editors: editors can only see top-level entries and all the structure is rendered in a flat structure in one page. The publish button shows an easy UI to publish all children components. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Contentful?
Contentful does not scale very well:
* The UI became painfully slow, probably because of the size of our space
* The contentful environments are extremely limited. We can only create copies of another environment, and after that there's no way to merge the content back. In the end, content editors don't use that feature and end up creating a lot of drafts/updated entries that never get published.
* Linking to the issue above, there's no easy way to undo changes. We have to open a separate Compare popup. After undoing changes the history disappears and there's no way to go back to where you were.
* Our space is full of dead and orphan entries. There is no way to identify these in the Contentful UI, so we ended up building a lot of tooling for that ourselves.
* The Contentful UI is very complex for content editors (nesting in many levels, hard to publish a page and all children). They created the Compose app, which solves that problem, but it's a separate app and there's no way to enforce editors to use it so I've found it very hard to encourage people to use it, especially because everybody lands in the traditional UI after login.
I think the Contentful team is making great steps towards improving these issues. An example is the Studio app, which is a much better UI for editors. However, it will be released as a paid app. It feels to me that basic features like that should not be paid extra. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.