Compare Drupal 8 vs. Contentful

Drupal 8 is a partial modernisation of the legacy Drupal CMS with a few parts of Symfony under the hood. Usability improvements were not the focus and to the end user Drupal 8 is very much like Drupal 7.

Contentful is a pure CaaS (Content as a Service) player. It comes from Berlin, and is currently the global market leader for decoupled hosted content management.

• Based on stable legacy with critical APIs in place
• A large number of ready made modules (for Drupal 7)
• Large mass of developers brings stability for purchasers

• Widely used across industries
• No technical operations needed
• Free tier for hobbyists

• A custom architecture based on Symfony Components, proprietary module structure
• Usability of admin interface not very good and remains tightly coupled to Drupal
• Suspect to security issues due to custom implementation and popularity (see Drupalgeddon)

• Limited customisation capabilities
• Vendor lock in (though export is possible)
• Pricing for large amounts of content