# Contentful to Drupal migration > How to migrate from Contentful to Drupal, with a side-by-side comparison and FAQs. --- ## Source: Contentful - **Type:** headless - **Official site:** https://www.contentful.com - **Pricing:** https://www.contentful.com/pricing - **Last reviewed:** 2026-08-13 ## Key advantages Contentful is one of the most established headless CMS choices, and we still see plenty of customers land on it after a shortlist. It's built around structured content, so you model fields once and pull them into any front end you like. That means no copy-pasted components scattered across pages. It also has first-party support for A/B testing and personalization through its Studio add-on, which most competitors don't match natively. The app ecosystem covers SEO, translation, validation, and asset management, and editors get live side-by-side preview for content they're working on. If your team has the budget and the developer resources to model content properly, it's a solid pick. ### 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. ### Scales under traffic Contentful's global CDN holds up under heavy load. We've run it on sites pushing millions of monthly requests without needing bespoke infrastructure to handle spikes. ### 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. ## 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. The pattern teams keep hitting is the same: the jump is forced by one limit, not by needing the bigger feature set. The content type cap alone can push you onto 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. ## Target: Drupal - **Type:** hybrid - **Official site:** https://www.drupal.org - **Last reviewed:** 2026-07-28 ## Key advantages We'll give credit where it's due: Drupal is a serious CMS for serious projects. If you're building a government portal, a university website, or a massive multilingual platform that needs to serve content in 24 languages, Drupal is genuinely hard to beat. Its content modeling is incredibly deep, its permissions system is enterprise-grade, and its multilingual capabilities are the best in the open-source CMS world. The European Commission runs on it for a reason. Where Drupal really shines is in complex, structured content architectures. You can model relationships between content types, build granular taxonomies, and set up editorial workflows that would make other CMS platforms weep. If your content team has 50 editors across multiple departments with different access levels, Drupal handles that without breaking a sweat. It's also one of the few traditional CMS platforms that has genuinely embraced decoupled architecture, so you can use it as a headless backend with a modern frontend framework if you want. The community is smaller than WordPress but significantly more technical. Drupal developers tend to be proper engineers, and the ecosystem reflects that. Module quality is generally higher, security patches are taken seriously, and the project has strong governance. If you're in an enterprise or government context where compliance, accessibility, and security auditing matter, Drupal is a well-trodden path. That said, we'd only recommend Drupal for projects that genuinely need its power. If you're building a marketing site or a blog, you're using a sledgehammer to hang a picture frame. Talk to us first, and we'll figure out if Drupal is actually the right fit or if you've been sold on it by someone who bills by the hour. ### Exceptional content modeling Drupal's entity and field system lets you build deeply structured, relational content architectures that most CMS platforms can only dream of. Complex taxonomies, references, and custom types are all first-class citizens. ### Best-in-class multilingual support With over 90 languages available out of the box and proper translation workflows baked in, Drupal is the gold standard for multilingual sites. No plugins, no hacks, just native support that actually works. ### Granular permissions and workflows The access control system is absurdly detailed. You can lock down roles, content types, fields, and editorial workflows with a precision that enterprise clients genuinely need and other platforms struggle to match. ### Viable headless architecture Drupal's JSON:API and GraphQL modules make it a legitimate headless CMS option, letting you pair its deep content backend with a modern frontend framework like Next.js or Nuxt. ### Strong security track record The Drupal security team is proactive and well-organized. Security advisories are clear, patches are timely, and the community takes vulnerabilities seriously, which matters a lot in government and enterprise contexts. ### Open source with no vendor lock-in You own your data, your code, and your hosting. There's no monthly SaaS bill that scales with your content volume, and you can move between hosting providers without rewriting anything. ## Key pain points Here's the uncomfortable truth about Drupal: it's powerful, but it demands a level of investment that most teams underestimate. The learning curve is brutal. We're not talking about a weekend of tutorials; we're talking about months before a developer is truly productive. Drupal 8 and beyond adopted Symfony patterns, which is great for architecture but means you now need a PHP developer who also understands dependency injection, service containers, and YAML configuration files that seem to multiply overnight. Finding and retaining Drupal talent is genuinely difficult, and the developer survey data confirms it: fewer than 10% of the community is under 30, and almost nobody is joining fresh. The upgrade story has been a recurring nightmare. The jump from Drupal 7 to 8 was essentially a full rebuild, and the ongoing churn from PHP and Symfony upstream changes means your team spends a meaningful chunk of time just keeping the lights on. Module compatibility breaks, themes need reworking, and the update process still isn't fully automated. If you're on a lean team, that maintenance burden is going to eat into your feature development time. And then there's the content editor experience. Drupal was built by engineers for engineers, and it shows. The admin interface is functional but far from intuitive, and content teams coming from friendlier platforms consistently struggle with it. You can improve things with contributed modules and custom configuration, but that's more time and money. If you don't have the budget for a dedicated Drupal team or a long-term agency partnership, you're going to have a bad time. ### Punishing learning curve Getting productive in Drupal takes months, not days. The combination of Symfony patterns, YAML configuration, and Drupal-specific conventions means onboarding new developers is slow and expensive. ### Shrinking talent pool The developer community is aging out. Fewer than 10% of Drupal developers are under 30, and new developers aren't joining at a rate that replaces those leaving. Finding affordable Drupal expertise is a real challenge. ### Painful upgrade cycles Between PHP version bumps, Symfony updates, and Drupal core changes, your team will spend significant time on maintenance that has nothing to do with shipping features. The Drupal 7 to 8 migration was so brutal they delayed end-of-life for years. ### Poor content editor experience The admin interface was designed by developers, and it shows. Content teams coming from WordPress, Sanity, or any modern CMS will find the editing experience clunky and unintuitive without significant customization. ### Resource-hungry infrastructure Drupal is not light. It demands proper server resources, caching layers, and database optimization to perform well. Cheap shared hosting won't cut it, and infrastructure costs add up quickly. ### High total cost of ownership It's open source, but don't let that fool you. Between specialized developers, hosting requirements, ongoing maintenance, and the sheer time investment to configure everything, Drupal projects consistently cost more than teams expect. ## Frequently asked questions ### 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. Enterprise is custom pricing with unlimited API calls and an uptime SLA of up to 99.99%. 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. ### Is Contentful being acquired by Salesforce? Yes, though it hasn't closed yet. Salesforce signed a definitive agreement on June 1, 2026, and the deal is expected to close in the third quarter of Salesforce's 2027 fiscal year, which runs from August 1–October 31, 2026, subject to regulatory approval. The price wasn't disclosed, but it's been reported at roughly $1 billion to $1.5 billion, well down on the $3 billion valuation Contentful raised at in 2021. Contentful says the platform, APIs, and support model stay the same for now, with deeper Agentforce integration on the roadmap. If you're making a long-term CMS bet, factor it in. Contentful's direction will increasingly follow Salesforce's enterprise priorities, which tends to mean enterprise pricing and enterprise roadmaps. It's one more reason teams ask us about a usage-based alternative like Sanity before they commit. ### 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. From the contracts we've seen, smaller organisations start around $40,000 a year and full enterprise deals run past $180,000, with renewals climbing year on year. 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.