Realistic effort to rebuild Ninetailed personalization on Contentful with another tool?
Some of you may remember me asking about the Ninetailed acquisition back in 2024. Well, here we are. We kept Contentful, the legacy app is gone, and I now have about a dozen personalizations to rebuild.
We are looking at Croct but I noticed there is no Contentful integration page on their site, unlike Storyblok or Strapi. Does that mean the integration is a bigger lift for us? What does the work actually look like, and can we do it incrementally or is it an all-at-once cutover
Site is Next.js App Router, roughly 12 personalized sections across 5 page types.
2 answers
You are right that there is no Contentful-specific integration page, but that does not mean a bigger lift. It means the path is the framework SDKs directly: you map the Contentful-rendered components in your app to Croct slots in code. Since you are on Next.js, that is @croct/plug-next, and the pattern is walked through in this guide.
Concretely, for each of your 12 sections:
- Define a slot with a component schema matching the props that section renders.
- In the component, fetch the slot content with your Contentful data as the fallback, so Contentful keeps serving the default.
- Recreate the audience and variants as an experience in the dashboard.
Step 1 and 2 are the dev work and they are mechanical once you have done the first one. Step 3 is dashboard work anyone on marketing can do.
On incrementality: this is explicitly designed as gradual adoption, one component at a time. There is no cutover moment. A section that is not mapped yet just keeps rendering Contentful content the way it does today, and mapped sections fall back to Contentful content whenever no experience matches. Most teams your size do the first section in a day and the rest at whatever pace suits them.
Did this exact migration in February, similar scale (10 sections, Next.js). Data point for your estimate: two days for the first two slots including learning the concepts, then about an hour per section after that. The dashboard side took our marketer an afternoon. The thing that saved us time was keeping our existing Contentful fetch code untouched and just passing its output as the fallback.
A real-world number is exactly what I needed for the plan, thanks both. Budgeting two weeks with slack and starting with the homepage hero.