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

From Drupal to Contentstack
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. At the end of the day, 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.
Key advantages
Contentstack is one of the more polished enterprise headless CMS platforms. It has API-first, composable, and loaded with the usual DXP buzzwords. It actually backs some of it up. The workflows are strong, role-based approvals are genuinely helpful for large editorial teams, and the visual builder plus modular blocks give marketers enough power to ship pages without pinging developers every 30 seconds. Its omnichannel delivery, multi-region CDNs, and fast APIs make it a solid fit for global brands with heavy traffic and complex localisation needs.
But this is firmly in enterprise territory. We generally don’t recommend platforms in the “DXP with 47 whitepapers” category, but if you must pick one, Contentstack at least has a smoother developer experience than most. The composable architecture is well thought out, integrations behave predictably, and the SDKs play nicely with modern frameworks like Next.js. If you're a Fortune-500-sized team and want help figuring out whether this is the right bet, or want a modern alternative instead, get in touch.

Enterprise-grade composable architecture
Built for large teams shipping across markets. The stack scales fast, stays stable under heavy traffic, and doesn’t crumble the moment your marketing team schedules a global launch.

Advanced workflow and approvals
Contentstack’s workflow engine handles multi-step approvals, roles, and governance without duct tape. Perfect for teams that need structure instead of Slack chaos.

Multi-region CDN delivery
Your content gets pushed worldwide through edge CDNs, keeping delivery fast even when your customers are nowhere near your servers.

API-first microservices design
Developers get flexibility without wrestling with legacy monolith logic with REST, GraphQL, and webhooks.

Extensive React/Next.js SDKs
Strong developer tooling means faster builds and fewer hours wasted writing boilerplate just to fetch and render content.

MACH-compliant infrastructure
Fully modular, cloud-native, and replaceable in parts. Plays nicely inside modern composable stacks instead of dragging you back to 2010.
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