Contentive vs Craft CMS and Statamic
Craft CMS and Statamic are the agency developer's favourites for good reason. Where a hosted Craft CMS alternative fits, and where it honestly doesn't.
Ask a room of agency developers which CMS they enjoy building in and Craft and Statamic come up early, usually with real affection. They earned it. If you're comparing us with them, you're comparing against tools that already do the hard part well, so this post is mostly about everything around the CMS.
What they do better
Craft's content modelling is excellent. Entries, sections and Matrix fields let you build flexible, nested page structures that are still properly modelled, and the authoring experience is clean enough that clients like it. Twig templating is mature and well documented, and the editor experience shows years of care.
Statamic brings the Laravel world with it. Content can live in flat files in git, so a site's content and templates can be versioned together, and when you outgrow files a database is there. Antlers and Blade are pleasant to write, and the control panel is tidy and quick.
Both can be self-hosted, both have healthy plugin or addon ecosystems, and both have communities of agency developers who share patterns, starter kits and help. Craft also has first-party hosting, Craft Cloud. Check each one's current licensing and plans on their own sites before you compare costs, because they change.
The closest cousins we have
Of everything we get compared to, these feel the most like us. Twig and Antlers versus Liquid is a small step: a layout, a template per content type, partials for repeated parts. If your developers think in that shape, they'll be at home in a Contentive theme in an afternoon. Liquid themes explained walks through the anatomy.
The modelling is close too. Our content types and stacks (reusable sections) do the job of Craft's sections and Matrix blocks, and references between documents are first-class, so the same author, location or service can appear on many pages without being copied. Why our content model is a graph goes into that.
The difference: the operations around the CMS
Where we differ is what happens after the build.
A Craft or Statamic site needs PHP hosting, a deployment pipeline from git to the server, plugin and core updates, licence renewals where they apply, backups and a way to test changes before they go live. Agencies who do this well usually have a standard server set-up and a deploy script they trust. Every client site still has its own copy of all of it.
On Contentive, hosting is ours. Each site has a staging address beside the live one, publishing lands in staging, and production is reached through a deliberate promote step. Theme files live in your git and are pushed to staging with our command-line tool, and you can develop locally against live content with hot reload. Rolling back a theme creates a staging version from an earlier deployment, which you then promote. There's no PHP version to track and no plugin to update.
Content that lives in one place
Craft and Statamic both have globals, so this will feel familiar. Contentive's globals hold the details a site repeats everywhere: phone number, address, opening hours, social links. What we add is that a global can be dropped into the middle of rich text as a live value, so "call us on" followed by the phone number in a paragraph updates when the number changes. It's a small thing that removes a whole class of client request: the one where the number changed and nobody found every place it appeared.
Agents
Contentive exposes the whole platform to AI agents over MCP: the content model, pages, forms, themes and deployments. You bring your own agent, it works through scoped tokens, and everything it builds is an ordinary object in the Studio afterwards. Craft and Statamic have APIs an agent can use, and their communities are building more. Ours is built in rather than added on.
A week in the life of twenty sites
The difference is easiest to see across a portfolio. Picture twenty client sites on a self-hosted PHP CMS. This week a minor security release lands for the CMS, two plugins publish updates, one client's host sends a PHP end-of-life notice, and a backup job on another server has been quietly failing for a fortnight. Each item is small. Together they're a day, and none of it is billable unless you've sold a care plan that covers it.
On Contentive, most of that list isn't yours. The platform is updated for every site at once, there's no plugin or PHP version to track, and more of the week goes on the things clients pay for: new sections, new content, the next build.
The client's side
Craft and Statamic both have clean control panels, and clients like them. Ours is similar in spirit: the client sees a form for each kind of thing the site contains, with no layout to break. On top of that, every document has version history with restore, publishing can be scheduled, and a client Editor can publish while an Author can only draft. Custom roles can be scoped per content type, so a client can publish news but only draft pages.
Migrating from Craft or Statamic
We don't have a Craft or Statamic importer. For a public site, our scraper can crawl it, extract the content and suggest a content model, and the clone tool can capture the pages into a starting theme with assets re-hosted. Both land in staging and both are a starting point, not a finished migration. Your Twig or Antlers templates won't convert automatically, but because the shapes are so close, rewriting them in Liquid is mostly mechanical.
What you lose
Server-side PHP. You can't write custom server logic inside the platform. Webhooks and simple automations cover the common cases, not all of them.
Their plugin ecosystems. We have a small set of apps we maintain ourselves, and nothing like the range of community addons.
Self-hosting. If a client needs the site on their own infrastructure, we can't do it.
A mature community. Craft and Statamic have years of conference talks, forum answers and shared starter kits. We're early.
Flat-file content in git, Statamic-style. Our themes are in git, but the content lives in the platform, with version history on every document.
Pricing, briefly
Our Agency plan is £39 a month for three live sites, then £10.99 a month for each further live site, unlimited seats, and nothing for sites still in staging. Hosting is included, and billing is monthly. The comparison worth doing is against your current hosting, licences and the hours your team spends on upgrades, not against licence price alone.
When to stay
If your team lives in PHP, enjoys it, and runs its own hosting well, stay. Craft and Statamic are excellent tools, and a well-run hosting set-up is an asset you've already paid for. Switch only if the operations, not the CMS, are what's costing you, and even then try one new client site first rather than migrating anything old.