Contentful: Best for enterprise

Contentful is our go-to platform for clients in the financial services or healthcare industries, large enterprises with complex workflows, and those requiring SOC 2 compliance.

Regulatory & compliance

Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 compliance is a must-have for most financial services and healthcare companies. It applies to the cloud provider that is storing the content being entered into the CMS.

Contentful is the only SOC 2 Type 2 compliant headless CMS that hosts your content data for you.

Sanity has recently achieved SOC 2 Type 1 compliance but not Type 2.

Alternatively, you can set up a SOC 2 compliant self-hosted CMS (e.g., Stackbit, Strapi, Directus, Tina, other git-based CMS tools).

Contentful is the oldest, most mature headless CMS and, in our experience, their teams are more familiar with regulatory and legal requirements, audits, and processes, as well as helping stakeholders get approval for using their platform across multiple levels.

More about SOC 2

SOC 2 is a compliance standard that outlines best practices for how companies secure customer data. It covers processes such as encryption, backup, and protection of customer data from unauthorized access; incident response and timely vulnerability management; hiring, onboarding, off-boarding, and anything related to employee access to data and managing permissions.

SOC 2 Type 1 compliance is important for organizations that need to demonstrate that they have implemented effective controls over their systems and processes, while SOC 2 Type 2 compliance is important for organizations that need to demonstrate that their controls not only exist but also operate effectively over a period of time.

Enterprise support & features

For enterprise organizations with hundreds or thousands of employees, Contentful is our go-to choice.

Contentful has the most experience supporting enterprise clients and the largest customer support employee roster. While all three CMSes offer technical support with service-level agreements (SLAs), Contentful offers extensive dedicated customer support, including developers and solution architects, as well as professional service offerings.

Companies with many brands and bigger teams have more complex workflows, and Contentful offers more features to handle scaled workflows. For example, a large organization with multiple content teams working on different parts of a website needs granular user access control, audit logs, and a visual interface for user management.

They may have authors who should only edit SEO or analytics-related content and nothing else. Enterprise organizations also likely need single sign-on (SSO) to grant and revoke access to on-boarding and off-boarding team members, especially if they’re paying per seat.

Smaller teams and organizations may prefer Sanity and Strapi’s developer-driven community support. Like with React, there are a lot of passionate people writing blogs and content about Sanity and Strapi (and other open-source CMSes) that are not officially supported by the respective CMS.

Multi-language & localization

Contentful offers built-in support for multi-language and localization. It allows developers to easily create and manage content in multiple languages and locales, including support for translations, fallback languages, and language-specific fields. It also offers a built-in user interface for managing and previewing translations, making it easy for content editors to manage multi-language content.

Sanity and Strapi allow for multiple languages and locales but do not have built-in functionality, and developers will need to build a custom solution or integrate with third-party plug-ins to provide localization.