Menestrel vs Contentful for an Astro site
Contentful's free tier is generous and its next step costs €300 a month. Where that gap matters, where it does not, and which of the two fits a fleet of Astro brochure sites.
Prices and features surveyed at the source on 8 August 2026. They change: check with the vendor before deciding.
Contentful is the enterprise reference in headless CMS, and it earned that position. If you are building a product with a content team, several environments and a governance story to tell, this comparison will not talk you out of it.
This page is about a narrower case: an agency running Astro brochure sites for clients who are not technical. That is the only case Menestrel is built for.
The pricing gap
| Contentful | Menestrel | |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 10 users, 2 locales, 25 content types, 10,000 records | 1 site, 2 editors, 2 locales, 200 entries |
| Next step | €300/month (Lite) | €3/month excl. VAT per site, billed yearly |
| Locales | 2 free, 3 on Lite | Unlimited from the first paid plan |
| Priced by | space and users | site |
Contentful’s free tier is genuinely good for a single site. The problem is the step after it: there is nothing between €0 and €300 a month. For an agency billing €40 a month of maintenance per site, that step is not a negotiation, it is a wall.
Where Contentful is the better choice
Say it plainly, because it is often true:
- A content team with roles and workflows. Contentful’s roles, scheduled releases and environments are a real product. We deliberately have none of that: our editor sees fields and a Publish button.
- Several front ends on one content base. A mobile app, a site and a kiosk reading the same API: that is exactly what Contentful is for and exactly what we are not.
- Content that changes by the minute. Our publishing goes through a build.
- Procurement that needs a name. Sometimes the answer is the vendor your client’s legal team has already cleared.
Where the difference actually bites
Nobody puts the site back online but you. Contentful publishes into its API. Triggering the build, following the deployment and telling the editor “it is live” is your job, usually a webhook and then silence. Menestrel takes the click, freezes an immutable snapshot, triggers the rebuild at your host, and tracks it until the page is actually served. That is the one thing we do that the others do not.
Your site keeps no dependency. Content travels at build time, never on a visitor’s request. If Menestrel goes down, published sites stay up and a build still succeeds, because the snapshot sits on a CDN rather than in our API. We test that on purpose by switching the API off.
Locales are not an upsell. Two on Contentful’s free tier, three on Lite. Unlimited on every paid Menestrel plan, because a bilingual brochure site is the normal case in Europe, not a premium feature.
If you are already on Contentful with Astro
Your content model is probably richer than what a brochure site needs, which
makes the move easier rather than harder. menestrel import reads existing
Astro content collections, so the usual path is: export from Contentful into
markdown collections, check the result in your repo, then import.
The schema then lives in your repository as TypeScript, in code review and in Git history, instead of being clicked together in a UI.
Honestly, the limits
- Publishing takes a build, usually one to three minutes.
- No visual page builder: your editor fills fields you defined.
- Astro only. If your stack is Next or Nuxt, we are not an option at all.
- We are a young product run by a small team, against a company with a decade of enterprise track record.
The short version
Contentful is built for content organisations. Menestrel is built for a developer who maintains other people’s brochure sites and wants the client to publish without ever meeting the word build. Different problems, and the €300-a-month step is where they separate.