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

*Source: https://www.editorstack.cc/compare/puck-vs-storyblok — last updated 2026-08-19. Licensed CC BY 4.0 with attribution to EditorStack.*

## Summary

- Puck is a React library you embed; Storyblok is a hosted headless CMS with a visual editor that previews your front end. They appear on the same shortlist and answer different questions.
- Storyblok brings content modelling, workflow, translations and asset management; Puck brings none of those and costs nothing.
- If your customers are meant to edit, Storyblok is not deployable for that; if your content team is, Puck means building a CMS around it.

## At a glance

| Product | Type | Licence | Frameworks | Bundle (min+gzip) | Price from | Self-hosted | White label | Score |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| [Puck](https://www.editorstack.cc/libraries/puck) | library | MIT | React | 90.4 kB gzip | Free (open source) | Yes | Yes | 8 |
| [Storyblok](https://www.editorstack.cc/libraries/storyblok) | cms | Proprietary | Any (framework-agnostic) | Not measurable | Free tier, paid plans undisclosed | No | No | not scored |

## 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](/use-cases/build-vs-buy-visual-editor).

**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](/compare/storyblok-vs-sanity) and
[Contentful Studio](/compare/storyblok-vs-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](/use-cases/build-vs-buy-visual-editor) after the editor interface.


## Frequently asked questions

### Can I use Storyblok as a page builder for my customers?

No. Storyblok's editor is its own hosted application with its own accounts. It is for your organisation's content team, not for the users of your product.

### Does Puck replace a CMS?

No. Puck stores a page as JSON; it has no content model, no workflow, no translations and no asset pipeline. Teams often pair it with a CMS or a database rather than replacing one.

### Which is cheaper?

Puck is free. Storyblok's paid plans start around €99 per month per space. The comparison is not like-for-like, because Storyblok is doing considerably more.