Contently: Reviews, Pricing, and Alternatives

If you are reading this review you probably want to know if Contently.com is a good content writing service and if you should use them. If so, you are in the right place. To help you make up your mind we decided to take an in-depth look at the company, their services, their prices, and if they have a track record of getting their clients results.

Contently overview

Founded in 2010, Contently is an online content management platform, which helps you organize, assign, and manage your whole content marketing plan all from one place.

Contently offers clients the technology (software) to plan and manage their content marketing, access to a team of expert freelancers who can produce the content, and also provides you with strategic services to help you plan and edit all of your content. It is essentially a ‘content marketing team as a service’ offering so that you have an outsourced content marketing department for your company without having to hire an in-house team.

When you use Contently you can also integrate the platform with other apps that you use such as Mailchimp and Google’s suite of products. This provides further opportunities to automate many of your business processes to save you time and money.

Contently is not suitable for small enterprises, agencies, and publishers largely due to the high fees that it charges but also because the advanced functionality of their platform is not required by smaller organizations. It is best suited for large and well-established organizations who are looking for a more efficient way to manage their content marketing efforts.

Contently reviews

Contently reviews on G2.com are particularly good. They currently have an overall 4 out of 5 stars rating as of December 2020.

The vast majority of reviews are 4 or 5-star reviews with only a small number of 1-star reviews which suggests most clients have a positive opinion of the platform.

The positive reviews mention that the company has great customer service, an easy-to-use platform, that the ability to integrate other apps makes it very productive to use, and the content produced by their freelancers is of a high-quality. The only negative feedback is about whether the high price tag is worth paying as other options cost less.

Features 

• One-Stop-Shop – you can manage your whole content marketing operation from the Contently website.
• Access to Quality Freelancers – you have access to an on-demand group of high-quality freelancers who can produce content for you quickly. They can write blog articles, e-books, press releases, SEO content and more.
• Automate Tasks – Contently allows you to connect their platform up with other top services that you use including Mailchimp, Facebook, WordPress, and Google.
• Transparent Pricing – even though it is expensive to use, the company is very transparent about how much it will cost you.

Pros

• Contently only works with freelancers (including experienced journalists and bloggers) that are highly experienced in writing and producing content. This means you can sure the content you receive will be unique and written to a very high standard.
• Contently gives you all of the tools required to plan, produce, publish, and optimize your website content. It is essentially an on-demand outsourced content marketing team for your business.
• The company has very good customer service and as part of joining their platform you are given a dedicated content management team who can help you to generate content topic ideas, edit your content, and they assign your work to one of their freelancers for you. This means you don’t have to spend any time vetting freelancers as Contently has already done it for you.
• Contently helps you to automate several business functions to make your business more profitable through an increase in productivity.
• Contently freelancers can take care of all of your content marketing needs – their team of experts can write content, produce video, produce/edit images, and much more.

Cons

• Contently is an expensive platform to use, and on top of platform fees, you have to pay quite high fees for freelancers to produce content for you. However, it should be noted the quality of their freelancers is universally considered very high so you can be sure you will receive great content. 
• As much as it is a great platform with lots of features, the downside of this is that you will need to be trained in how to use it and possibly train some of your staff members as well, which can be time-consuming and costly.
• Using Contently to outsource some or all of your content marketing needs can be great especially for start-ups and company’s who lack the internal resources to manage it themselves. However, if in the future you want to bring these functions back in-house it might be very difficult as you will be very reliant on the Contently platform by that stage.

Prices

Contently is aimed at large enterprises and the prices reflect that. It is hard to give exact prices since every business will have different needs, but you can expect to pay between $3000 to $25,000+ per month for access to their platform and a dedicated content manager.

On top of this fee, you also need to pay additional fees for the work freelancers do. These fees seem to be in line with industry rates for experienced freelancers.

Top Contently.com alternatives

Contently is an all-in-one content marketing service that is built for large enterprises with high budgets. However, there are some other great options for you to consider even if you do match their target market. Please check out our reviews of some of those options by following the links below. 

Final thoughts

If you are looking for a one-stop-shop for all your content marketing needs then Contently is a great solution for you, as long as you are prepared to pay the relatively high fees they charge. There are other options that you can use that don’t cost as much so we recommend you do your research before signing up for Contently.