Ninetailed got acquired by Contentful, what does it mean for non-Contentful users?
So the acquisition news from last month finally reached our planning meeting. We use Ninetailed for personalization today, and here is the awkward part: we are mid-evaluation of other CMSes and Contentful is not the frontrunner.
Now that Ninetailed belongs to Contentful, I keep wondering if we are betting on a tool that will slowly become Contentful-only. Nothing official says so, but acquisitions usually mean the roadmap follows the buyer's product. Has anyone thought this through, or found personalization options that are not tied to a specific CMS vendor?
2 answers
Ninetailed was acquired by Contentful in August 2024, which ties its future to that ecosystem. What that means for users on other CMSes is not yet officially defined, so the open question is roadmap direction rather than any announced change.
If CMS independence is a requirement for your evaluation, the property to look for is where the personalization layer lives. Croct works as an overlay alongside whatever CMS you use: your existing components map to slots, the CMS content stays as the default fallback, and audiences and experiments are managed independently of the content backend. Because nothing in that model depends on a specific CMS, switching the CMS later does not affect the personalization setup.
For a structured comparison of the options in this space, including Contentful with Ninetailed, Builder.io, Storyblok, Strapi, and Sanity, see the headless CMS A/B testing comparison.
We went through a similar exercise after the news. Our conclusion was less about Ninetailed specifically and more of a general rule: when your experimentation tool and your CMS are the same vendor, you have coupled two decisions that have very different lifecycles. CMS migrations happen every few years, experiment programs run continuously, and you do not want the former to force a rebuild of the latter.
So whatever you pick, I would score it on how cleanly it survives a CMS swap. Since you are mid-evaluation anyway, that is the perfect moment to test it, ask each vendor what a migration from CMS A to CMS B looks like with experiments live.
The lifecycle framing is helpful, that is exactly the mismatch I could not articulate. Adding the migration question to our vendor calls, thanks.