Contentful is proven at Fortune 500 scale. Dyrected is built for everyone else.

Contentful's free tier is real but limited — 5 users, 1 space, 48 content types. The first plan with meaningful features is Basic, which starts at around $300 per month. Team is around $800 per month. Enterprise is custom. These are not small numbers, and they don't include the per-user charges that apply to larger editorial teams on the higher tiers.

For a Fortune 500 company running 30 international websites with a 50-person content team and a procurement process that requires SOC 2 certification — Contentful's price is justified and the alternatives are either riskier or less capable. For a 10-person startup, a digital agency, or a growth-stage SaaS company — you're paying for enterprise infrastructure you don't need at a price point that doesn't match your revenue.

Dyrected's most expensive self-service tier is $99 per month, covers 25 sites, and has no per-user charge. If your team grows from three editors to fifteen, your bill doesn't change. The honest comparison is not Contentful's free tier against Dyrected's paid tier — it's equivalent use cases: a team managing multiple properties, multiple editors, at production scale.

Contentful's content modelling experience is built around a polished GUI. Non-technical stakeholders can create and modify content types without involving a developer. For large enterprises where content teams and engineering teams operate independently, this is a genuine advantage — marketing can add a field without filing a ticket.

Dyrected's schema is TypeScript code in your repository. Adding a field means writing a line of code, submitting a pull request, and merging it. For some teams, this sounds like a bureaucratic step. For developers who've watched a content type get quietly modified in a CMS GUI and broken a frontend component that depended on the old structure — it sounds like a feature. Schema changes go through the same review process as code changes because they are code changes.

Neither approach is universally better. The GUI model scales well to large, non-technical content teams. The code model scales well to development-led teams where schema governance matters. The question is which model matches how your team actually operates.

Contentful has no self-hosted option. Your content lives in Contentful's infrastructure. This is not a criticism — it's a deliberate architectural choice that enables the reliability and scale they deliver. The practical consequence is that you cannot leave without a significant migration. Your content API is Contentful's API. Your content delivery is their CDN. When your contract ends, the conversation is about data export formats, not self-hosting.

Dyrected is open-source (BSL license) and self-hostable. If you decide to move off the cloud tier, you run it yourself — it's the same codebase. The content lives in a Postgres database you own. There's no export-and-rebuild, no migration specialist needed. This matters most in two scenarios: if you're cost-sensitive and the cloud tiers grow beyond your budget, and if you're in a regulated environment where data residency requirements make vendor-managed infrastructure complicated.

For most teams, this distinction is theoretical rather than practical — they stay on the cloud tier, the vendor remains stable, and the self-hosting option is never exercised. But the option having a real value only reveals itself when circumstances change.