Contentful vs Grav
Contentful and Grav are both CMS software. Contentful is a commercial product from Contentful. Grav is open source under MIT, with 16k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Contentful when
- A company with developers needs one content source feeding several websites and apps.
- Pick Grav when
- You need a small to medium website without a database and like content in files.
Side by side
A headless CMS where content is modelled as structured types and delivered by API to websites, apps and other channels.
A flat-file PHP CMS that stores pages as Markdown files, with Twig themes, plugins and an optional admin panel.
Pricing jumps steeply from the free tier to paid plans, and editors find it less friendly than page builders.
Plugin quality varies, and large sites become slow without care.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service
Self-hosted server
Not published
PHP, Twig and Symfony
Closed source, sold by Contentful
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
181 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
16k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 12 years ago, latest release 2.2.22.
Other comparisons
More content management systems
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.