8 reasons why BCMS is a strong Contentful Alternative

Are you considering alternatives to Contentful?

Contentful alternatives include mainly CMS tools, but they can also include Blog Publishing Tools and Website Builders.

You might wonder which headless CMS solution would be the most suitable open-source alternative to Contentful. Well, we @BCMS have a stubborn belief that our product can complete all the shortcomings that Contentful, although a powerful platform, inevitably has.

This guide will cover why BCMS is a great alternative to Contentful. As well as show you how BCMS works and why you should consider it for your business.

Contentful is a leading content platform for digital builders that helps digital teams create content and deliver experiences at scale faster.

As with other headless solutions, Contentful was developed to use modern technologies to deliver digital content in an omnichannel world. Integrating with other platforms also means integrating several tools to improve UI and UX seamlessly.

This feature is common among API-driven headless CMS platforms, and Contentful is no exception.

Although Contentful is known for being one of the oldest headless CMSs, there are some drawbacks businesses should consider before implementing it.

Contentful is a Headless CMS meant to satisfy many use cases. Still, as the amount of your content grows - some drawbacks can negatively impact both the content author and developer experience.

Despite being a pioneer in Headless CMS, some of Contentful's features and options remain out-of-date due to rapid market changes.

Some of the factors why a Contentful alternative is considered necessary are as follows:

BCMS is a headless open-source content management system (CMS) that is emerging as a strong contender in the CMS sector and is seen as one of the leading Contentful alternatives.

Without getting into deep comparisons, BCMS is often regarded as a flexible system that grows and adapts to your company's needs no matter how big or small it grows. In a cost-effective manner.

Open-source headless BCMS is designed to boost your productivity by offering a high-quality content authoring experience.

With BCMS's intuitive & minimal editor, you can:

One of the reasons why BCMS is a popular alternative to Contentful is the features that complement the shortcomings of proprietary CMS such as Contentful.

The feature-rich list includes the following:

The BCMS identifies different roles, such as contributors, editors, and administrators. Team members are assigned roles based on their authority and rules.

Roles, permissions, and users are integral components of security, as well as ease of use. With BCMS, you can configure who has access to what type of content in BCMS. Can you update blogs but can't create new ones? No problem. Can you create and edit the homepage but can't delete it? Sure.

You can start blogging right away with BCMS's easy-to-use blogging interface.

Some of the most used BCMS features that you can easily create are:

Content creators and marketers need easy-to-use tools for creating content.

BCMS is renowned for being the most user-friendly platform for creating content, with a user-friendly dashboard and intuitive navigation menu.

BCMS can manage content in any number of languages - with no limitations.

93 different languages in particular.

In the following, we will explain why BCMS is a strong Contentful alternative by showing differences that can help you choose BCMS over Contentful by comparing features, customer experiences, performance, and pricing.

First and foremost, BCMS is a strong Contentful alternative because it is a self-hosted headless CMS.

The downside of SaaS solutions like Contentful is that your data is already hosted. Therefore, you can't choose where to store it. This means that you may be locked into one vendor.

Self-hosting is important for:

With an open-source solution like BCMS, you have full control over your content, data, and applications, maintain independence from external providers, and are responsible for your own security and privacy.

Contentful is a proprietary, cloud-based CMS meaning that the source code is unavailable for users to view, modify, or distribute.

On the other hand, BCMS is an open-source and customizable CMS that allows customization through the API or by editing the automatically generated code files. React-based BCMS's code is available on Github and is completely editable and customizable.

Being open-source allows BCMS to adapt to various projects, and you can build literally any website you need.

Compared to proprietary, closed systems like Contentful, BCMS is more reliable, secure, and cost-effective in the long run since it is an open-source platform.

Contentful has a complex pricing structure that can be difficult for businesses to navigate, especially when their content base is growing. Why is that?

Contentful pricing plan is based on the following:

All these factors make it challenging to predict costs.

BCMS's pricing plan is loud and clear, without hidden costs and limits.

Not only does choosing BCMS result in lower costs, but you can also create the same website at a fraction of the Contentful price.

Contentful has a relatively limited media management system, making it challenging to organize and manage large amounts of media content. This can be a limitation for businesses with many images, videos, or other media types to manage. BCMS has a media manager with folders, making your content well-organized and easy to find. Also, it prevents you from having an overloaded media manager.

Another key factor when it comes to content limitations is the fact that those limitations prevent creativity.

Contentful has 48 limited content types, making it challenging to design a modular layout and may require a generic approach, negatively impacting the content editor's experience.

BCMS comes with unlimited inputs, groups, widgets, and templates. More precisely - with no content limitations.

Managing and organizing content with Contentful can be challenging due to the complex user interface.

With increasing content and site size, Contentful becomes increasingly complex to manage. Businesses with large amounts of content may require additional resources to work it.

Slow server response times when using Contentful are common, which can be frustrating and harm productivity.

This issue troubles Contentful even more with larger websites and makes it Complexful. Contentful becomes more expensive and increasingly slow to navigate as you add more content.

In BCMS, pages open immediately. Regardless of how long your CMS entries are - BCMS opens them immediately, making it the most user-friendly CMS.

With BCMS, developers can easily integrate Gatsby CMS, NextJS CMS, and Nuxt.js CMS into their backends and build custom APIs to integrate with third-party systems and other repositories.

In addition to its API-first architecture, BCMS helps developers create innovative digital experiences quickly.

At its core, BCMS is an open-source, self-hosted, Headless CMS with a flexible architecture and is made as an integration-friendly platform.

Among official integrations include:

Before you get started, look at BCMS's detailed documentation and directory of integrations. Reading this will lead you to a definite conclusion: so much is possible to build with BCMS.

We hope these 8 BCMS reasons will help you understand why BCMS is growing in popularity as a Contentful alternative. BCMS's headless CMS platform goes beyond the basics to provide the most effective solution possible.

It's time to take BCMS on this rocket-high journey, whether you're looking for a replacement for your existing platform or to migrate from Contentful.