Puck vs Storyblok: an editor in your product or a CMS for your team

Two different users

Storyblok's user is your content team. They log into Storyblok, see a preview of your site, click a section and edit its fields. Everything about the product — roles, workflow, translations, asset library — is built for an internal editorial process.

Puck's user is whoever you put it in front of, because it is a React component in your application. That is usually your own customers.

Once you know which of those you are building for, the comparison is nearly over. What follows is for the case where you genuinely could go either way, which happens when the "customers" are internal teams in a large organisation.

Where Storyblok wins

Content modelling. Typed components, references, reusable content. Puck stores a page and nothing else; relationships between content are your database's problem.

Editorial workflow. Drafts, releases, scheduling, roles and audit. Building even a subset of this on Puck is months.

Translations. A managed multi-language workflow, which is the single most underestimated requirement in content projects.

Assets. Upload, storage, transformation and a picker — the 80-hour line in our calculator.

Nothing to run. Hosted, with the vendor's uptime rather than yours.

Where Puck wins

It ships inside your product. Multi-tenant, per-customer editing under your brand — impossible with a hosted CMS.

Free and MIT licensed. No per-space pricing, which matters if you would otherwise need many spaces.

Your data. Pages live in your database, joined to your other tables, with no vendor in the render path.

Composition, not just editing. Puck users drag components onto a canvas; Storyblok's visual editor is click-to-edit on a preview, which is a different interaction and a common source of disappointed expectations.

No vendor limits. No API request allowances, no bandwidth tiers.

The pairing nobody mentions

These are not mutually exclusive, and the combination is common: Storyblok for structured marketing content managed by your team, Puck for the in-product page composition your customers do.

Trying to force one to do both jobs is where evaluations go wrong — a CMS bolted into your product as a customer-facing editor, or a page builder gradually accumulating content-modelling features it was never designed for.

Migration

There is no direct path. Storyblok stories are typed content in a vendor model; Puck data is a component tree in your database. Moving either way is an export, a transformer per content type, and a rebuild of whatever workflow features you were using.

Verdict

Your content team editing your marketing site: Storyblok, compared against Sanity and Contentful Studio rather than against a library.

Your customers composing pages inside your product: Puck, with the asset and permissions work priced into the plan.

Decision checklist

1. Who edits — our content team or our customers? A hosted CMS cannot serve the second.
2. Does content get reused across pages and surfaces? Reuse is what a content model is for, and Puck has none.
3. How many spaces would we need? Storyblok bills per space, which changes the arithmetic for agencies immediately.
4. Do we need translation workflow? Building it on Puck is a project; Storyblok includes it.
5. Are we prepared to build asset management? Our calculator prices it at 80 hours, and Storyblok includes it.

The number that matters

80 hours for asset management — the line teams forget when they compare a free library with a paid CMS. Upload, storage, thumbnails, a picker, deletion and quota are solved in Storyblok and unsolved in Puck, and they are the second-largest line item in our build-versus-buy model after the editor interface.