When evaluating content management solutions, Contentful and Webflow represent two distinct approaches. Contentful functions as a headless CMS that separates content from presentation, while Webflow combines visual website building with CMS and hosting capabilities.
This article compares these two popular CMSs to help you determine which best suits your project requirements.
In brief:
- Contentful is a headless CMS focused on content infrastructure, offering API-first flexibility and multi-channel content delivery, making it ideal for large enterprises with complex digital ecosystems.
- Webflow combines visual website design with CMS functionality, providing an intuitive, no-code platform suited for designers, marketers, and small to medium businesses.
- Choosing between the two depends on priorities: Webflow excels in design control and simplicity, while Contentful offers scalable content management and broader integration capabilities.
Contentful vs Webflow: An Overview
When choosing a platform for your digital content needs, understanding the fundamental differences between Contentful vs Webflow is a must. These tools serve different primary purposes while offering some overlapping functionality.
Contentful
Contentful is a headless CMS launched in 2013 that focuses on content infrastructure rather than traditional website creation. The core features of Contentful include:
- Headless CMS architecture — Separates content management from presentation, providing flexibility across multiple platforms.
- API-first approach — Offers robust APIs for dynamic content management and delivery across various channels.
- Multi-channel content delivery — Enables content reuse across websites, apps, and other digital formats without duplication.
- Structured content authoring — Allows designers to customize content types and organize them hierarchically, enabling content modeling.
- Marketplace for apps — Provides access to third-party and in-house applications that extend platform capabilities.
- Public APIs for development — Encourages custom application creation through publicly available APIs.
Contentful is great for organizations needing to deliver complex digital experiences across multiple channels and touchpoints, particularly for larger enterprises requiring scalable content solutions.
Webflow
Webflow is a comprehensive visual web design tool and hosting platform that combines design capabilities with CMS functionality.
The core features of Webflow include:
- Visual design interface — Offers an intuitive drag-and-drop editor for building websites without coding.
- Webflow Designer — Provides a Photoshop-style editing environment that generates clean, semantic code.
- Integrated CMS — Includes built-in content management capabilities for easy publishing.
- Responsive design tools — Automatically ensures websites adapt to various screen sizes.
- Custom interactions and animations — Enables creation of complex animations through a visual editor without CSS or JavaScript knowledge.
- Hosting and security — Includes SSL encryption, regular backups, and DDoS protection.
- SEO optimization — Facilitates meta tag editing and provides automatic XML sitemaps.
- Figma integration — Converts static Figma designs to Webflow layouts through a dedicated plugin.
- Localization options — Offers tools to build and switch between locales (available as an add-on).
Webflow is ideal for designers, marketers, and small to medium-sized businesses looking for a no-code solution that combines design flexibility with content management capabilities in a single platform.
Usability and Target Audience
When choosing between Contentful vs Webflow, it’s important to understand their primary use cases and target audiences.
Contentful
Contentful offers tremendous flexibility and customization options, but this comes with a steeper learning curve. The platform's interface emphasizes content management over design elements. This makes it straightforward for organizing and managing content across multiple channels.
However, Contentful requires a certain level of technical expertise from its users:
- You'll need to understand API-first development to unlock its full potential.
- Content modeling can be complex and requires understanding specific data structures.
- The platform may feel less intuitive for users who want direct control over design aspects.
Contentful is ideally suited for developers, digital marketers, and content creators who manage content across multiple channels. If you're considering going headless, Contentful offers the flexibility needed for complex digital ecosystems. Understanding the differences between headless vs traditional CMS can also help in this transition.
Webflow
Webflow offers a more visual-first approach to website creation with its intuitive drag-and-drop interface. The platform is designed for accessibility to a wider audience, including individuals and small businesses without extensive technical skills. Its Photoshop-like environment for website creation allows users to craft websites easily through a visual website canvas.
While Webflow is more approachable for non-technical users, it still presents a learning curve:
- The vast array of design options can be overwhelming for complete beginners.
- The platform is visually oriented, making it easier for those with design backgrounds.
- Using Webflow for content management without developer support can be challenging.
Webflow is designed for designers, freelancers, agencies, and small to medium businesses looking for an all-in-one solution to design, build, and launch websites without extensive coding knowledge.
Design Capabilities
When comparing Contentful vs Webflow, there's a stark contrast in their design capabilities that significantly impacts how you'll approach building your digital experiences.
Contentful
Contentful is primarily a headless CMS with no built-in design capabilities. Its focus is exclusively on managing and delivering content rather than designing the visual layout of websites or applications. This design-agnostic approach means:
- You'll need to integrate with external design and development tools.
- Front-end development typically requires frameworks like React, Angular, or Vue.
- The separation of content and presentation offers flexibility but requires additional development resources.
- Design work happens entirely outside of the Contentful ecosystem.
This approach positions Contentful as a content repository rather than a design tool, providing powerful content management but requiring you to handle design separately.
Webflow
Webflow excels in design capabilities with its comprehensive visual editing tools that enable sophisticated website creation without coding.
Its design-focused features include:
- Visual editor: A Photoshop-style editing environment that generates clean, semantic code.
- Build with raw ingredients: Drag in unstyled HTML elements for complete control, use Quick Stack elements for rapid construction, and employ pre-built elements like sliders and background videos.
- Reusable components: Convert elements like navigation bars and footers into components that can be maintained across your site.
- Navigator tool: View and reorganize your page structure for improved accessibility.
- Real content design: Work directly with CMS data and e-commerce products instead of placeholder content.
- Responsive design tools: Preview and adjust layouts for various modern devices with ease.
- Class-based styling: Use a CSS-based class system to apply style changes across multiple elements simultaneously.
Webflow's comprehensive design capabilities make it the clear winner for users who prioritize visual design and want an integrated platform that combines design, content management, and hosting.
CMS Features
When it comes to content management capabilities, Contentful and Webflow offer distinctly different approaches while both providing powerful solutions for digital content.
Contentful
Contentful is a pure headless CMS that completely separates content from presentation. This architecture provides several notable capabilities:
- Flexible content modeling: You can create custom content structures tailored to specific project needs, defining unique content types with specific fields without being restricted by predefined structures. Refer to this content modeling guide for best practices.
- Multi-channel content delivery: Content created in Contentful can be delivered seamlessly across various platforms—websites, mobile apps, IoT devices—through its RESTful and GraphQL APIs.
- Robust API ecosystem: Contentful provides multiple specialized APIs including:
- Content Delivery API for retrieving published content.
- Content Management API for programmatic content creation/updates.
- Content Preview API for unpublished content.
- Images API for image transformations.
- GraphQL Content API for schema generation and content queries.
- Localization support: The platform offers comprehensive support for managing content in multiple languages and regions, making it ideal for global businesses.
- Version control: Contentful meticulously tracks content revisions, allowing for quick review, reversion, and auditing of changes.
- Extensibility: The platform supports numerous third-party integrations and offers webhooks to trigger custom actions when content changes occur.
One important limitation is that Contentful lacks built-in design tools, requiring developers to implement the presentation layer separately using frameworks like React, Angular, or Vue.
Webflow
Webflow takes a fundamentally different approach by combining CMS functionality with visual design capabilities:
- Integrated CMS collections: Webflow CMS is designed for all team members—designers can connect design elements to collections without developer assistance, while developers can interact with content via REST API. Content managers and editors can write, update, and publish directly on the page.
- Visual content management: Unlike Contentful's headless approach, Webflow allows you to design directly with CMS data, creating sites that utilize actual content rather than placeholders.
- Symbols and components: You can turn any element and its child elements into reusable components (buttons, navigation bars, footers, etc.) that can be updated across the entire site simultaneously.
- Interactions and animations: Webflow provides visual tools for creating rich animations and interactions without coding—from parallax effects to progress bars and reveal animations that traditionally required JavaScript expertise.
- Responsive design tools: The platform includes built-in preview and adjustment features for various devices.
While Webflow offers more integrated visual design tools, it doesn't match Contentful's flexibility for delivering content across multiple platforms and applications beyond websites.
Pricing Models and Cost-Effectiveness in Contentful vs Webflow
How do Contentful and Webflow approach pricing? And which one is more cost-effective? Let’s find out.
Contentful
Contentful offers a tiered pricing structure designed to scale with your organization:
- Free Plan: Supports up to 5 users, 4 standard roles, 2 locales, community-based support, and access to basic apps like Tasks and Compose. This plan includes 25 content types, 2 environments, 10,000 records, and 2,000,000 API calls.
- Basic Plan ($300/month): Expands to support up to 20 users, 4 standard roles, 4 locales, technical support, and additional apps including Tasks, Compose, and Launch.
- Premium Plan (custom pricing): Tailored for enterprise needs with support for thousands of users, customizable roles and locales, Customer Success and Professional Services, enhanced governance features (SSO and Workflows), and dedicated infrastructure for security.
For organizations requiring more capacity, Contentful offers additional options like the Medium Spaces package at $350/month.
Contentful's pricing is generally more suitable for mid-size to large companies that need comprehensive content management capabilities and are willing to invest in API flexibility and scalability.
Webflow
Webflow's pricing structure is more complex with three distinct types of plans:
Site Plans:
- Starter: Free (limited features, webflow.io subdomain)
- Basic: $14–18/month
- CMS: $23–29/month
- Business: $39–49/month
Ecommerce Plans:
- Standard: $42/month
- Plus: $84/month
- Advanced: $235/month
Workspace Plans: These are designed for teams working on multiple projects, with options ranging from free to custom pricing for larger teams.
Webflow's more accessible entry points make it attractive for small businesses and independent designers who need user-friendly visual tools without the complexity of traditional CMS platforms.
The stark contrast in pricing is particularly evident when comparing Contentful's Basic plan at $300 monthly against Webflow's Business plan at under $50. This difference can be significant for organizations operating with limited budgets.
Integrations and Compatibility
Understanding how each platform integrates with other tools and systems is important for building a cohesive digital ecosystem.
Contentful
Contentful adopts an API-first approach that makes it exceptionally flexible when connecting to other systems. This approach positions Contentful as the backbone for complex digital experiences across multiple channels.
The platform offers:
- API support for both GraphQL and REST.
- An extensive array of apps within its ecosystem, more comprehensive than what Webflow currently offers.
- AI-powered apps that assist users in generating content and images.
- Strong browser compatibility with support for all modern desktop browsers, including the two most recent versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Edge (though mobile browsers aren't officially supported).
The flexibility of Contentful's API enables you to connect your content to virtually any system or application, including customer engagement tools and marketing analytics software.
Webflow
Webflow operates within a semi-closed ecosystem but still offers a variety of useful integrations designed to extend the platform's capabilities beyond its core design and development tools.
The platform features:
- Direct connections with marketing, analytics, and customer engagement tools.
- A growing App Marketplace with third-party integrations and extensions.
- Free plugin options like Data Goat for Google Analytics 4.
- CMS integration capabilities that allow designers to connect design elements to Collections.
- Comprehensive API access for developers who want to manage content programmatically.
While Webflow's integration ecosystem isn't as extensive as some larger platforms, it covers many common needs with pre-built integrations that can significantly streamline your development process. This makes it easy to incorporate analytics tools to track website performance, integrate CRM systems, or add other functionalities without extensive coding knowledge.
Making the Right Choice
After examining both platforms, it's clear that the decision between Contentful vs Webflow represents a choice between two distinct approaches to digital content management and delivery.
Webflow excels as a design and development platform with an integrated CMS, offering a streamlined workflow for teams that value visual design control. Contentful functions as a dedicated content platform with robust content management capabilities and flexibility for complex content structures.
Choose Webflow if visual design and an all-in-one solution are priorities; select Contentful if sophisticated content modeling and multichannel distribution are at the top of your list.
