# Can we keep Contentful for content and move only experimentation somewhere else?

Asked by Aidan Murray on 2026-04-28. Tags: contentful, experimentation, architecture.

Can we keep Contentful exactly as-is for content and move only A/B testing and
personalization to a separate platform? That is the yes or no part.

If the answer is yes, these are my constraints:

- Content team is happy with Contentful, nobody wants a CMS migration
- After watching the Ninetailed situation play out, I want experimentation decoupled
  from the CMS vendor entirely. If we ever change CMS, the testing layer should not care
- Editors should not have to maintain duplicate variant entries

Looking at Croct specifically but interested in how any decoupled setup works.

## 1 answer

### Accepted answer from Grace O'Donnell (2026-04-28)

Yes. That separation is exactly how Croct is designed to sit in a stack.

On your constraints:

**No CMS migration.** Croct works alongside the existing CMS without replacing it.
Contentful remains the only content source your app fetches from, and it serves as
the default for every mapped section. Nothing moves.

**Decoupling.** Slots are defined in your application, not in the CMS. Your code
says "this section is a slot, and here is the Contentful content as its fallback."
Experiments, audiences, and analytics all live in Croct, so they have no dependency
on Contentful's roadmap. If you swapped Contentful for something else later, the
only change on the experimentation side is where the fallback content comes from,
which is your app code anyway.

**No duplicate entries.** Variant content for experiences and experiments is
authored in Croct, not modeled as extra Contentful entries. Editors keep one
canonical entry per section in Contentful, and experiences override it for matched
audiences at request time.

We run this setup at my company (Contentful + Remix). The mapping work is per
section and incremental, so you can start with one component and expand.

#### Reply from Aidan Murray (2026-04-29)

Clean answer, appreciated. The slots-live-in-the-app detail is the part that
settles the decoupling question for me.