
Contentful, a Stripe for content management, raises $28M led by General Catalyst - realityking
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/04/contentful-a-stripe-for-content-management-raises-28m-led-by-general-catalyst/
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sashthebash
Contentful was born several years ago (back then as StorageRoom) through Show
HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616041)

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thogenhaven
We almost went with contentful when we chose a headless cms. But their pricing
for large multilingual sites was through the roof.

Directus is an open source alternative that has the same features for free. So
we wet with this. Very happy with this CMS.

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gregwebs
yeah, pricing did not make sense for us. We went with Kentico Cloud (hosted,
but it is also open source that you can deploy).

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Sujan
> but it is also open source that you can deploy

Do you have a link for that? I couldn't find anything about self hosting.

(But I did check it out, and it definitely is quite capable!)

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Sujan
I asked Kentico Cloud support, this was their reply.

> Kentico Cloud is a SaaS model, so you need to host the application that
> consumes data from it. I'm not aware of an option where you would host the
> content management application.

So no self hosted option.

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aaronpk
What does "a Stripe for content management" mean?

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Cyberdog
Seriously. From the article:

> When many people today think of cloud-based content management systems
> (CMS), the names that likely come to mind are WordPress (which we use), or
> Medium (which people leaving their companies like to use), or Tumblr (which
> is owned by the same company that owns TC).

So it's a blog hosting service?

> Contentful can provide some of the same functionalities as these but it’s
> aimed at a different end: CEO and co-founder Sascha Konietzke describes it
> as a “headless” CMS, not unlike Stripe’s relationship to payments: there is
> no front end for ingesting and formatting content, or design end for
> producing the final look of that content for the reader. Instead, there are
> a set of APIs that developers of the media product in question can use to
> control both of those aspects more flexibly.

So it's a specialized database?

> “Existing CMSs are like the MS-DOS of the internet,” Konietzke said. “No one
> really likes to use them, similar to older payment systems before Stripe.”

…wat wow

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0xCMP
I guess I thought of all this way later than everyone else. I only just
recently wanted to start building a headless CMS and now it seems a ton of
really well done ones are coming out. Good to know I can focus on what I
actually wanted the CMS for!

Another one that came out recently was sanity.io.

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CryoLogic
What a terribly confusing analogy.

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misterbowfinger
Can someone provide a pros/cons of Contentful? I don't get what's so hard
about building an API around content. The frontend I get, but the backend
seems relatively simple, and the complexities are usually brand-specific

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atonse
It's not the API. It's that too many applications have Admin UI boilerplate
interfaces for managing a lot of their content. And too much time is wasted in
building those UIs. I know, I've done it.

The way I see this is, it allows you to completely skip building the content
management portion of Admin UIs, and present you with pure content as data, so
you have full flexibility over how your website layout looks.

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Sujan
Contentful (and similar services) also _can_ invest lots of time to get a good
looking and super usable admin interface that can tackle difficult problems
well.

Examples: Sorting of ordered many to many relations, WYSIWYG or markdown
editors, workflows, versioning, concurrent editing of items - all the stuff
that you don't need for an MVP but if you have hundreds of editors and non dev
people working on the actual content.

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devdad
So it's a REST API with a webapp I can whitelabel? Why would I pay for this -
what is the problem it solves?

If it's anywhere near as brilliant in implementation as Stripe is I really
want to know, since it will probably make my life easier.

I often find "Uber for X" or "Stripe for Y" confusing. If Stripe were doing Y
they wouldn't be Stripe now, would they?

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Sujan
Awesome product. And a free developer plan you can actually use for live
projects, too!

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chickenfries
> “Existing CMSs are like the MS-DOS of the internet,” Konietzke said. “No one
> really likes to use them, similar to older payment systems before Stripe.”

What a ridiculous statement. Wordpress is so much more popular than
Contentful. The vast majority of publications don't need a headless CMS. It's
literally half the value proposition of Wordpress (since they have a REST
API).

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mherchel
Yeah, I can't see them being worth that much money. Between WP and Drupal's
Contenta distribution
([http://www.contentacms.org/](http://www.contentacms.org/)), you can deploy a
free open source system that's way more extendable than a proprietary system
ever will.

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chickenfries
Yep, with commodity developers. Never heard of Contenta before, sure wish it
was around at my job where we rolled our own headless Drupal v5.

