6 key differences between Contentstack and Brightspot

Brightspot vs. Contentstack

Content teams can customize workflows in a simple drag-and-draw UI that lets them work the way they want to work.

Simple, linear workflows customizable by developers or admins via a multi-step, complex interface.

Contentstack is built for highly development-centric use cases, with a focus on publishing primarily for mobile apps and other headless endpoints. It's made by developers—for developers—and doesn't focus as much on the actual publishing experience. The idea is to plug into many different systems, and as such, there is less focus on the complex needs of content-centric publishing teams and their stories.

Brightspot, on the other hand, was built by both publishers and developers for a richly functional and intuitive experience tailored to how you work. The idea here is to enable robust storytelling and offer publishers an enterprise-quality authoring and collaboration experience for content teams. Empowerment is the name of the game—for developers and publishers.

This means a hefty set of out-of-the-box authoring and editorial tools including a dynamic rich-text editor, built-in preview, and collaborative tools. These tools can be used to push content to desktop and mobile-web in addition to mobile apps, Internet of Things endpoints, and more. Brightspot's flexible workflows increase publishing efficiencies by integrating into your existing workflows, while providing support for any number of different user and team roles for easy customization and personalization. Or you can build your own workflows to be as granular and customized as needed to meet your specific publishing criteria and needs.

Brightspot vs. Contentstack

Start with pre-built content types, modules and front-end styles, then customize as much as you want, from no-code to low-code to headless.

Development teams empowered to model and create front-end experiences, but little can be done by content teams without upfront dev support.

The benefits of Brightspot versus Contentstack extend to the content creation experience.

As far as drafting the content itself, Contentstack provides a basic content authoring and editing interface.

Brightspot enables publishers with enterprise-grade content authoring and editing capabilities, full-screen authoring, track changes and in-line commenting, content locking and collaboration capabilities, a dynamic, high-fidelity, built-in preview system—and much more, like out-of-the-box workflow capabilites to ensure content gets seen by the right eyes before going out the door.

Contentstack's developer-centric experience provides a number of APIs and SDKs allowing developers to get started creating quickly—but very little can be done by publishers or editors without considerable upfront development and integration. Previews are limited to in-browser or in-app, and must be configured by the customer's development team. Workflows are offered, but limited to enterprise-level customers and must be configured by development.

Brightspot vs. Contentstack

With our API-first flexibility, choose your approach to delivery—headless or decoupled, or both—all from the same environment.

API-only. All functionality must first be modeled, created and integrated by a development team or integration partners.

Contentstack is functionally an API-only content management system—built to enable development teams to create their own preferred experiences. In an API-only environment, all functionality must first be modeled, created and then integrated into your sites/apps by your development team.

Brightspot allows your organization to implement an API-first approach, starting with Brightspot Headless, so new channels can be added on infinitely. But headless is not the end of the story: go headless with one implementation, publish decoupled for another scenario, or do both. Brightspot supports both choices without limiting you through your initial implementation journey.

An API-first implementation has all the benefits of an API-only one, ensuring that you always have the option to develop a custom front end, but it takes it a step further by delivering a set of starter content types, styles and configurations right off the shelf. The outcome for your business? Deploy and iterate quickly with an engaging experience for your audiences with Brightspot as your starting point, but from there you get to customize the experience as much and as deeply as you need, using a combination of no-code, low-code and professional software project options.

This is where the Brightspot differs considerably from Contentstack and most other CMS solutions on the market today.

Whether you're looking to start creating with Brightspot's in-built theme engine and pre-configured content types or build out from scratch with a headless CMS, Brightspot is built to get you to launch and beyond at astonishing speed.

Brightspot vs. Contentstack

Pre-built integrations connect critical data and services, saving time and lessening IT dependencies.

Integrations are delivered through third-party integration, training and support partners.

Contentstack offer integrations, but only with its enterprise offering. The integrations themselves are offered as code that must be integrated into a customer's front end by their development team.

Brightspot's pre-built third-party integrations are designed to suit specific use cases across media, corporate and internal communications, marketing and eCommerce. And unlike platforms like Contentstack, each integration is delivered pre-built and ready-to-use, requiring zero custom dev. Securely connect your most important third-party data and services with the click-and-go simplicity of an API key.

Whether it's your preferred advertising platform, marketing tech or email service provider, businesses can get started faster without needing to wait on complicated and time-consuming dev integrations to be completed first. Other in-CMS integrations with leading third-party image and media sources like Getty Images or YouTube mean you can easily find, create and publish world-class content in just a few clicks with zero content-switching between your original source content and supporting media assets.

Brightspot vs. Contentstack

Flexible users, roles and permissions deliver personalized experiences across the organization.

Pre-configured and limited roles that require custom development to gain any needed flexibility.

Brightspot offers unlimited, flexible roles and user permissions, ensuring each user has a streamlined experience with no extra noise. Built-in users and roles functionality allows for contextual experiences that are fully personalized for your users at any level.

Contentstack offers pre-configured roles that are less flexible without custom development. Though these roles are also unlimited, they must be defined and created via the Contentstack API by a development team or third-party integrator instead of being able to be built in a clean interface by publishers.

Brightspot vs. Contentstack

Rapidly launch with minimal development overhead and start publishing immediately with an easy-to-learn CMS platform tailored to how you want to work.

Out-of-the-box SDKs and APIs help dev teams get started quickly—but not without considerable development and integration work upfront.

Speed-to-market matters and is made possible with Brightspot's segment-specific starter content, pre-built content types and pre-configured third-party integrations to give you a head start with an enterprise-grade CMS solution from day one.

Deliver exceptional digital experiences from the start with powerful no-code options including layouts, templates, colors, fonts, styles and design options that reflect your style, your content goals—and your budget. From there, the low-code customization options are nearly limitless even before bringing in development resources to get deep into the CSS and JavaScript layers.

For technical teams, the savings come not only with reduced overhead with support and maintenance, but also in the time it takes to learn new languages and proprietary APIs. Connect a different front-end head to your CMS via a standardized, open-source GraphQL API and query language plus manage data modeling and transformations directly within the CMS.