Contentful is a polished product with excellent documentation and a reliable CDN. It is also a subscription: your content lives with them, your limits are their limits, and growth is a conversation with sales.
The short version
If you want SaaS where nobody has to run a server, Contentful does that well. Just work out what it costs over three years — with growth that is rarely linear — and what happens when you want to leave. Drystone runs the same kind of workload on a machine you own, without quotas, with your content in ordinary SQL tables you can export yourself.
Point by point
Honest advice
Choose Contentful if nobody in your organisation may or wants to run a server, if you have a global editorial team with demanding workflow requirements, or if procurement would rather sign a vendor with an SLA than accept a VPS. That is a legitimate choice, and Drystone does not try to compete with it.
Choose Drystone if your content has to stay yours, if plan limits and API quotas are in your way, or if the bill grows with traffic you are already paying for.
Switching
Frequently asked
In most setups yes, and often faster: if you build statically, the CMS is not in your visitor's request path at all. If you serve dynamically, ETag and Cache-Control carry the cache, and you can put your own CDN in front.
Your admin is down — your published site is not, if it is built statically. That is the inverse risk profile of SaaS: you are responsible, and you can also act during an incident instead of watching a status page.
Yes, and more simply than you are used to: an environment is a data folder plus a schema from git. Staging is a second binary with a second data folder, not a plan feature.