Headless CMS Setup with Strapi or Contentful

We run a content-heavy marketing site and our old monolithic CMS has become a bottleneck. Every small text change turns into a developer ticket, and our editors are frustrated. We want to move to a modern headless setup and are looking for someone who has done this end to end before. The stack is open: I lean toward Strapi if self-hosting makes sense for us, but I am equally happy with Contentful if the managed route is the better fit for our team size and budget. Part of your job is to help us make that call with clear trade-offs, not just pick your favorite tool.

The scope is a full working setup, not a proof of concept. You will model our content types properly (articles, authors, categories, landing blocks, reusable components, media), set sensible field validation, and design relations that make sense for editors rather than mirroring a raw database. On top of that, expose a clean, well-documented API (REST or GraphQL) with pagination, filtering, and draft-versus-published states, and connect it to our JAMstack front-end so pages render from the CMS content. Editors must be able to create, preview, and publish entries on their own, with roles and permissions that keep the structure safe. We already have a designer and a front-end developer on the team, so you will be collaborating, not working in a vacuum.

Please share examples of headless CMS projects you have delivered and tell us which platform you would recommend for our case and why.

— Model content types, components, and relations for real editorial workflows
— Expose a clean REST or GraphQL API with pagination, filtering, and draft/published states
— Connect the CMS to our JAMstack front-end and set up preview
— Configure editor roles, permissions, and a migration path for existing content