Both Strapi and Contentful are headless CMS. The main difference between them is that Strapi is an open-source product, while Contentful is a proprietary SaaS (software-as-a-service). This influences a lot of important things like hosting, security, performance, cost, and customization of the CMS.

With an open-source solution like Strapi, you are free to choose where you want to keep your data. It means that you have complete control of the security, performance, and cost of your project. Choosing a hosting by yourself adds one more step to the application setup but it can be done quite quickly using official Strapi integrations with hosting providers. SaaS solutions like Contentful, provide you a CMS that is already hosted, which means that you can't choose where your data is kept and you risk having a vendor-lock-in.

Strapi is open-source, which means that you can install it on your own server and customize both the backend and admin panel as you wish. You can customize anything through the API or by editing the automatically generated code files.

Strapi comes with a React-based admin panel for content editors which can be fully customized as well since all the code is available on Github.

Strapi can be adapted to suit your needs, whatever your project is: a corporate website, a blog, a mobile application, an ecommerce platform, a connected object, you name it.

As an open-source product, Strapi has more than 600 contributors and an active community of over 15 000 users. If you are looking for a custom solution, chances are high that someone in the community has already done it.

Have a look at the numerous tutorials and integrations created by the Strapi team and users. Thanks to the community, our product can evolve so quickly and there's always free support from other users.

Both CMS offer a free Community version. However, Contentful Community Edition has a number of limitations: you can only have 48 content types, 25k records, 2 locales, 3 environments, 2 admin panel roles, and 5 users. To remove these limitations, Contentful offers paid plans which start at $489 / month.

Strapi free plan has no limitations of content types, locales, API calls, entries, environments, or admin panel users. Strapi paid plans (starting at $9/month) unlock access to more custom roles and advanced support offers, which are mostly requested by large enterprises.

We believe in the power of open-source communities, that's why Strapi is community-first, free, and will stay that way forever.