Contentful Pricing: A Guide to Plans, Costs & More

Contentful pricing refers to the price tiers for the Contentful CMS (content management system), a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform designed to make it easy to assemble content into digital experiences that can be published to any digital channel. Contentful states that its headless CMS supports nearly 30% of Fortune 500 companies.

Contentful has three pricing plans: Free, Basic, and Premium. Contentful pricing tiers are differentiated by the volume of API calls per month, although each plan also has different features and limitations.

The three pricing plans can be broken down as follows:

Contentful also offers a free trial for its basic plan. It is also important to note that Contentful separately charges for more spaces or the use of its drag-and-drop content assembly tool, Contentful Studio. We’ll discuss all pricing plans in detail in the following sections, but if you’re just learning about Contentful, we suggest you start with our guide: What is Contentful? and why we consider Contentful the best of available headless CMS options.

Which Are The Contentful Pricing Plans?

At a high level, Contentful has three different pricing plans, with the basic plan available only at a monthly rate (no annual discount).

• Free: $0 / month
• Basic: $300 / month
• Premium: Custom / year, with an average of $81,000 / year

To understand the differences between each price tier, we’ll look at the features more closely:

1. Free Plan

The Free Contentful plan is $0, available for developers or marketers to create a single Intro Space (workspace) for a project, including its own content model, content base, and users. The free plan does not allow for overages and imposes rate limits at 1M / month API calls and 0.1TB / month CDN usage. The Intro Space has its own limits, set at 2 environments, 2M API calls / month (bringing the total to 3M) and 0.75 TB / month asset bandwidth / CDN (bringin the total to 0.85 TB).

The Contentful Free plan includes the following features:

• One Intro Space (with limits)
• 2 locales
• Editor tools: rich text editor, image editor, live preview, visual content modeler, Tasks app (to assign tasks), comments on entries, Compose app (quick creation of web pages)
• Developer tools: APIs, webhooks, CLI tool

The Free plan is suitable for developers and marketers working on one simple project.

2. Basic Plan

The Basic Contentful plan is $300 / month, available for teams to build sites, apps and multichannel experiences, with higher limits at 2M API calls / month and 0.75TB / month CDN usage plus an Intro space with the same limitations, but now with the ability to allow for paid overages at a rate of $5 for every 1M overage API calls.

The Contentful Basic Plan includes the following features:

• One Intro Space (overages allowed)
• 4 Locales
• Enhanced editor tools: comments on fields, presence indicator, Launch app (coordinating multi-content releases)
• Standard technical support

The Basic Plan is suitable for medium organizations with teams that want to build a variety of sites, apps and experiences.

3. Premium Plan

The Premium Contentful plan is a custom-priced product, available at an estimated average of over $81,000 contract value or a median price of $33,000. Premium plan customers are exempt from API overages, but may still be subject to asset bandwidth overages at a rate of $65 per 1 TB over the usage limits.

Contentful previously had a fourth price tier, Enterprise, but has since merged that with its Premium plan.

The Contentful Premium Plan includes the following features:

• Configurable spaces
• Dedicated infrastructure, AWS webhooks, advanced caching, multi-region delivery
• Uptime and support SLAs
• Dedicated support and professional services
• Advanced security including SSO, custom roles and permissions, IdP, custom domain, reporting, PCI DSS compliance, ED data residency support
• Workflows app (automate editing workflows)

The Premium Plan is suitable for enterprise customers who want to create secure omnichannel digital experiences at scale.

Regardless of the pricing plan chosen, there are a variety of other fees and costs that you may incur when using Contentful.

Are There Other Contentful Fees and Costs?

Although there are only three different pricing tiers in Contentful, one of which is free, there are a lot of additional pricing considerations that impact your total contract price and your total cost of ownership for your online content.

1. Spaces

Contentful Free and Basic plans come with one Intro space license, with the option to upgrade for Basic plans, while the Premium plan comes with the option for custom spaces. You can add any number of Basic or Large+ spaces at additional (unspecified) fees. How you use a space is up to you, but it’s not uncommon to spin out new spaces for marketing campaigns, for managing products in a PIM system, or for developers to test ideas internally.

2. Contentful Studio

Contentful offers its Contentful Studio as a paid add-on studio. Designed for digital teams, the Studio leverages a drag-and-drop interface, patterns and design tokens to make it faster to create content visually, making it easier to see how content looks in its final form, all without the reliance on developers.

Contentful Studio comes in a range of plans, all of which are custom priced.

3. Ninetailed by Contentful

Ninetailed is a brand new personalization solution (a new app) brought to Contentful through acquisition, bringing composability to digital experiences to help digital teams define audiences, gather insights about audiences and content components, create and test personalized experiences, and gain insight through continuous insights. Ninetailed’s AI works to suggest audiences and content variants. The goal of Ninetailed is to provide more iterative control to digital teams, also without developer input.

Ninetailed has three pricing packers of its own: Start, Core and Scale, all of which are customizable based on your company’s needs.

4. Apps and Integrations

You can browse the Contentful marketplace to add apps or can use the Contentful app framework to create your own connections to third-party services, each of which may come with third-party costs and/or development time. There are nearly 100 apps and integrations listed in the app marketplace.

5. Payment Gateways

Although BigCommerce has no transaction fees across the board for all its plans, you can expect there to be third-party fees associated with payment gateways. BigCommerce builds in rates for credit cards via Paypal powered by Braintree, with prices decreasing per transaction as you go up in tiers, but you can also choose to integrate with additional payment gateways.

6. Front-End Development

As a headless CMS, developers can work with available SDKs to support a variety of front ends, helping optimize the experience for users across channels and devices. Creating custom front-ends can result in additional development, hosting and maintenance costs, but Contenetful does supply some helpful starter templates to help jumpstart Next.js projects (website, eCommerce, blog).

How Can You Choose the Right Contentful Plan?

Although there are only three plans, your choice in Contentful pricing plan (and add-ons) needs to be driven by your current and anticipated business needs. To make a decision, we suggest:

• Estimate your API usage, using an API traffic tool
• Look if there are any months where API usage may increase, incurring overage fees
• Look at how many locales you need to service
• Consider how many people on your team need to work in Contentful
• Look at each plan in the context of your overall information security plan
• Consult with an experienced Contentful partner, who can advise you on plans and add-ons

Next, we’ll examine Contentful in light of alternative CMS options.

How Does Contentful Pricing Compare with Other Platforms?

If you are a price conscious organization, in this section we will break down how Contentful’s pricing plans compare to other popular CMS alternatives—such as WordPress, Strapi, Contentstack and more.

Contentful pricing vs WordPress pricing

WordPress is available both as free, open-source software (known as WordPress.org) and in seven tiers as a hosted CMS (known as WordPress.com). These tiers range from WordPress Free (Free with Ads) to WordPress VIP Enterprise (Starting from $25000/year). WordPress VIP itself has three tier levels: Standard, Enhanced, and Signature.

Contentful offers a free plan and two paid plans (Basic Plan costing $300/month and Premium Plan, which has custom pricing based on your requirements each year) for its Contentful platform. It also has Contentful Studio, a new option that allows marketers to visually create design templates and leverage AI to build repeat digital experiences without engineering help, backed by controls and an Experiences SDK. The pricing for it is custom each year based on your business requirements.

To learn more, read our in-depth comparison of Contentful vs WordPress.

Contentful pricing vs Strapi pricing

Strapi and Contentful are each headless CMS, though Strapi is primarily known for being an open-source CMS, with some limited cloud offerings, while Contentful is a comprehensive SaaS CMS. While Strapi does limit seats quite severely, it does support unlimited locales across all plans.

The Strapi Community edition is free, with costs for self-hosting, with the option as well to self-host the Enterprise edition at a custom price. Strapi’s cloud offerings start at $29 / month for 1 seat for developers, with its common Pro plan starting at $99 / month for 5 seats and its Team plan at $499 / month offering 10 seats, placing all seat limits lower than Contentful’s Basic plan at $300 / month. Read more about Strapi vs Contentful.

Contentful pricing vs Contentstack pricing

Contentstack and Contentful are both headless CMS platforms, but Contentstack includes the option for front-end hosting and a higher number of initial locales (10). Contentstack also has three pricing tiers (but no free plan), with pricing all at custom levels based on entitlements and add-ons.

It is estimated that the lowest Contentstack tier is $995 / month, higher than both the Free and Basic Contentful plans. The average estimated annual price for Contentstack is $120,000 vs the estimated $81,000 for Contentful. For more on comparing these two platforms, read our guide to Contentstack vs Contentful.

Contentful pricing vs Prismic pricing

Prismic is another headless CMS, one optimized for Next.js, Nuxt and SvelteKit websites, with visual editing tools and AI to help quickly generate content. While Prismic also has a free plan and calculates plans based on API calls, it offers 3 additional plans.

Prismic paid tiers start at $180 when paid monthly for Medium ($150 per month when paid annually) compared to $300 per month for Contentful Basic, with similar API calls (Prismic slightly higher) and CDN usage (Prismic lower), but each Prismic plan only covers one “repository,” which is similar to Contentful “spaces,” each with its own full subscription vs the Contentful subscription, which prices spaces independent of pricing plan. Learn more about the differences between Prismic vs Contentful.

Contentful pricing vs Sanity pricing

Sanity is another top headless CMS, one that is offered both as cloud-hosted and self-hosted. Like Contentful, Sanity also has a Studio to simplify content creation, although the Sanity Studio is included in all price tiers (vs. a paid add-on for Contentful) and is not nearly as comprehensive or user-friendly as Contentful’s product.

Sanity prices its tiers based on “seats” or users, which begins at 20 for free and 50 for its next tier, Growth. Sanity’s Growth tier starts at $15 per seat / month vs Contentful Basic, which is $300 / month for 20 users, which works out to $15 per user. Both plans each have overage charges and add-on options, although Sanity supports add-on service and security at the Basic level. Learn more in our Contentful vs Sanity comparison.

Contentful pricing vs Storyblok pricing

Storyblok and Contentful are both headless CMS with free plans and free trial options for their paid plans, although has four plans in total, with the free trial extending to both its Entry and Business plans, with Enterprise being a custom price.

Storyblok calculates its price tiers based on number of users, spaces and traffic, with its Entry tier based upon 500GB of traffic (with overages) for $99 / month when paid monthly or $90.75 / month when paid annually. The Storyblok Business plan, which is most comparable to Contentful’s Basic plan, is available for $849 / month vs Contentful’s $300 / month. Compare the two platforms at Storyblok vs Contentful.

Contentful pricing vs Webflow pricing

Webflow is a traditional CMS compared to Contentful, which is a headless CMS. Webflow lacks a robust marketplace or simple editing tools, making it a very basic option.

Webflow offers two tracks of pricing, one to support single-site prices and another track to support multi-site pricing. Webflow offers a very limited free plan, with a Basic static site starting at $18 / month when billed monthly or $14 / month when billed yearly or a multi-site Workspace plan starting at $19 / month when billed yearly, with limitations on number of pages, CMS items, bandwidth and more. Contentful’s more comprehensive CMS begins at $300 / month. Learn more about Webflow vs Contentful.

Contentful pricing vs Drupal pricing

Drupal is also an open-source CMS, one that does not come with an SaaS offering, requiring the user to bear the full cost for hosting, development, security, and maintenance. Although Drupal is free, if one were to use Drupal as a headless CMS, expect higher development costs.

Learn more about Drupal vs Contentful.

Contentful pricing vs AEM pricing

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a large enterprise CMS for building websites, apps and forms and part digital asset management (DAM) platform, available at custom prices with significant numbers of add-ons to support “screens” for content scheduling, asset management, security, and more.

AEM is estimated to start at $100,000 per year per license, with no free version or trial and additional costs for add-ons, vs the average estimated $81,000 for Contentful’s enterprise plan. Learn more about AEM vs Contentful.

Contentful pricing vs Sitecore pricing

Sitecore is an enterprise digital experience platform with a built-in CMS (XM Cloud), previously available as a perpetual license, but now available with subscription licensing and hosting. Sitecore licenses are based upon visits per year and number of users, with additional costs related to non-production installations. Although the plans are similar, we have no hard data or estimates to compare the pricing of each plan. To compare features, visit Contentful vs Sitecore.

Start, Optimize, or Scale Your Contentful Site with Net Solutions

Contentful is a powerful, easy-to-use CMS, helping small to enterprise level clients create and manage digital experiences at scale. As a proud Contentful partner, Net Solutions has experience helping clients create and optimize their Contentful sites to see higher performance, conversions and sales.

If you would like to learn more about Contentful, are looking for a tailored Contentful strategy, or want to audit your Contentful performance against benchmarks, we can help.