Case Study
View Case StudyTray.ai
Migrating hundreds of thousands of pages, re-platforming and extending for the leading composable AI integration platform
From Contentful to Builder.io
We are the Contentful to Builder.io migration experts
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Challenges with Contentful
Key pain points
Contentful is one of those platforms where the bill can catch you off guard. The free tier caps you at 25 content types and 100K API calls, and a single marketing site can blow past both without warning. The next step up is $300 a month, and enterprise pricing often lands in the $50K to $100K+ a year range.
Users on Reddit regularly flag the same thing: tier jumps are forced by hitting one limit, not by needing the bigger feature set. Content model caps alone can push you into a higher plan you don't otherwise need.
The other issue is that Contentful has strong opinions about how content should be modelled, and those opinions aren't always documented. Projects built without that knowledge tend to accumulate performance problems and awkward workarounds. Before writing Contentful off, speak to us, a lot of the pain we see is implementation, not platform.
Pricing climbs fast
Contentful isn't a cheap CMS. Once you pass the free tier's content type or API call limit, you're on the $300/month Lite plan, and enterprise pricing often starts at $50K+ a year.
Complex for non-technical users
Marketers and editors may need a small learning curve before they feel at home. It’s powerful but not always plug-and-play.
Integration dependency
A lot of magic happens through third-party tools. Great for flexibility, but it does mean extra setup instead of getting everything out-of-the-box.
Limited native features
Contentful keeps the core CMS clean and minimal, but that also means more building and configuring to get advanced functionality.
Learning curve for new teams
If your team is moving from a traditional CMS, expect some onboarding time. Structured content is amazing but new for many.
Requires careful management
Because it’s so flexible, projects need good governance. Without it, content models can get messy and harder to maintain over time.
Benefits of Builder.io
Key advantages
Builder.io occupies a unique spot in the headless CMS landscape. It is not really a traditional headless CMS in the way that Sanity or Contentful are. It is more of a visual page builder with headless capabilities bolted on. That distinction matters because if your marketing team needs to ship landing pages fast without filing Jira tickets, Builder.io genuinely delivers on that promise. The drag-and-drop editor is solid, and the ability to register your own React components so that non-developers can compose pages from your actual design system is a legitimately powerful idea.
Where Builder.io really shines is in bridging the gap between developers and marketing teams. You build the components, register them with Builder, and then hand the keys over. Marketers can assemble pages, run A/B tests, and publish without touching code. For agencies like ours, this means fewer "can you just move this banner" tickets and more time spent on actual engineering work.
The framework support is also genuinely broad. Next.js, React, Angular, Vue, Svelte, Qwik, SolidJS, and React Native all have SDKs. If you are running a modern JavaScript stack, Builder.io probably has an integration for it. The AI features they have been shipping are interesting too, though still early days in terms of real production reliability.
Visual drag-and-drop editor
The visual editor lets non-technical users build and edit pages using your actual codebase components. It is one of the better implementations of visual editing in the headless space.
Custom component registration
Developers can register their own React, Vue, or Angular components so editors drag and drop real design system pieces rather than generic blocks.
A/B testing and personalisation built in
Native experimentation tools let marketing teams run split tests and personalise content without needing a separate optimisation platform.
Broad framework support
SDKs for Next.js, React, Angular, Vue, Svelte, Qwik, SolidJS, and React Native mean you are not locked into a single frontend framework.
Marketing team autonomy
Content and marketing teams can ship landing pages, campaign pages, and promotions independently, which frees up developer time for product work.
Structured and visual content modes
Builder.io supports both structured data models for developer-driven content and visual page building for marketing-driven content, giving teams flexibility in how they work.
Common questions
Contentful to Builder.io migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Contentful to Builder.io migration
How much does Contentful cost?
Contentful has a Free tier with 10 users, 100K API calls per month, 25 content types, and 10,000 records. The Lite plan is $300/month for 20 users, 1M API calls, and 100GB CDN bandwidth. Premium is custom pricing with unlimited API calls and a 99.99% uptime SLA. We've seen teams hit the free tier's API ceiling or content type cap fast, and the jump to Lite is often forced by a single limit rather than a feature need.
What are some alternatives to Contentful?
Sanity is the alternative we recommend most. It gives you real-time collaboration, a customizable studio, and pay-as-you-go pricing that doesn't punish you for scaling. Storyblok is worth considering if your editors want a visual builder. We've migrated teams off Contentful to both, and Sanity consistently gets the best feedback from developers and content editors alike.
How does Contentful compare to Sanity on pricing?
Contentful charges $300/month for its Lite plan with hard caps on API calls, seats, and content types. Sanity's pricing is usage-based, starting free and scaling with actual consumption. For most mid-size projects, Sanity ends up significantly cheaper. The real difference is that Sanity doesn't gate core features behind premium tiers the way Contentful does with roles, SSO, and content modelling limits.
Can I migrate from Contentful to Sanity?
Yes. We've migrated dozens of Contentful projects to Sanity. The structured content model in Contentful maps well to Sanity's schema, so most migrations are straightforward. Content, assets, references, and localized fields all transfer. Our typical migration takes 2-4 weeks depending on the number of content types and the complexity of your references. We handle frontend rewiring too if you're on Next.js or a similar framework.
Is Contentful good for large enterprise websites?
It can be, but the costs get steep. Enterprise plans are custom-priced and often land in the $50,000-$100,000+ per year range. If you have deep pockets and your team already knows the platform, it works. If you're evaluating from scratch, we'd push you toward Sanity for enterprise use. You get equivalent API performance, better real-time editing, and a pricing model that doesn't penalize growth.
Can you migrate from Builder.io without losing your page designs?
Yes, but it takes work. Builder.io's visual editor stores page compositions as JSON that references your registered components. Those component registrations are tightly coupled to Builder's SDK, so you can't just export and import elsewhere. What you can preserve is the design itself. We extract the page structures, map them to equivalent components in the new system, and rebuild the composition layer. The visual output stays the same. Typical timeline is 6-10 weeks depending on how many page types and custom components are involved. The biggest time sink is usually recreating A/B test variants and personalisation rules that lived inside Builder's platform.
What does Builder.io actually cost?
Builder.io's free tier gives you 1 user and basic features, which is enough to evaluate but not to run a real project. The Growth plan starts at $49/month and includes more seats and content types. Beyond that, pricing gets opaque. Teams needing roles, scheduling, and higher API limits are pushed toward custom Enterprise plans that typically start in the $500-$1,000/month range. We've heard from freelancers and small agencies who were caught off guard by charges after exceeding limits on the Growth plan. Builder.io also charges per "impression" on higher tiers, which means your costs scale with traffic in ways that aren't always predictable.
How does Builder.io compare to a traditional headless CMS?
Builder.io is a visual page builder first and a CMS second. That distinction matters. If your primary goal is letting marketing teams build landing pages without developer involvement, Builder.io does that well. If you need structured content modelling, editorial workflows, multi-language support, or content that powers more than just web pages, a traditional headless CMS is a better fit. Builder.io's SDK embeds deeply into your frontend code, which creates vendor lock-in that most headless CMS platforms avoid. We typically recommend Builder.io only when the use case is narrow: high-volume landing page creation for marketing teams. For everything else, a headless CMS with a proper content model gives you more flexibility long-term.
What's the main risk of building on Builder.io?
Vendor lock-in. Builder.io's SDKs are woven into your component rendering layer, which means migrating away requires rebuilding how your pages are composed and rendered. That's not a content migration, it's an architecture migration. With a typical headless CMS, your content is accessible through standard APIs and your frontend is independent. With Builder.io, the two are intertwined. We've worked with teams who spent months extracting themselves from Builder.io because every page template needed to be recreated outside the platform. If you're evaluating Builder.io, go in with eyes open about the exit cost.
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