Storyblok Review and Features: The Most Intuitive CMS?

Case study

A great example of Storyblok advantages has been documented with Avenues: The World School. The client chose Storyblok for its seamless "page builder" and live preview option, making content updates on static websites effortless.

For a detailed look at how Storyblok transformed Avenues: The World School's content strategy, check out the full case study here.

What is Storyblok?

Storyblok is a user-friendly and robust headless Content Management System. With Storyblok's visual preview feature, users can preview changes to their websites before they go live, making it simple to create and manage web pages with just a few clicks.

User Interface

Let's start with its core feature - visual editor. Please take a look at the video below to see its power.

Where Storyblok Is a Good Fit?

Before we dive into Storyblok itself let's stop for a while here and explain where, and where not, to use it.

Visual Editor, as the core of Storyblok, has its pros and cons. For some websites, it can be a blessing, but in other projects, it can cause headaches.

Firstly, Storyblok is a great choice for editors. So, in case your website, and business, depend on frequent content changes you'll need a tool that can help you build landing pages quickly and preview how the website/pages look before going live. If that's the case, Storyblok is the right tool for you. However, if you need a CMS to work as a database for your website, in all honesty, look for a different solution.

Storyblok Overview

Now, when we have some clear vision, where we'd be using Storyblok, let's dive into it. I'll create a project to help you understand some of the common Storyblok concepts.

What Options Do We Have to Build Models?

Please take a look at the screenshot below, to see all available types of models we have at all times.

Besides the standard ones, like Text, Number, Image, or Assets, there are a couple of non-standard ones, like Plugin. In Storyblok you can use custom fields, which basically allows you to use more robust fields like "color-picker", "vimeo", "fontawesome icon selector" that are created by the Storyblok team, in your own plugin built for a specific use case (I'll cover that later).

Now, let's create some models, shall we:

and the sneak peek of one of our custom plugins:

Datasources - Whenever You Need it

In the previous video about model creation., for the "button" component, I used a "single-option" field type with the custom data source for the "color" field. What are those data sources?

In general, whenever you don't want to repeat yourself when adding an available option to a field type - you can use a data source for it. In this particular example, I've defined a data source with available button styles. So, I can use this data source whenever I want and update it whenever I want without worrying if I forgot to make changes somewhere else. All linked field types will be updated at the same time.

Examples when data sources come handy:

Need More Power to Publish?

Storyblok, like any other headless CMS, has a built-in option to trigger a webhook after publishing an entry. It means, your website can be automatically rebuilt whenever you made changes. Besides that, Storyblok also offers something called "Tasks". You can basically manage the website, where you manage the content.

As you can see in the screenshot above you can have multiple webhooks (like in this case) to trigger different stagings. In the future, you'll be able to run a Lambda function from there as well.

Apps - to Improve Your Workflow

Storyblok allows you to expand your editorial workflow with some custom apps. You can install extensions like previously mentioned Tasks, or S3 Backups, or Releases to combine multiple changes into one. You can read more about available apps here.

Pricing and Features

Is Storyblok affordable? Does the availability of the features make sense?

It is important to mention that different Apps require different plan types for you to be able to work with them. Some can be used with a Basic subscription while others can be used only with a Premium subscription.

Support

You can contact support using a chatbot on their website. Support team responses are fast. We've needed them in a few situations and can't complain about the reaction times.

What Do Clients Say?

Wherever we used Storyblok we got nothing but good reactions. Same with from Avenues team.

Check the full Avenues: The World School case study here.

Pros and Cons