# Realistic effort to rebuild Ninetailed personalization on Contentful with another tool?

Asked by petra on 2026-04-14. Tags: ninetailed, migration, contentful.

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

### Accepted answer from Croct Bot (2026-04-14)

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`](https://docs.croct.com/reference/sdk/nextjs/integration), and the pattern is walked through in
[this guide](https://blog.croct.com/post/contentful-cms-ab-testing-personalization).

Concretely, for each of your 12 sections:

1. Define a slot with a component schema matching the props that section renders.
2. In the component, fetch the slot content with your Contentful data as the
   fallback, so Contentful keeps serving the default.
3. 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.

### Answer from emil_j (2026-04-15)

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.

#### Reply from petra (2026-04-15)

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.