Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Contentful VS GraphQL Playground

Compare Contentful VS GraphQL Playground and see what are their differences

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Contentful logo Contentful

You don't need another CMS. You need a better way to manage content — unified, structured, and ready to deploy to any digital channel.

GraphQL Playground logo GraphQL Playground

GraphQL IDE for better development workflows
  • Contentful Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-07
  • GraphQL Playground Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-09

Contentful

Release Date
2013 January
Startup details
Country
Germany
State
Berlin
City
Berlin
Founder(s)
Paolo Negri
Employees
250 - 499

Contentful features and specs

  • Scalability
    Contentful is designed to handle high traffic and large volumes of content, making it a suitable choice for enterprise-level applications.
  • Flexibility
    Contentful provides a headless CMS solution that allows you to deliver content across multiple platforms including websites, mobile apps, and IoT devices.
  • API-first approach
    Contentful's robust API enables developers to easily fetch, manage, and deliver content programmatically.
  • Customizable content models
    Users can define their own content types and relationships, offering great flexibility in how content is structured and managed.
  • Multi-language support
    Contentful natively supports multiple languages, which is beneficial for global businesses needing localized content.
  • Extensive integrations
    Contentful can be easily integrated with various third-party services, enhancing its functionality and adaptability.
  • User-friendly interface
    The platform offers an intuitive admin interface that makes it easy for non-technical users to manage content.
  • Strong community and support
    Contentful has a large community of developers and provides extensive documentation and support resources.

Possible disadvantages of Contentful

  • Cost
    Contentful can be expensive, especially for small businesses or startups, as its pricing scales with the amount of content and API calls.
  • Complexity
    The initial setup and customization can be complex, requiring a good understanding of both the platform and RESTful APIs.
  • Dependence on developers
    While the platform is user-friendly, leveraging its full potential often requires significant developer input, particularly for custom integrations and advanced features.
  • Limited built-in features
    Contentful focuses on being a pure headless CMS, which means it lacks some built-in features like website themes or e-commerce functionalities that are present in other CMS platforms.
  • Performance issues
    Some users have reported performance issues when managing a very large number of content entries or making a high volume of API requests.
  • Learning curve
    There is a learning curve, particularly for users new to headless CMS architecture and API-centric content management.

GraphQL Playground features and specs

  • Interactive Interface
    GraphQL Playground provides a user-friendly, interactive interface for exploring and testing GraphQL queries and mutations. This allows developers to quickly experiment with their GraphQL API.
  • Auto-Completion and Syntax Highlighting
    It offers auto-completion and syntax highlighting which increases productivity by helping developers write correct GraphQL queries faster.
  • Built-in Documentation
    The built-in documentation explorer helps developers easily navigate and understand the GraphQL schemas, types, and fields available in their API.
  • Real-time Error Feedback
    Provides real-time error feedback, making it easier to identify and fix issues while writing queries, resulting in smoother development workflows.
  • Request History
    GraphQL Playground maintains a history of queries and mutations executed, allowing developers to quickly revisit and reuse previous work.
  • Customizable Settings
    It is highly customizable, allowing developers to set endpoint URLs, headers, and other configurations to match various environments (development, staging, production).

Possible disadvantages of GraphQL Playground

  • Performance
    GraphQL Playground can be resource-intensive, consuming significant amounts of memory and CPU, which might slow down the development environment, especially with large schemas.
  • Security Concerns
    As an interactive playground embedded in web interfaces, it may expose sensitive data or operations if not properly secured, necessitating careful configuration and access control.
  • Limited Offline Use
    Since it relies on an active endpoint to fetch schema details and execute queries, its utility is limited when working offline.
  • Deprecated Maintenance
    As of 2020, the GraphQL Playground repository is not actively maintained anymore, which means it may not receive updates, bug fixes, or new features.
  • Complex Configuration
    In comparison to simpler alternatives, setting up and configuring GraphQL Playground can be more complex and time-consuming.

Contentful videos

Bits & Bytes Ep. 1 - What is Contentful?

More videos:

  • Review - A Quick look at contentful | #CodingPhase
  • Review - Gatsby And Contentful - The Headless CMS Approach - Episode 1

GraphQL Playground videos

Graphql playground review completa parte 1

More videos:

  • Review - Create Local GraphQL Playground
  • Review - Graphql playground review completa parte 2

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Contentful and GraphQL Playground)
CMS
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Blogging
100 100%
0% 0
GraphQL
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Contentful and GraphQL Playground

Contentful Reviews

  1. Eleanor Bennett
    · Digital Marketing Specialist at Logit.io ·
    Very generous free plan

    The free plan of Contentful is generous enough to allow us to run a successful technology blog without having to pay for any overheads to run it. We used them as an alternative to the previously used Ghost. We have experienced a lot of growth since this migration.

    🏁 Competitors: Ghost

21 Headless CMS Platforms That You Should Check Out
Contentful integrates with many tools and helps you create your content quickly. It is mostly used for e-commerce websites.
Source: popupsmart.com
Best Headless CMS in 2022
Contentful is an API-driven headless CMS that focuses on content and the backend. It is considered one of the best systems for small to medium enterprises. You can edit content anywhere by any smart device and integrate it with other services such as Dropbox.
Source: flatlogic.com
Best Headless CMS for 2020
Yes, hosted providers, such as Contentful would be easier to use but it literally comes with a price...
Source: dev.to
11 Headless CMS to Consider for Modern Application
It uses RESTful API development kits for all popular languages. Contentful is welcoming newcomers, so anyone can quickly create data entries.
Source: geekflare.com
34 Headless CMS That Should Be On Your Radar
Founded in 2013, Germany-based Contentful offers an API-driven headless CMS. Contentful’s RESTful API gives developers full programmatic control of content, digital assets, and translations. The platform also takes advantage of caching techniques as well as external CDN integrations to enable the delivery of API payloads in the sub-100ms range.
Source: www.cmswire.com

GraphQL Playground Reviews

We have no reviews of GraphQL Playground yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

GraphQL Playground might be a bit more popular than Contentful. We know about 12 links to it since March 2021 and only 10 links to Contentful. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Contentful mentions (10)

  • How to connect nextjs app to contenful cms - 2025
    First, you need to register on the Contentful website and create an account. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • My blog post workflow
    Next, I’ll copy and paste the draft text to my CMS. I’ve been using Contentful since working there in 2021. I use Rich Text rather than Markdown for my posts and what’s great about this is that copying and pasting from Notion preserves hyperlinks and formatting. If I’m including anything else like code samples, images and other embedded media, I add those as separate linked entries manually whilst working through... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • How to Style Markdown in Next.JS Using React-Markdown and SASS
    If you have a blog or website with articles or long text documents, markdown is your friend. It makes authoring documents so much easier and more intuitive than straight HTML. Markdown has a far smaller learning curve than HTML and can easily be taught to non-tech-savvy writers. Markdown editors are also built-in to headless CMSs like Contentful. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Looking to Create a Wordpress Style Website with Python / Flask
    It depends on the requirements, but this might actually call for a headless CMS like Forestry.io or Contentful coupled with a Static Site Generator like Hugo. The CMS will manage users/permissions/data hierarchy and provide a simple frontend for users to add content, lay out pages, etc. And then when they save a change, the SSG will re-run and render everything to static HTML/CSS/JS. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • How to Create a Blog Using Next.js and Contentful CMS
    Contentful is a headless content management system (CMS). Headless simply means there is no front-end to display the content to the consumer. It's basically a database, but much easier to setup and maintain than a traditional relational database. Contentful provides a very easy-to-use API for fetching and managing content. They also support GraphQL queries if you're into that. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
View more

GraphQL Playground mentions (12)

  • Show HN: API Parrot – Automatically Reverse Engineer HTTP APIs"
    Have you tried something like GraphQL playground before? https://github.com/graphql/graphql-playground There's other tools out there that can generate similar docs or playgrounds, given you have a schema/spec of some type. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Exploring GraphiQL 2 Updates and New Features
    GraphiQL is a tool that was created to help developers explore GraphQL APIs, maintained by the GraphQL Foundation. But when GraphiQL became more and more popular, developers started to create additional GraphQL IDEs. A good example of this was GraphQL Playground, which quickly became the most popular GraphQL IDE. It was loosely based on GraphiQL, but had more features and a better UI. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Why Is It So Important To Go To Meetups
    I went to a GraphQL meetup and they used the gql playground and a similar schema generator to what I was using, and it made me feel relevant. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
  • GraphQL subscriptions at scale with NATS
    Here, we'll create a simple GraphQL server and subscribe to a subject from our resolver. We'll use GraphQL playground to mock client side behavior. Once we're connected we'll use NATS CLI to send a payload to our subject and see the changes on the client. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
  • GraphQL vs REST in .NET Core
    Now we can consume created GraphQL API. In the GitHub Repo same functionality has been added with REST approach and GraphQL endpoint. Also widely used Swagger configured for Web API Endpoints as well as AltairUI added for GraphQL endpoint testing. Naturally, AltairUI it not a must for GraphQL, you can also use Swagger, GraphiQL, or GraphQL Playground. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Contentful and GraphQL Playground, you can also consider the following products

WordPress - WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

How to GraphQL - Open-source tutorial website to learn GraphQL development

Strapi - Manage any content. Anywhere. The leading open-source headless CMS. 100% JavaScript / TypeScript and fully customizable.

GraphQl Editor - Editor for GraphQL that lets you draw GraphQL schemas using visual nodes

Drupal - Drupal - the leading open-source CMS for ambitious digital experiences that reach your audience across multiple channels. Because we all have different needs, Drupal allows you to create a unique space in a world of cookie-cutter solutions.

Stellate.co - Everything you need to run your GraphQL API at scale