Menestrel vs Storyblok for an Astro site
Storyblok's visual editor is excellent and each extra locale costs $20 a month. What that means for a bilingual brochure site, and when the visual editor is worth it anyway.
Prices and features surveyed at the source on 8 August 2026. They change: check with the vendor before deciding.
Storyblok’s visual editor is the best argument in this whole comparison set. Clicking a block on a preview of the real page and editing it in place is a genuinely better experience than filling a form, and we do not offer it.
So read this page knowing what you would be giving up.
The line-item that decides it
| Storyblok | Menestrel | |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 1 seat, 100k requests, 2 locales | 1 site, 2 editors, 2 locales |
| Growth | $99/month ($90.75 yearly), 5 seats, 2 locales | €15/month excl. VAT yearly, 10 sites, unlimited seats and locales |
| Extra seat | $15/month each | Free, unlimited |
| Extra locale | $20/month each | Free, unlimited |
| Priced by | space, seats and locales | site |
The free tier has one seat. One. Which means the moment your client edits their own site, you are on Growth at $99 a month, for that site.
Then the locale line. A French site that also speaks English is two locales, which Growth includes. A third language is $20 a month, forever, for that site. That single add-on costs more than a whole Menestrel Studio plan covering ten sites.
In Europe, bilingual brochure sites are the normal case, not a premium feature. That is why our locales are unlimited from the first paid plan.
Where Storyblok is the better choice
- Marketing people who compose pages. If your client assembles landing pages from blocks and wants to see the result as they type, Storyblok wins and it is not close. Our editor is a form.
- A page builder is the requirement. Nested blocks, drag and drop, reusable components arranged visually. We deliberately do not do this: the developer defines the fields, the client fills them.
- One well-funded site. $99 a month on a single flagship site is a normal budget. Spread across twenty brochure sites it is not.
Where the difference actually bites
Storyblok stops at the API. Same as the others: it publishes, it can fire a webhook, and the rest is yours. Menestrel triggers the rebuild at your host and follows the deployment until the page is genuinely served, then tells the editor. That is the whole product.
Seats are free here because clients are not a cost centre. An agency’s value is the fleet, not the headcount editing it.
Your site does not depend on us at runtime. Published content is an immutable snapshot on a CDN. Our API can be down; your client’s build still passes.
If you are already on Storyblok with Astro
The move is worth scoping honestly: if your client uses the visual editor daily and likes it, do not move them. Move the sites where Storyblok is effectively a form filler with an expensive locale line.
menestrel import reads Astro content collections, so export Storyblok
stories into markdown first, then import content and images in one command.
Honestly, the limits
- No visual editor. This is the real gap, and on this axis Storyblok is simply better.
- Publishing takes a build, usually one to three minutes.
- No nested block composition. Fields are fields.
- Astro only.
The short version
If your client composes pages, pay for Storyblok. If your client changes a price, a photo and opening hours twice a month, in two languages, you are paying $99 plus $20 per locale for a form, and that is the comparison.