Remember the days when ‘all-in-one’ software seemed like a good idea? Today, it's a distant memory as businesses learned that ‘doing everything’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘doing everything well’ — and that monolithic systems fall short in agility and extensibility. MACH architecture (which stands for microservice, API-first, composable, headless) emerged as a welcome alternative, allowing teams to combine leading tools and frameworks to support their unique business needs and team preferences.
Contentful is at the core of many of these tech stacks, as a digital experience platform (DXP) used to create, manage, and deliver content to customers. Vercel is often selected for hosting and scaling experiences as it is extremely compatible with Contentful. This compatibility, list of joint customers, and inclusion in the MACH alliance made a partnership the logical evolution for Contentful and Vercel.
In 2023, Vercel celebrated the partnership by launching an app on the Contentful Marketplace. The return on investment began almost immediately, giving the company exposure to a new audience and enablement resources to drive adoption.
Making a name for itself with marketers and other nontechnical professionals
Vercel is deeply trusted by developers and technical teams for delivering world-class performance and developer velocity for their frontends. But today’s technology decisions rarely live in engineering alone — they’re made across digital teams that include marketing, content, and design leaders.
Partnering with Contentful helps Vercel reach this broader audience, connecting its technical excellence to the business outcomes: going-to-market faster, building better customer experiences, and delivering personalized digital experiences at scale.
Gaining credibility alongside other market-leading apps
Over 75% of Contentful users turn to Marketplace apps to customize Contentful. The Marketplace houses 125+ market-leading, purpose-built solutions for everything from AI to workflow automations — like cloud-hosting and Google Analytics, for example. Being listed amongst these leading software providers supports Vercel’s reputation as another high-caliber technology.
“We're very opinionated with the technologies that we partner with. We aren’t trying to sell our solutions together just for the sake of doing so; we want customers to benefit from best-in-class technologies that integrate seamlessly with Contentful,” shared Tristan Paule, Partner Sales Manager at Contentful. In fact, Contentful itself relies on Vercel for hosting and deployment — a strong signal of trust and technical alignment between the two platforms.
Entering into sales conversations at earlier stages
While some companies want to build out their tech stack independently, a growing number of enterprises are building them based on recommendations from their core technology vendor — whether that be a CMS, DXP, or ecommerce solution. As customers begin to consider additional microservices, Contentful might point them towards partners that offer high-quality solutions. The partnership enables Vercel to engage earlier in these conversations — and gives our joint customers a proven path to deploy high-performing digital experiences.
“Customers are looking for solutions to modernize their business, but they also need to offer a perspective on how to architect it and how to integrate it for a specific outcome,” noted Paule.
“Customers are more than likely going to go through Contentful first. They're not going to say, ‘ I chose this frontend, now what backend platform do I need?’” said Saler.
“They're utilizing Contentful for content management, eventually need to select a hosting platform, and being readily available in the Marketplace and easy to integrate supports our position," he added
Together, Contentful and Vercel have attracted 230+ joint customers, including market leaders such as BMW, Atlassian, Notion, and DoorDash. The digital transformation success stories and impressive outcomes reported by these customers are testaments to the joint power of our offerings.
Empowering customers to optimize Contentful and Vercel with enablement
Contentful also helps Vercel educate customers on the best way to manage and deploy their digital experiences via Contentful’s blog posts and documentation. Ultimately, these resources help:
Implement the tools more easily.
Increase customers' time to value.
Improve customer experiences.
Lead to deeper adoption and even expansion.
These resources are proof that Vercel and Contentful’s partnership is built on more than just technology — it’s rooted in collaboration and shared success.
“The experience has been great. Contentful created a genuine partnership where we were consulted on ideas and are able to provide feedback. It’s a very open, symbiotic relationship,” said Saler.
Learn more about becoming a Contentful Partner.
