#contentful

Payload CMS is emerging as a compelling alternative to Contentful, offering open-source flexibility, customizable content models, self-hosting options, and seamless integration with modern development stacks. For enterprises focused on scalability and long-term digital transformation, the move could represent a significant strategic advantage.

When building modern digital experiences, choosing the right content management platform is critical. Sanity and Contentful are among the leading headless CMS solutions, each offering unique strengths for enterprises.

Migrating from Strapi to Contentful requires clear strategy and careful execution to preserve semantic integrity and editorial continuity. This guide focuses on practical migration choices and planning steps to minimize downtime and keep content parity. It’s built for small- to mid-sized teams that need a repeatable, low-risk approach to decoupling or full CMS migration. Use it to align stakeholders, map custom logic, and preserve localization at scale.

Key Migration Strategies: Manual, Automated, or Hybrid?

Manual Migration — Best for micro-sites and highly curated editorial pages; recreate Content Types in Contentful’s UI and copy entries for full editorial control.

Automated Migration — Use Strapi exports and Contentful’s CMA/CLI for bulk imports; ideal for large datasets, consistent relationships, and repeatable transforms.

Hybrid Migration — Automate structured content (articles, taxonomies, media) and handle complex relationships, embeds, or plugin-specific logic manually for accuracy.

Audit & Planning — Perform a content inventory, classify items (migrate-as-is / migrate-with-updates / exclude), and document Strapi customizations to map equivalents in Contentful.

Execute & Validate — Implement exports/imports, map fields and references, run staging QA (content parity, links, media, localization), and plan cutover with rollback and editorial checks.

JAMstack, Buddy, and Contentful: A Winning Combination for Scalable and Reliable Websites

The Challenge: We had to build and manage multiple international websites with a small team of 5, while ensuring scalability with the localisation at its core, reliability with easy content and code changes, and efficiency with minimal operational overhead.

The business ambition was to launch 10 new websites within the first year with a limited budget and no additional team members. Our project plan was to use the central development team to build the core components, own the technical operation of the websites, and train the local teams who would content-manage their own localised websites.

Our future vision was to empower local teams to expand their websites with local components, so the central solution had to be a modular and scalable by nature.

The Solution: JAMstack, a web development architecture that uses JavaScript, APIs, and Markup to create fast, secure, and scalable websites and applications. JAMstack allowed us to build a headless website that was decoupled from its back-end, so that it could be served directly from a CDN (Content Delivery Network). This architecture reduced the need for dynamic servers and databases, and improved reliability and scalability which in return helped us to keep operational and maintenance costs much lower than traditonal websites.

We chose Contentful as our headless CMS, as it fit the picture perfectly with its RESTful APIs and easy to handle JSON files. Contentful gave us the flexibility and control to manage our content across different regions and languages, and to integrate with various services and features from third-party providers via APIs.

We used Gatsby and React to build the front-end that was managed through GitHub. Gatsby and React are powerful frameworks that enable us to create dynamic and interactive web pages with high performance and SEO which were crucial for the project as these were brand websites with keen focus on the design and findability. GitHub was our version control system that helped us to collaborate and track changes in our code.

We used Buddy, the DevOps automation platform, to build the CI/CD pipelines that automated our workflows and integrated with our tools. Buddy has a visual pipeline editor and a dashboard that show us the status and performance of our projects, and allow us to manage our settings.

The trick: was to leverage MACH architecture, starting with Headless. MACH stands for Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless, and it is a modern approach to software development that helps us to build a scalable, modular, and composable architecture. MACH architecture gives us the freedom and flexibility to choose the best tools and services for our needs, and enable us to adapt to market changes.

With the help of these technologies and tools, we were able to automate a big portion of the operation, ensuring that the team could manage the ambitious scale. By using the same infrastructure and codebase for every single website, we could avoid duplication, inconsistency, and maintenance issues. We also achieved faster delivery, better quality, and higher customer satisfaction.