Contentful vs Directus

Compare Contentful and Directus for your content needs. Find out what actual users are saying about each product and which one is best suited for you!

Contentful
Contentful
Contentful is a leading headless content management platform that allows users to create, manage, and distribute content across various platforms seamlessly, providing complete freedom in designing their content models.
Directus
Directus
Directus is a headless CMS and backend platform for managing complex content structures and digital assets, offering customizable solutions for developers and empowering teams to build faster.

What Users Say

See what users who have used Contentful and Directus have to say about their overall experience with the product.

Contentful's Key Strengths

Read what users love about Contentful.

Directus's Key Strengths

Read what users love about Directus.

Contentful's Key Issues

Read what issues users have with Contentful.

Directus's Key Issues

Read what issues users have with Directus.

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What Marketers & Content Creators Say

Hear from the users who uses Contentful and Directus daily about their experience with the editors.

Contentful's Editorial Experience Highlights

What marketers love about Contentful's editor.

Directus's Editorial Experience Highlights

What marketers love about Directus's editor.

Contentful's Editorial Experience Issues

What marketers dislike about Contentful's editor.

Directus's Editorial Experience Issues

What marketers dislike about Directus's editor.

Mobile Editing

Find out how the platforms handle the mobile-first experience for the new generation of workforce on the move.

Contentful:
Not Suitable for Mobile

Contentful does not explicitly support mobile-first content creation for marketers; mainly desktop-centric.

"Contentful is mainly an API-based headless CMS, emphasizing structured content delivery rather than a mobile-first editing experience."
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"Contentful focuses on optimizing web performance metrics but does not emphasize mobile content creation."
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"No significant discussions regarding mobile-first content creation features for Contentful."
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Directus:
Mobile-First Experience

Directus supports mobile content creation via its mobile app and user-friendly interface.

"Layouts provide intuitive displays to view and interact with Items in a Collection."
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"Explore the features and benefits of the Directus Mobile App for seamless content management on-the-go."
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"The Directus Studio App serves as a comprehensive no-code interface for managing and presenting data, content, and assets."
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"Directus stands out as a fully open-source platform, designed to be modular and extensible."
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Automatic Content Linking

Find out if the platform supports automatic linking of related content to help user discover more content without additional manual effort from the marketer. This automatically create topical clusters of content and is essential for SEO.

Contentful:
AI-Powered Related Content

Contentful supports automatic related blog linking with Content Source Maps, linking content fields automatically.

"With Content Source Maps, this setup is now fully automated. Our APIs now return source maps for fields that link directly to the corresponding field in Contentful."
Source
Directus:
No Automatic Content Linking

Directus does not support automatic related blog linking; only manual relationships are available.

"Directus provides a way to manually link related content but does not have AI-driven auto-linking."
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"Directus emphasizes creating and managing relationships manually for SEO purposes."
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"Discussion highlights the lack of built-in automatic internal linking features."
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"Directus focuses more on policies and access control rather than auto-linking features."
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Automatic CTA Linking

Find out if the platform supports automatic display of Call-to-Actions using AI to help users take actions that are relevant to the content they are reading.

Contentful:
No Automatic CTA Linking

Contentful does not support automatic call-to-action linking features.

"Links are a powerful way to model relationships between content."
Source
Directus:
No Automatic CTA Linking

Directus does not support automatic linking of CTAs to content through AI features.

"Directus offers a highly flexible API and content management system but lacks a specific feature for automatic CTA linking."
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"While Directus has released AI extensions, they do not include features for automatic CTA linking."
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"Traditional CMS architectures, including Directus, are not designed to support AI-driven content strategies like automatic CTA linking."
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Comments

Find out if the platform supports comments from your users to improve user engagement. This is often a great way to collect feedback and user emails.

Contentful:
No Comments Supported

While Contentful has a comments feature, it's primarily for internal collaboration. It does not support external visitor commenting out of the box.

"The Comments tab allows you to communicate with collaborators in your space by creating comments, replying, and tagging members."
Source
"Entry comments. Users can add comments to an entry. This allows for teams to collaborate and have conversations."
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"Contentful's flexible content modeling goes far beyond blog posts. Here’s how you can leverage Contentful and Netlify to create a nested commenting system."
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Directus:
Comments Supported

Directus supports commenting directly on items for team collaboration with mentions and editing options.

"Encourage team collaboration directly within your content for things like approval processes and feedback."
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"Comments are a collaboration tool and can be left on items from the sidebar."
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"To create a comment, follow the steps: Navigate to the Content Module, select the desired Collection, select the desired Item and submit your comment."
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Multi-tenancy

Find out if the platform supports managing multiple clients or projects within a single account. This is useful for agencies, multi-client or multi-project scenarios.

Contentful:
Multi-tenancy Supported

Contentful supports multi-tenancy, allowing users to manage multiple client accounts from a single interface.

"Multi-tenancy architecture means that all our customers and applications share a single, common infrastructure and code base that is centrally maintained by us."
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"Our solution? A single, unified content platform."
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"Contentful's multi-tenancy concept is extensible on all levels and continuously delivers new features."
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Directus:
Multi-tenancy Supported

Directus supports multi-tenancy through project and role scoping, allowing for isolated environments for different clients.

"The Multi-tenant SaaS starter kit is designed to streamline the backend infrastructure for Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. The user data is setup as a simple project and task as an example only, but you can build whatever you desire."
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"Directus supports multi-tenant architectures, ensuring that each Professional Project is isolated within its own container. This approach guarantees dedicated minimum resources."
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"Directus has multi-tenancy in that you can create different projects that each have their own database. Within each project you have the ability to create different roles to manage specific access."
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"Multitenancy is an architecture that allows multiple tenants (e.g., customers) to be managed by the platform. There are two main ways to achieve multitenancy: project scoping and role scoping."
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What Developers Say

Hear from developers who've integrated and built on Contentful and Directus about their experiences.

Ease of Integrating Contentful:
Medium
Contentful integration is manageable but involves a learning curve and can become costly for larger projects.
Ease of Integrating Directus:
Medium
Integration is generally straightforward but requires careful configuration and may involve technical complexities.

Contentful's DX Highlights

What developers love about building with Contentful.

Directus's DX Highlights

What developers love about building with Directus.

Contentful's DX Issues

What developers dislike about building with Contentful.

Directus's DX Issues

What developers dislike about building with Directus.

Content Modelling

Find out how developers model and manage their content with the platform with key highlights and limitations.

Contentful:
Customisable Content Types

Contentful supports content modeling with flexible structure and customizable content types, including various field types and validations.

"A solid content model is the foundation of every great digital project. Your model is the bones of your project; it tells our APIs what kind of content to send to your end application."
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"You can set up your content model with the following tools: Visual modeler — Visually build your content model, view the content types and references."
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"This guide will lay out a set of best practices that are considered good content modeling patterns."
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"Currently, editor interfaces are fully supported in templates. These include all configurations for content type fields."
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Directus:
Customisable Content Types

Directus provides robust content modelling capabilities, including custom collections, fields, and relationships.

"The Directus data studio enables no-code configuration and management for any SQL database, with no arbitrary restrictions on how you build your data model."
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"Directus collections help you manage your data. Create custom collections, define fields, configure relationships, and leverage features like content versioning."
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"Directus supports creating collections, defining fields, and configuring relationships, forming a comprehensive content model."
Source

Custom React Components

Find out if the platform supports custom React components to go beyond the basic HTML components for content.

Contentful:
Custom React Components Supported

Contentful supports custom React components, allowing developers to enhance content editing with interactive components.

"To use custom components in Experiences, you need to register them."
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"You can import your own design system components into Experiences to create on-brand digital experiences."
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"The Forma 36 Design System and React component library provides a comprehensive collection of UI components."
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Directus:
Limited Customization

Directus allows for integration with React using its SDK, but fully custom React components are not natively supported.

"Integrating Directus with React applications provides a powerful combination for building dynamic and real-time web applications."
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"Directus provides a set of reusable UI components that can be used when building extensions."
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"Custom Modules are completely open-ended components that allow you to create new experiences within the Directus platform."
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"Custom Interfaces allow you to create new ways of viewing or interacting with field data on the Item Detail page."
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Full Text Search

Find out if the platform supports full text search across multiple fields to help users find content quickly.

Contentful:
Full Text Search Supported

Contentful supports full-text search across multiple fields, allowing users to search content effectively.

"In Contentful, full-text search terms are left anchored...full-text search is built into the standard entry listing endpoint."
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"Contentful's full-text search capabilities allow searching across all fields."
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"Contentful does include some intriguing full-text search capabilities out-of-the-box that searches across all fields."
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Directus:
Full Text Search Supported

Directus supports full text search across multiple fields with built-in indexing for enhanced performance.

"Full text search is a powerful feature in Directus that allows users to perform comprehensive searches across their data collections."
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"Directus offers robust search capabilities that allow users to quickly find the data they need within their collections."
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"Directus Features: Full Text Search, Role-Based Permissions, Content Management."
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Starter Kits

Discover starter kits and templates to help you get started with the platform.

Contentful:
Available

Contentful offers various starter templates including Next.js and Gatsby options.

(Expand section to see a list of Contentful templates and starter kits.)

Directus:
Available

Directus offers community-maintained templates and premium starter kits for projects.

(Expand section to see a list of Directus templates and starter kits.)

Pricing & Plans

Compare the prices of Contentful and Directus.

Contentful's Pricing
Free
$0 / forever
- 5 users
- 2 locales
- 1M API calls/month
- Community support
- 1 Intro Space
- Structured content
- Developer tools
Lite
$300 / month
- 20 users
- 4 locales
- 2M API calls/month
- 0.75TB/month CDN
- Technical support
- Extended editorial tools
- Optional Medium Spaces
Premium
$81000 / year
- Custom users
- Unlimited API calls
- Custom CDN
- Dedicated support
- Enhanced governance and security
- Contentful Studio compatibility
Directus's Pricing
Starter
$15 / month
- 1 Studio User Included
- 5,000 DB Entries
- 50,000 API requests
Professional
$99 / month
- 5 Studio Users Included
- 75,000 DB Entries
- 250,000 API requests
Business
$499 / month
- 10 Studio Users included
- 250,000 DB entries
- 1,000,000 API requests
- SSO included
- Support add-on
Enterprise
$0 / custom
- Custom Studio Users
- Custom DB Entries
- Custom API Requests
- Multiple Environments
- Premium Support and SLAs

Compare with other technologies

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