Case study
View case studySlingshot Bio
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 Joomla to Storyblok
We are the Joomla to Storyblok migration experts
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Challenges with Joomla
Key pain points
Joomla sits in the same bracket as WordPress, except it is somehow even harder to explain to anyone under 40. If your C-suite still thinks “PHP developer” is a personality type, Joomla will make them feel right at home. You will also keep your hosting provider happy, because nothing about this platform is light or low-maintenance.
The dev experience feels stuck in a pre-Composer, pre-type-hints era. Major upgrades are the real horror story. Joomla 3 and 4 both went end of life in October 2025, and moving up a major version tends to break extensions and templates badly enough that you rebuild the site anyway. The community is smaller than WordPress's, the documentation is hit-and-miss, and the admin panel feels like a government portal that accidentally became a CMS. Performance on shared hosting is shaky and the editing workflow is clunky. If you really, truly still want Joomla, we will point you to another agency, or sit down with us for half an hour and we will talk you out of your biggest digital regret.
Steep learning curve
Joomla makes even simple tasks feel like you’re onboarding into a new corporate ERP system. If you’re not already fluent in its quirks, prepare to lose a weekend (or three).
Outdated coding standards
Still clinging to older PHP conventions, missing modern practices, and generally stuck in a time capsule. If you enjoy fighting your own tools, you’ll love it.
Complex migration process
Upgrading versions feels less like an update and more like a full-blown rebuild. Random extensions break, templates combust, and you’re left questioning your career choices.
Extension compatibility issues
Half the ecosystem works… depending on your version, your template, the time of day, and whether Mercury is in retrograde. Reliability is not its strong suit.
Limited template selection
Unless you’re aiming for “government website from 2011,” the design ecosystem doesn’t give you much to work with.
Interface complexity barriers
The admin panel still feels like an escape room puzzle. Everything is technically there, but actually finding or using it is another story.
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
Joomla to Storyblok migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Joomla to Storyblok migration
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.
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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