Agility CMS vs Contentful: Which Should You Choose in 2025?
A detailed head-to-head comparison of Agility CMS and Contentful covering features, pricing, developer experience, and ideal use cases.
Agility CMS and Contentful are two of the most established headless CMS platforms on the market. Both are cloud-based, API-first, and trusted by large organisations — but they make very different design decisions that make each better suited to different teams.
Quick overview
Agility CMS is a hybrid headless CMS founded in 2001. It delivers a content API alongside a built-in page management system, meaning marketing teams can control page layout and structure without developer help. It's built on Microsoft Azure and has first-class support for Next.js.
Contentful is the market-leading API-first CMS founded in 2013. It is purely a content repository — it manages structured content and delivers it via REST and GraphQL APIs, but has no concept of pages or layouts. Frontend composition is entirely the developer's responsibility.
Content modeling
Both platforms support flexible content modeling with structured content types, rich text fields, and references between content entries.
Contentful's content modeling is arguably more powerful at the edges — it supports complex reference chains and has a larger set of field types. Its structured content model is well-suited for product catalogs, complex editorial content, and data-heavy applications.
Agility CMS's content modeling is solid and covers the majority of real-world use cases. Its unique advantage is the addition of “page modules” — content types that are tied to page templates, enabling the page management system to work.
Page management and marketer experience
This is where the two platforms differ most fundamentally. Contentful has no page management concept. Content editors manage structured content entries, but how those entries become pages is entirely defined by the developer. This means every layout change requires a code deployment.
Agility CMS includes a full page management system. Editors can create new pages, assign templates, add page modules (content blocks), and reorder them — all without touching code. This is transformative for marketing teams that need to move fast without depending on developer availability.
Developer experience
Both platforms have good developer experiences, but Contentful has a larger ecosystem of community resources, tutorials, and third-party integrations. Its SDKs are mature and widely used.
Agility CMS has an excellent official Next.js starter and maintains strong documentation. Its REST and GraphQL APIs are well-designed. Developers familiar with Microsoft Azure and .NET will find the platform architecture intuitive.
Pricing
Both platforms have free tiers suitable for development and small projects. At scale, Contentful's pricing can become significant — it scales by content locale, API calls, and team member seats. Large organisations often find themselves in enterprise territory quickly.
Agility CMS is generally more competitive on price for mid-market organisations and offers more predictable pricing tiers. For enterprise deals, both platforms negotiate custom contracts.
Ecosystem and community
Contentful has a larger developer community, more third-party integrations in its marketplace, and a broader library of community-created resources. It has been around longer in the modern headless CMS era and has significant mindshare among frontend developers.
Agility CMS has a smaller but loyal community. Its support team is frequently cited as more responsive and hands-on than Contentful's at equivalent price points.
Which should you choose?
Choose Agility CMS if: your marketing or editorial team needs to manage pages independently of your development team. The hybrid headless model is genuinely differentiated and saves significant developer time in organisations where marketers need to move fast.
Choose Contentful if: you need the deepest ecosystem, the most mature third-party integrations, or your content model is highly complex with many cross-referenced content types. Contentful is also the safer choice for very large enterprise deals where established vendor credibility matters.
Read the full Agility CMS review or browse our full headless CMS directory to see all options.