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From Drupal to Storyblok
We are the Drupal to Storyblok migration experts
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Challenges with Drupal
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.
Benefits of Storyblok
Key advantages
If you've ever tried explaining "headless" to a content team and watched their eyes glaze over, Storyblok is your peace offering. The visual editor is genuinely good: editors see changes on the real page preview instead of filling out abstract field forms.
That's the upside. The downside is that the API lacks a few basics, like fetching child or sibling pages directly, and the tier jumps get steep once you need more locales or seats. If Storyblok is your choice, we can make it work, we know where the rough edges are and how to set it up cleanly.
Visual editing capabilities
Yes, you read that right, you can do real-time, on-page editing. Make a change, see it instantly, no staging limbo, which means you can stop “guess and publish.”
Component-based approach
You can build a component once and use it everywhere. You can also update a button or banner in one place, and the entire site fixes itself.
Efficient content structuring
Your content stays clean, organised, reusable, and not scattered across 40 pages. Developers work with structured data, editors drag-and-drop pieces like Lego. Everyone gets to stay sane.
Strong multi-language support
One CMS, many languages, no chaos. Localise content without duplicate pages or messy spreadsheet exports.
Collaborative environment
Writers, designers, and editors can all jump in at the same time without breaking each other’s work. Add comments and approvals. View version histories for teamwork without the headache.
Highly customisable
If your design system can imagine it, you can use Storyblok to model it. There are custom fields, workflows, and logics that can bend to your stack rather than the other way around.
Common questions
Drupal to Storyblok migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Drupal to Storyblok migration
How do I migrate a website from Drupal?
We export your content, taxonomy, user data, and media from Drupal's database, then restructure everything for the target platform. Most Drupal migrations we handle move to Sanity or a headless setup with Next.js. The timeline depends on how many content types, custom modules, and Views you're running. A typical mid-size site takes 4-8 weeks. The hardest part is usually untangling custom module logic and rebuilding it in a modern stack.
What are the best Drupal alternatives?
For enterprise projects that need structured content and granular permissions, Sanity is our top recommendation. It matches Drupal's content modelling depth without the PHP overhead or the shrinking talent pool. For simpler sites that were on Drupal because someone chose it 10 years ago, WordPress or even Webflow might be enough. The right alternative depends on whether you actually need Drupal's power or just inherited it.
How do I migrate from Drupal 7 to a modern CMS?
Drupal 7 reached end-of-life, so this is urgent for many teams. Rather than migrating to Drupal 10 (which is essentially a rebuild anyway), most of our clients choose to move to a headless CMS instead. We extract your Drupal 7 content using Drush and custom migration scripts, then map it to the new platform's schema. The frontend gets rebuilt in Next.js or a similar framework. It's a bigger project than a version upgrade, but you end up with a system that's actually maintainable long-term.
How much does a Drupal migration cost?
It varies wildly based on content volume, custom modules, and frontend complexity. A small Drupal site with 500 pages might cost $15,000-$30,000 to migrate. Enterprise Drupal sites with thousands of pages, custom workflows, and multilingual content can run $50,000-$150,000+. The honest truth is that Drupal migrations are expensive because the platform is complex. But the ongoing savings from reduced hosting costs, easier maintenance, and cheaper developer rates usually justify the investment within 12-18 months.
Is Drupal still worth using in 2026?
Only if your project genuinely needs what Drupal offers, meaning deep content modelling, granular permissions, and multilingual support at scale. For government and large institutional sites, it still makes sense. For everything else, the shrinking developer pool, high maintenance costs, and painful upgrade cycles make it hard to justify. We've moved many teams off Drupal who were paying $200+/hour for specialized developers when a modern headless setup would have served them better at a fraction of the ongoing cost.
What are the best Storyblok alternatives?
Sanity is the alternative we recommend most often. It offers deeper content modelling, real-time collaboration, and a pricing model that doesn't spike when you add features. Contentful is another option if you want a mature ecosystem, though it's pricier. For teams that loved Storyblok's visual editor, Sanity's Presentation tool now provides a similar live preview experience. We've migrated several Storyblok projects to Sanity, and the feedback from both editors and developers has been positive.
How much does Storyblok cost?
Storyblok's Starter plan is $0 with 1 seat, 2 locales, 100K API requests, and 100GB of traffic. Growth is $99/month for 5 seats, 2 locales, 1M API requests, and 400GB. Growth Plus is $349/month for 15 seats, 10 locales, 4M API requests, and 1TB. Add-ons run $15/month per extra seat, $20/month per extra locale, $10 per extra 1M requests, and $75 per extra 250GB. Premium and Elite are custom-priced and gate SSO, custom roles, and the GraphQL API. The catch most teams hit is the gap between tiers, because there's no gradual scaling. A Growth account that runs over on traffic or locales jumps straight to $349/month, a 3.5x increase for what's often a small overage.
Does Storyblok have a visual editor?
Yes, and it's one of the best in the headless CMS space. You see real-time changes as you edit, directly on your site preview. It's the main reason many teams pick Storyblok. That said, Sanity now offers a comparable experience through its Presentation tool, which gives you live visual editing with more flexibility in content modelling. If the visual editor is your primary reason for choosing Storyblok, it's worth comparing both before committing.
Can I migrate from Storyblok to another CMS?
Yes. We export your stories, components, and assets through Storyblok's API, then restructure everything for the target platform. Storyblok's component-based content model actually maps well to Sanity's block system. Most migrations take 3-5 weeks. The main challenge is handling Storyblok's nested component structure and translating field-level localization to the new platform's approach. We keep your site running on Storyblok throughout, so there's zero downtime during the switch.
Is Storyblok good for large websites?
It works for mid-size sites but starts to strain at enterprise scale. The API slows when fetching deeply nested content, and the tier pricing is the bigger problem. Teams with multiple locales and heavy traffic land on Growth Plus ($349/month) or get pushed toward custom-priced Premium sooner than expected, since custom roles and SSO only exist on enterprise plans. We've seen the public complaints about Storyblok hiking existing customers' bills when they cross a usage or locale limit, and that risk grows with site size. For large projects we usually recommend Sanity instead. GROQ handles complex content relationships well, and the pricing scales in steps you can actually predict.
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