# Croct vs. Contentful

Contentful stores content in documents. Croct stores it in components and decides which
variation each visitor sees, on the server, with the segmentation and analytics to measure it.
Teams either move to Croct or run it alongside Contentful.

## How they compare

| Capability                                     | Contentful | Croct |
|:-----------------------------------------------|:----------:|:-----:|
| Component-based CMS rather than document-based |     No     |  Yes  |
| Native real-time content personalization       |     No     |  Yes  |
| Native Bayesian A/B testing engine             |     No     |  Yes  |
| Native real-time dashboards and analytics      |     No     |  Yes  |
| Advanced segmentation with no third-party tool |     No     |  Yes  |
| Real-time user data processing                 |     No     |  Yes  |
| User data structuring and unification          |     No     |  Yes  |
| Data export API                                |     No     |  Yes  |
| Integration in hours rather than weeks         |     No     |  Yes  |
| First-class developer experience               |     No     |  Yes  |

## Why teams choose Croct

- **Server-side by design.** Content is resolved before the page is sent, so experiences
  arrive personalized with no flicker and no anti-flicker snippet blanking the page.
- **One platform, no extra vendors.** Segmentation, user profiles, experimentation and
  analytics are built in, so there is no separate CDP, feature-flag tool or analytics
  contract to buy and wire together.
- **Built for headless stacks.** Croct sits alongside Storyblok, Sanity, Strapi, Contentful
  or Shopify Hydrogen and makes the content they hold contextual, instead of replacing them.
- **Marketers ship without developers.** After setup, audiences, experiences, A/B tests,
  scheduling and preview all happen in the Croct interface.
- **Bayesian experimentation on unsampled data.** A/B, A/B/n and multivariate tests with
  cross-device consistency for identified users and bot traffic filtered out.

Against Contentful specifically, the model is what differs. A document describes a page. A
component describes a piece of interface that can vary per visitor, which is what makes
personalization and testing native rather than bolted on.

## Adopting Croct

Croct runs alongside Contentful, so adoption is incremental. There is also a [guide to running
A/B tests and personalization with
Contentful](https://blog.croct.com/post/contentful-cms-ab-testing-personalization).

Setup is one command, `npx croct@latest init`, which installs the SDK, wires the provider
and generates TypeScript types for every slot. Official SDKs cover Next.js, React, Vue,
Nuxt, Astro, Remix, Svelte, Gatsby, JavaScript, PHP, Laravel and Shopify Hydrogen. Most
teams are live the same day, and the forever-free plan needs no credit card.

Define slots where content should become dynamic, then move experiences across one at a time.
Existing profile data can be imported, and enriched profiles export to your warehouse or to any
tool you already run.

## Frequently asked questions

### Do I have to leave Contentful?

No. Many teams keep Contentful for long-form content and use Croct for the components that need
to adapt per visitor.

### What does component-based mean here?

Content is typed and versioned per component rather than per document, so a slot can serve a
different variation of that component to each audience.

### Does personalization slow the page down?

No. Content resolves on the server before the response is sent, with end-to-end response times
under 90 milliseconds at the 95th percentile.

### What statistics does the A/B testing use?

Bayesian, computed on unsampled data, with A/B, A/B/n and multivariate tests, cross-device
consistency for identified users, and bot traffic filtered out.

### How long does it take to get running?

One command to install, and most teams are live the same day. Marketers run experiments
afterwards without further development work.

### What does it cost?

The forever-free plan covers 10,000 monthly active users with 3 content slots and 1
experience or experiment, and needs no credit card. Growth starts at $100 per month billed
annually for 20,000 monthly active users. Scale is custom. See [pricing](/pricing) for the
full table.