Contentful vs Strapi

Where Strapi wins

Languages stop being a billing event

This is the whole reason most people are reading this page. Contentful allows two locales on the free plan and three on Lite at $300 a month, so a third publishing language is a $3,600 a year decision. Strapi's own documentation marks internationalization as a free feature and says administrators can add as many locales as they want. Nothing in any Strapi plan counts locales. If your roadmap says "we are launching in German and Spanish next quarter", the two products give you very different answers to the same sentence.

Roles and seats are not rationed

Contentful's free plan gives you two roles and Lite gives you three. Wanting distinct permissions for translators, a legal reviewer and a marketing editor is an ordinary editorial requirement that triggers an upgrade well before headcount does. Strapi's Community edition has no seat limit at all and role-based access control is available on every tier, so the org chart stops being a pricing input.

The content model is yours, in your database

Strapi runs on your Postgres, MySQL or SQLite instance, and the content types are files in your repository. That means schema changes go through code review and deploy like any other change, backups are your normal database backups, and there is no export step if you ever want the data somewhere else. Contentful's 25 content type cap on the free plan and 1,000 per environment ceiling simply have no equivalent here.

No request meter

Contentful free allows 100,000 API calls a month and 55 delivery requests per second, against 78 per second on paid plans. A large static site rebuild or a bulk import can bump into that. A self-hosted Strapi answers as fast as the machine you put it on, and the only ceiling is the one you provisioned.

Where Contentful still wins

Strapi has not rebuilt the operational half of the product, and it does not pretend to. Contentful gives you a global CDN, an uptime SLA of up to 99.99 percent on Enterprise, 24 hour support and a named customer success manager. With Strapi you are the CDN decision, the uptime and the on-call rotation. For a five-person marketing team with no platform engineer, that trade is often worse than the invoice they were trying to escape.

The governance comparison also runs the other way, and it is worth being precise about it. Single sign-on is an add-on even on Strapi's $45 Growth plan, and review workflows, audit logs and 365-day content history are Enterprise only with no published price. If SSO and an audit trail are compliance requirements rather than nice-to-haves, Strapi is not automatically the cheaper end state; you have just moved from a locale meter to a governance paywall. And the licence has conditions people skip: anything under the ee/ directory ships under a commercial licence in the same repository, and the MIT grant in Strapi's LICENSE file is written to apply only if you avoid that directory and have no registered Strapi Cloud account.

There is also a genuine pricing case for staying. Contentful does not bill by request volume the way several alternatives do, so a high-traffic, content-heavy site that publishes in one or two languages can be the cheapest possible customer on the free plan, and $0 with a CDN and an SLA is not a number a self-hosted stack beats.

Migrating Contentful to Strapi

The path most teams take:

1. Inventory first. Run contentful-export to get entries, assets and content types out as JSON. Then list what has no equivalent: roles and permissions, scheduled publishing, webhook configuration and every App Framework extension all have to be rebuilt rather than moved.
2. Rebuild the model, then write the importer. There is no official Contentful importer for Strapi, so you write a script that walks the exported JSON and posts to Strapi's Content API. The work is in the mapping, not the transfer: Contentful's rich text is a structured JSON document, and references, assets and locale variants all need explicit handling.
3. Run both for one publishing cycle. Point a staging front end at Strapi while production still reads Contentful, and reconcile the two outputs page by page. Expect to pay for both for a month; that overlap is the honest cost of the migration.
4. What does not move. Version history and the publishing audit trail stay behind. Contentful keeps entry versions server-side and there is no export for them, so if you need that history for compliance, either keep a read-only Contentful space or accept that the record starts fresh on the day you cut over.