Gather Content vs. Contentful
In this article, we’re comparing two popular content marketing platforms – Gather Content and Contentful. If you aren’t familiar with these platforms, they both share the goal of helping a business manage, create, and optimize their content marketing. We’ll be examining each digital platform, their content model, and letting you know which is best for your digital content business.
Gather Content
Gather Content is, as they put it, a “content operations platform.” Essentially, it’s a comprehensive digital platform designed to help businesses manage, plan, and implement a content marketing campaign and strategy. If that all sounds a little vague and open-ended, it is, but only because Gather Content has such a wide array of features and content creation capabilities.
At the heart of the platform is the Content Hub. The centre of content operations, the Hub allows you to organize content across your entire organization. Anyone can access new, planned, or ongoing projects. Administrators can choose which team-members can access which content, and can assign work to different teams. The Hub also allows you to track processes, identify bottlenecks, search content, develop a content strategy, and more. It’s a comprehensive organization tool for planning tasks that can usually become overwhelming.
But the Content Hub is far from all that’s on offer with Gather Content. It also has dedicated tools for predicting, planning, and creating content. The Content Planning tool helps teams see which content they are responsible for, and they can use Gather Content’s templates and style guides to complete the work. At its core, Gather Content is a good organizational tool and content management system. With modern businesses and marketing departments requiring such an enormous amount of structured content, it’s helpful to have a platform that connects everyone, and keeps all workflows organized and on-track. But as with any platform, you have to give your team time to learn its ins and outs.
Pricing
Pricing for Gather Content is done on a subscription basis. You can choose to pay monthly or annually, with some added bonuses for an annual plan. There are 3 basic plans available for Gather Content, that scale up based on the number of concurrent projects, rather than the number of users. Gather Content’s “Start” plan allows for 3 concurrent projects for $99/month, the “Scale” plan allows for 15 concurrent projects for $299/month, and the “Transform” plan allows for 60 concurrent projects for $799/month. There are also other caveats that you can find here. Gather Content also offers plans for larger organizations, but you’ll need to book an individual consultation.
Contentful
Contentful operates within the same space as Gather Content, offering a comprehensive platform for managing content. According to Contentful, their content platform “aggregates, structures, and delivers content across an organization’s digital footprint.
At the core of Contentful’s service offering is the Content Platform. The content platform provides a central hub for creating, planning, and managing content. Team members have access to the central hub, where there are extensive tools to organize content workflow. The Content Hub brings together team-members to seamlessly create content. Designers, creators, editors, and marketers all have access, and work simultaneously with developers and publishers to share content across all the organizations’ channels and mediums.
Pricing
Perhaps where Contentful differs most from Gather Content is their pricing structure. Rather than paying per concurrent project, you pay for the amount of people on the platform. The pricing is a little convoluted, but we expect that’s by design. The only advertised price is for the “Team” tier, which starts at $489/month. Bigger organizations will have to book a consultation with Contentful.
Which is For You?
At the end of the day, Contentful and Gather Content are very similar content platforms. Both are geared toward helping an organization create, manage, plan, and share content. Both are meant as organizational tools, rather than tools for creating content. Your decision may come down to which platform your organization likes best, or which platform offers your organization the best deal! Do note that both platforms are extensive, and require real buy-in from members across your organization. The platforms are only as effective as the commitment they receive from your team. If everyone works together to create and share, you’ll be much happier with the results. This also means that you’ll need to dedicate time and resources toward training & onboarding team-members onto the platform.
Conclusion
Thanks for checking out our head-to-head comparison of Gather Content and Contentful, two content management softwares that we like for different reasons. Once again, these are platforms for managing content, not creating it. If your organization is looking for help creating high-quality content to share, consider Content Refined.
