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CRM not equal to CMS diagram
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Should your website move to Contentful now Salesforce owns it?

Salesforce’s purchase of Contentful closed on 1 September, finally giving it a CMS worth putting in front of marketing teams. Here’s what it means for your website.

Adam Griffith
Adam Griffith

19 October 2026

8 minute read

When Salesforce announced it was buying Contentful back in June, my reaction in our team Slack was that it was a smart move. Salesforce's own CMS is average, to put it nicely, and so often the question of CRM goes hand in hand with CMS.

So if your organisation runs on Salesforce, should your website now run on Contentful? For most of the organisations we work with, the answer right now is no. Being on Salesforce isn't a good enough reason to change CMS on its own, and very little about Contentful has changed since the deal closed on 1 September. For a smaller group that's already deep in Salesforce's marketing tools, it's worth starting to plan.

I should declare where we sit before going any further. Luminary is a Contentful partner. We also partner with Optimizely, Sitecore, Kentico, Umbraco and Kontent.ai. We're not a Salesforce partner, though plenty of our clients run Salesforce alongside one of those platforms.

What's changed since 1 September?

The owner, mostly.

Contentful is now part of Salesforce, which is selling it as 'Contentful, the headless CMS from Salesforce' and lists it under Marketing. Salesforce's own product page says 'strategic content needs and definitions live in Marketing Cloud, with Contentful serving as the downstream content source'. So Contentful is becoming Marketing Cloud's content layer.

The product itself hasn't changed yet. Contentful already connected to Salesforce before the deal, through its APIs and a Commerce Cloud connector. The new capabilities Salesforce promised in June, with agents assembling content for each customer in real time, haven't shipped. Its Agentforce Content Agent was still in pilot in June, and the Dreamforce recaps from mid-September mention Contentful only as a completed acquisition.

Contentful's line to existing customers hasn't moved either. "Contentful customers remain our top priority," co-founder Sascha Konietzke wrote in June.

Why Contentful will feel like the obvious choice

Salesforce has had a go at content management before, with Site.com and later Salesforce CMS, and neither became something marketing teams went looking for. Constellation Research's Liz Miller wrote that Salesforce's content capabilities "were hardly the API-first, composable architecture needed for complex digital experience deployments". Deep Analysis's Matt Mullen described Site.com as a product that "quickly floundered". Contentful fills that gap with an established headless platform that Australian brands like Chemist Warehouse and MYOB already use.

So expect Contentful to come up whenever a Salesforce organisation talks about its website, probably first from its Salesforce account team. There's a fair case for it, too. Having one vendor and one contract is simpler to buy and manage. A content model designed alongside your CRM data should make personalisation easier. And Salesforce's pitch is that its agents will eventually use your customer data and your content together, assembling the right page or email for each person.

Most of those benefits run through Marketing Cloud and Data 360, though. If Salesforce mostly runs your sales, service, students or donors, and your email and personalisation happen somewhere else, most of the advantage doesn't reach you. Changing CMS in that situation means paying for an integration you won't use.

Which group are you in?

You run Salesforce's marketing tools and you're already on Contentful

You're who this deal was built for, and you don't need to do much yet. Salesforce has said Contentful will be connected natively across its platform, so your journeys and agents will be first in line for whatever ships. Until it does, don't rebuild anything around features that are still in pilot. Use your next renewal to get roadmap commitments with dates on them in writing (Gartner's first take on the deal told buyers to 'negotiate flexible renewal terms'). And spend the time getting your content model to line up with the customer data you already hold, which pays off whatever Salesforce ships.

Salesforce runs your CRM, and your website runs on something else

A lot of our clients are in this group. Salesforce runs your sales, service, fundraising or student management, and your website runs on Optimizely, Kentico, Umbraco or Sitecore. For you, the deal changes very little. Your website already talks to Salesforce through forms, APIs and middleware, and any decent CMS can do that. If your platform is mid-life and doing its job, an acquisition isn't a reason to replatform.

When it is time to replatform, put Contentful on the shortlist and judge it the same way as everything else on the list, on what it does for your content and your team. Be honest with yourselves about headless, too. With a headless CMS, your website's front end is a separate application that someone has to build, host and maintain, and how much your marketers can do without a developer depends on how well that's done. Some teams have the developers and the budget for that. Others end up waiting in a queue for changes they used to make themselves.

You're on Contentful, but Salesforce isn't in your stack

Maybe your email runs through HubSpot or Braze, and you picked Contentful partly because it plugged into anything. Nothing breaks tomorrow, and rushing a migration because of a headline would create more risk than staying put. But you're no longer the customer Contentful's roadmap is built around. Salesforce says Contentful is 'highly extensible' and works with third-party tools, and I believe it, for now. Over the next few years, though, I'd expect the engineering effort to follow Salesforce's growth.

So make your next renewal a deliberate decision, and ask for pricing and terms in writing early. Work out what it would cost to leave. The content itself is portable, but the integrations and workflows built around one vendor's way of doing things take real effort to move. And rival vendors are already offering switching deals, which gives you something to bargain with whichever way you go.

You're about to move to Salesforce

Make the CRM decision on its own merits. It'll shape how you run sales and service for years, and your CMS is one integration among many. If Salesforce wins, by all means put Contentful on the CMS shortlist, then test it against your real content and your real team. Ask for reference customers running the two together in production. And if there's a bundle on the table, ask what it'll cost at the first renewal as well as in year one.

Where Contentful goes from here

Some of Salesforce's acquisitions became core products under new names. ExactTarget became Marketing Cloud, and Demandware became Commerce Cloud. Others, like MuleSoft, Tableau and Slack, kept their name and kept selling to organisations that don't use Salesforce at all. And some were absorbed or wound down, like Airkit, which can no longer be bought on its own, and Quip, whose customers can't renew after 1 March 2027.

So far, Contentful looks headed somewhere between the first two. It's kept its name. But it's been filed under Marketing as the content source for Marketing Cloud, and that's a part of Salesforce that needs a lift. In the three months to 31 January 2026, Salesforce's marketing and commerce revenue went backwards, down one percent in constant currency, while its other main product lines grew. Its CFO, Robin Washington, did point to "early signs of recovery in marketing" in August. She also said it was too early to call it a trend.

My read is that the Contentful name will stick around and its independence will fade slowly. Salesforce needs Contentful to work, so I'd expect plenty of investment in it. Customers outside Salesforce will probably feel the change at renewal before they see it in the product.

Who signs off when the agent publishes?

Salesforce's plan is for Agentforce to query, assemble and deliver content on the fly, with no manual publishing step in between. That sounds great in a keynote.

The publishing step is where someone notices the interest rate is wrong, or that a claim never went past legal. For our clients in financial services and aged care, that check is part of compliance. A page or email assembled for one person at a time is also harder to review, because nobody sees the same version twice.

To be fair to Salesforce, its own Contentful page talks about workflows that define 'where AI proposes, where it executes alone, and where a person signs off'. So the controls will be there. Deciding where the lines go is your job, and it's worth doing before anyone switches the agent on. Work out which content an agent can assemble and send on its own, which needs a person to approve it, and which it shouldn't touch. Anything with a price, a rate, a health claim or a regulated disclosure belongs in the last two.

The same goes for every platform that's adding agents, including the ones we work with every day. A website is the end point of thousands of decisions. An agent assembling pages for each visitor still makes every one of them, and where it lacks context, it makes them from defaults.

So, should your website move?

For most organisations, not yet.

I still think buying Contentful was a smart move for Salesforce. It gives Salesforce a CMS worth putting in front of marketing teams, and a reason to raise it in every CRM conversation. Whether it's a smart move for you depends on which group you're in.

If you're deep in Marketing Cloud, start planning, and get Salesforce to commit to dates. If Salesforce runs your sales, service, students or donors and your website is doing its job, there's no reason to move yet. I'll revisit that when the Marketing Cloud and Data 360 integration has a release date, the Content Agent is out of pilot, and we've seen what Contentful costs at renewal for customers outside Salesforce.

So often the question of CRM goes hand in hand with CMS, and now Salesforce has an answer to both. It's still worth answering them one at a time. If you're weighing up either, we're happy to talk it through, whichever platform you end up on.

Adam Griffith
Adam Griffith

19 October 2026

8 minute read

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