Case Study
View Case StudyTray.ai
Migrating hundreds of thousands of pages, re-platforming and extending for the leading composable AI integration platform

From Agility CMS to Contentful
Key pain points
The pricing is the elephant in the room. Starting at $1,249/month for the lowest tier, Agility is significantly more expensive than most headless CMS competitors. For smaller agencies or startups, that's a hard sell when platforms like Sanity or Contentful offer free tiers and more gradual scaling. If a client needs template customizations beyond what's available, those changes often require going through Agility's team at additional cost, which can slow things down.
The editor experience, while better than most headless CMS tools, still has rough edges. The content preview has a noticeable delay which frustrates editors used to real-time feedback. Component nesting can feel limited when building complex layouts, and creating unique page designs sometimes requires creating an excessive number of components as workarounds. The initial setup and configuration is also more involved than the marketing suggests, particularly for teams coming from traditional CMS platforms.
The ecosystem and community are noticeably smaller than competitors like Contentful or Sanity. There's less community-generated content, fewer third-party plugins, and Stack Overflow coverage is thin. When you hit an edge case, you're more reliant on the support team than community knowledge. The platform also lacks JSON field support in content models, which limits some advanced use cases that other headless CMS tools handle natively.

Expensive entry point
Starting at $1,249/month with no free tier, it's one of the priciest headless CMS options. Hard to justify for smaller projects or clients with lean budgets.

Slow content preview
The preview function has a noticeable delay before changes appear, making it less immediate compared to tools like Sanity or Storyblok that offer real-time feedback.

Steep initial setup
Despite marketing claims of simplicity, the initial configuration requires significant effort. Advanced features and custom setups demand real technical expertise.

Limited component nesting
Building complex, deeply nested layouts can feel restrictive. You often end up creating numerous individual components as workarounds for unique page designs.

Small community and ecosystem
Far fewer plugins, community resources, and Stack Overflow answers compared to Contentful or Sanity. When you hit edge cases, you're mostly on your own.

Missing JSON field support
No native JSON datatype in content models, which limits flexibility for advanced structured data use cases that other headless CMS platforms handle easily.
Key advantages
With over 42.9% market share and more than 14,000 companies using it, Contentful is one of the most popular headless CMS choices among our customers. And why not?
It's built for structured freedom, which lets you create once and reuse forever from its huge repository. Meaning, no more copy-paste déjà vu or hunting through a maze of components. It's also one of the only CMS with first-party support for A/B testing and personalization. The plugin ecosystem is vast, and it keeps developers happy and content teams nimble with SEO, internationalisation, validation, and more.
And for the editors who like to see it as they build it, the live side-by-side preview makes every change visible in real time.

API-first design
Contentful was built for APIs from day one, which means your content plugs cleanly into apps, websites, and mobile.

Developer-friendly flexibility
Schemas, content models, and references can be tuned however you like. If your stack is anything beyond “cookie-cutter,” Contentful won’t get in your way.

User-friendly interface
Editors enjoy using it. Clean UI, quick search, structured fields, and no “where does this go again?” confusion.

Extensive integration capabilities
Plug in analytics, eCommerce, automation, and translation. Contentful plays nicely with almost anything. And if something isn’t supported yet, you can wire it up yourself without hacking the platform apart.

High scalability
From a tiny blog to a fire-hose of global traffic, Contentful easily scales. You can completely avoid surprise outages, or “please hold while the CMS catches up.”

Cloud-based architecture
You don't have to install, patch, or maintain anything. It’s fast, globally distributed, and always up to date. Your content team can ship from anywhere without a DevOps babysitter.
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