Contentive vs Storyblok and Prismic
Storyblok and Prismic give editors a visual page builder over a headless API. A Storyblok alternative that also hosts and ships the site is a different trade.
Storyblok and Prismic solved a problem the first wave of headless CMSs left behind: editors hated working in forms with no idea what the page would look like. Both put page building back in front of the editor, on top of a clean content API. If you're comparing us with them, you already like the component idea. So do we.
What they do better
Storyblok's visual editor is the best in headless. The editor sees the real page, clicks a component and edits it in place, with the change showing as they type. For a marketing team that works in the CMS every day, that feedback loop is hard to give up once you've had it.
Prismic's slices map to front-end components very cleanly. A developer builds a slice as a component in their framework, the editor composes pages from those slices, and the whole thing stays in step with the codebase. It's a tidy, developer-friendly model, with good tooling around it.
Both have mature component-based page building, solid SDKs for the major JavaScript frameworks, and years of production use behind them.
Where we agree
Our blocks are their components and slices. You define a section type once, say a hero, a feature grid or a testimonial set, and editors compose a page as an ordered list of those sections. The page is stored as structured data, not as layout, and the front end decides how each section looks. Same idea, same reasons. If you've built in either, our model will feel familiar within an hour.
The difference: where the product stops
Storyblok and Prismic stop at the API. That's a deliberate and respectable choice. The front end, hosting, preview set-up, build pipeline and deployment are yours to assemble, usually as a Next.js or Nuxt project on a separate host.
We ship the rest of it. A Contentive site renders through a Liquid theme we host, with a standing staging address next to the live one, a deliberate promote step to production, and a theme rollback that creates a staging version from an earlier deployment, which you then promote. The forms inbox and a sitemap generated from published pages come with every site. If you still want your own front end, the GraphQL API and typed SDK are there. We wrote about the same gap with Contentful and Sanity in Contentive vs Contentful and Sanity.
For a product company with a front-end team, assembling the stack is the right call. For an agency doing it again on every client site, it's the hidden project.
Visual editing: they're ahead
This is the honest gap. Their editors work in context, on the page. Ours is a block list and fields: add, remove and reorder sections, fill in each one, preview the result. It's clear and hard to break, but it isn't in-context editing.
Live preview with click-to-edit is the direction we're heading: click an element in a preview of the real site and land on the field that produces it, in the block editor that already exists. It isn't shipped, and we're not going to give you a date. If in-context editing is a requirement today, that settles it in their favour. Why we don't have a drag-and-drop editor explains what we will and won't build here.
Who builds the front end
They assume a JavaScript framework team: someone who builds components in React or Vue, deploys to a host and maintains the build. That's a strength if you have the team and a cost if you don't.
We assume someone who writes templates. A Liquid theme is a layout, a template per content type and a template per section, plus CSS and JavaScript files. A front-end developer who knows HTML and CSS is productive quickly, and a theme can be developed locally against live content with our command-line tool. There's no framework to upgrade and no build to keep green on twenty client sites.
Agents
Every part of a Contentive site, from the model and the pages to the theme and the deployment, can be built by an AI agent over MCP, and everything it makes is an ordinary object in the Studio afterwards. Storyblok and Prismic both run official MCP servers too, so an agent can read and change content in either. The difference is scope: ours covers the whole site, including the theme and the deployment, not just the content.
Modelling beyond the page
Component-based page building is only half of a content model. The other half is the things that aren't pages: team members, locations, services, events. In Contentive those are content types with their own fields, references between them are first-class, and the media library shows where each asset is used, so nobody deletes an image a page still needs. Globals hold the details that appear everywhere, such as a phone number or an address. Change it once and it updates on every page, including inside rich text. Storyblok and Prismic both model non-page content well too. The point is that in all three, blocks are where you start, not where you stop.
Preview and deployment, in detail
On a typical Storyblok or Prismic project, preview means a preview route in your front-end app, configured to fetch draft content, deployed to a host that can render on demand. Production means a build triggered by a webhook, or a cache to invalidate. A staging site is a second deployment you set up yourself. It's all well documented and none of it is exotic, but it's yours, per project.
On Contentive, every site has a staging address with a "Staging preview — not the live site" bar on every page. Staging is private by default, and you share it with a signed, expiring preview link. Content changes need no rebuild, because the theme renders from the content on request. If a production page was edited after its staging copy, promotion names the pages and refuses until someone acknowledges the edit. That kind of guard is the sort of thing an agency would rarely build for itself on each project, because nobody has time.
Agency economics
Our Agency plan is £39 a month for three live sites, then £10.99 a month for each further live site, with unlimited workspaces and unlimited seats. That includes the hosting, so there isn't a second bill from a front-end host. Sites still in staging cost nothing. Storyblok and Prismic price their own plans differently, and you'd add hosting on top, so compare total cost per client site rather than the CMS line alone. Check their current pricing pages on the day.
What you give up with us
In-context visual editing, for now.
The freedom to render with any framework you like on our hosting. Our hosted path is Liquid; anything else means building against the API and hosting it yourself.
Their maturity, ecosystem and integrations.
When to pick which
If you already run a JavaScript framework team and want the best visual editor on a headless API, choose Storyblok or Prismic. They're excellent at that job. If you'd rather not assemble a front end, host and deploy pipeline per client, and a block list is a fair trade for having all of it in one place, that's where we fit.