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Roboto converged Slingshot Bio's WordPress and Shopify sites into one headless Shopify build on Next.js and Sanity, instrumented end to end and AI-ready.
From Contentful to Joomla
We are the Contentful to Joomla 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.
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.
Benefits of Joomla
Key advantages
Recommending Joomla in 2026 feels a bit like recommending Internet Explorer. But if you must use it, it does earn a few real points. The multilingual support is built in, so you run a five-language site without a pile of plugins. The access-control system is more detailed than most enterprise platforms, and the modular structure gives developers room to build complex, multi-section sites. If you have a big editorial team that needs genuinely granular permissions, Joomla holds up.
If you are set on Joomla and we cannot talk you out of it, we will point you to an agency that still happily ships heavy old templates. Or sit down with us for half an hour, and we will at least make sure you do not regret the journey.
Native multilingual support
Joomla ships with multilingual features baked in, so you don’t need a plugin graveyard just to run a site in five languages. It handles translations cleanly and is one of the few CMS platforms that gets this right out of the box.
Granular user permission system
Its ACL system is its biggest bragging right. You can lock down roles, workflows, and access rules with a level of control that most CMS platforms still envy.
Custom field capabilities
Joomla gives you solid flexibility with custom fields, letting you shape structured content without hacking together a dozen extensions. It’s powerful enough for complex layouts and multi-section content.
Active developer community
The community isn’t massive, but the people who are there are dedicated, technical, and still shipping useful extensions and documentation. If you're deep in Joomla land, it’s a lifeline.
Strong security foundation
Kept patched, Joomla is stable and the core team takes security seriously, with regular updates. The catch is the "kept patched" part. The 2026 JCE editor exploit hit sites that fell behind, so the upkeep is on you.
Modular architecture flexibility
Its module-based layout system lets you build multi-section portals, dashboards, and content-heavy sites without bending the platform backward. If you know what you're doing, it’s flexible enough to scale.
Common questions
Contentful to Joomla migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Contentful to Joomla 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 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. Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Contentful in June 2026, expected to close later in Salesforce's fiscal year. 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.
Is Joomla free?
Yes. Joomla is open-source software under the GPL, so there is no licence fee and you can download Joomla 6 and self-host it for nothing. The real cost is everything around it. You pay for hosting, for any commercial extensions and templates you bring in, and for the developer time that keeps it patched and upgraded. Treat the price tag as hosting plus extensions plus maintenance, not a SaaS subscription. On a busy site those running costs add up fast, which is the part most "Joomla is free" claims quietly skip.
Can I migrate from Joomla to Sanity?
Yes, and it tends to be cleaner than a Joomla version upgrade. Joomla stores everything in MySQL, so we script the content extraction, map your articles, categories, and custom fields into a Sanity content model, and rebuild the frontend in Next.js. For a typical site of 500 to 2,000 pages, budget 6 to 12 weeks. The extraction takes a few days. The rest goes on the new frontend, replacing whatever your extensions used to do, and mapping 301 redirects so you keep your search rankings. The payoff is no more PHP version juggling and no near-rebuild every time the platform bumps a major version.
What are Joomla's main limitations?
Three things bite. First, major upgrades are brutal. Joomla 3 and 4 both reached end of life in October 2025, so anyone still on them is running unpatched software, and moving up a major version often breaks extensions and templates badly enough to feel like a rebuild. Second, the extension and template ecosystem is small next to WordPress, and maintainers keep drifting away. Third, the developer experience is dated and the admin panel is hard to navigate, so editor productivity suffers. Security upkeep is on you too, as the JCE editor exploit doing the rounds in 2026 reminded plenty of sites.
Joomla vs WordPress vs headless, which should I pick?
For a content site you want to keep cheap and simple, WordPress wins on ecosystem size and the sheer number of developers who know it. Joomla's honest edges are native multilingual and its access-control system, so it makes sense if you genuinely need granular permissions across a big editorial team. But both are PHP monoliths that tie your content to your frontend. If you care about performance, want a modern build with React or Next.js, and plan to push content to a web app, a mobile app, and a few other places at once, go headless. We pair Sanity with Next.js for exactly that, and it is where most teams leaving Joomla end up.
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