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 Ghost
We are the Contentful to Ghost 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 Ghost
Key advantages
Ghost is genuinely great if all you want is a fast, clean, no-nonsense blogging machine. It keeps things beautifully simple: a slick Markdown editor, zero clutter, and performance scores so good they’ll make WordPress users cry into their PHP logs. If your plan is “just publish content,” Ghost actually gets out of your way and lets you do that.
The built-in memberships and payments system is also a win. You can slap a paywall on your content, charge people to read your mediocre hot takes, and do it all without duct-taping together 12 plugins. For solo creators, small publications, and anyone who wants a simple writing-first experience, Ghost delivers exactly what it promises and nothing you didn’t ask for.
Lightweight JSON API
Ghost’s API is fast, predictable, and doesn’t make you fight a schema just to fetch a title. It’s perfect for JAMStack setups where you want speed without ceremony. Pull content, ship pages, move on with your life.
Intuitive Markdown editor
If you enjoy writing without 19 toolbars screaming at you, Ghost’s Markdown editor is bliss. Clean, distraction-free, and actually enjoyable to use.
Built-in membership system
Memberships, paywalls, and subscriptions come built in, no plugin Frankenstein required. Hook up Stripe and you’re basically running your own mini-Substack in minutes.
SEO-friendly defaults
Ghost ships with fast performance, clean URLs, structured data, and proper metadata, without needing an SEO plugin the size of a small country. Most sites hit solid scores straight out of the box.
Native subscription support
You don’t need 3 SaaS tools duct-taped together to run a newsletter. Ghost handles email delivery, subscriber lists, and automated posts natively.
Easy theme customization
Themes are simple to tweak thanks to Ghost’s handlebars-based templates. If you know basic HTML/CSS, you can make it look exactly how you want without fighting a visual builder from 2011.
Common questions
Contentful to Ghost migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Contentful to Ghost 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.
How much does Ghost CMS really cost beyond the "free" open source version?
Ghost is free to self-host, but "free" is misleading. You'll need a VPS ($5-$20/month minimum), someone to handle server maintenance, security updates, SSL certificates, and backups. That's either your time or a developer's hourly rate. Realistically, self-hosted Ghost costs $50-$200/month in labour and infrastructure for a small team. Ghost's managed hosting (Ghost Pro) starts at $9/month for the Starter plan (500 members), jumps to $25/month for Creator (1,000 members), and scales to $199/month for the Business tier. Once your membership list grows past a few thousand, costs climb fast. We've seen publishers hit $300+/month on Ghost Pro before questioning whether the platform still made sense for them.
Does Ghost need a developer to maintain it?
If you're self-hosting, yes. Ghost runs on Node.js and requires regular updates, database maintenance (MySQL), and server monitoring. Major version upgrades (Ghost 4 to 5, for example) can break themes and integrations, and someone technical needs to handle those. On Ghost Pro, maintenance is handled for you, but customisation still requires a developer. Custom themes use Handlebars templating, and anything beyond basic styling means editing theme files and redeploying. If your team is purely non-technical and you want to go beyond Ghost's default themes, you'll need developer support on an ongoing basis.
When should you migrate away from Ghost?
Ghost hits its ceiling when you need more than blog posts and newsletters. If you're trying to build landing pages, manage structured content across multiple page types, run an ecommerce store, or handle multi-language content, Ghost wasn't designed for any of that. We've migrated publishers off Ghost when they outgrew the "blog plus newsletter" model and needed a real content platform. The migration itself is painless. Ghost's JSON API makes content extraction simple, and posts map cleanly to markdown. The typical timeline is 4-6 weeks to move content into a headless CMS and rebuild the frontend.
Can Ghost handle a site with more than just a blog?
Barely. Ghost gives you two content types, posts and pages, and that's it. There's no custom content modelling, no relational fields, no structured data beyond tags and authors. You can hack together something with custom routes and internal tags, but it's brittle and hard to maintain. If you need case studies, service pages, team directories, or any structured content beyond articles, you're fighting the platform. Ghost is excellent at what it does. It just doesn't do very much. For sites that need a blog alongside other content types, a headless CMS gives you the flexibility Ghost intentionally leaves out.
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