Vetted talent network of 165,000+ creators including CFAs, MDs, and FINRA-registered reviewers for regulated industries
Editorial review·Last reviewed June 2026·By the GrowthManager.ai editorial team
Contently review
Visit contently.com ↗Starts at
$500/mo
Founded
2010
HQ
New York, NY
Funding
$19.2M
Platforms
4
G2 rating
—
Our take, in one paragraph
Contently is one of the more established names in this category, dating back to 2010. Pricing starts at $500/mo across 3 tiers. Named customers include RBC, American Express, Coast Capital and 5 more. Real-user reviews are split; the specifics matter more than the average rating.
In their own words: Enterprise content marketing platform with freelance creator network.
Who Contently is for, and who it isn't
Best for
- Enterprise procurement. Entry tier at $500/mo is built for teams with budget, dedicated CSMs, and an annual contract motion.
- Engineering-led marketing teams. If you have a dev team and want a composable CMS, this is the right primitive.
- Reference-driven buyers. 8 named customers means you can find a peer who's used it, which matters in enterprise procurement.
Not for
- Small teams and bootstrappers. The cheapest tier is $500/mo — if your AI search budget is under $300/mo, this isn't the right fit.
- Marketing-led teams without engineers. Headless CMS without an engineering partner becomes a six-month migration project.
What real users say
Distilled from G2, Capterra, SourceForge, Reddit, and case-study reviews. Verbatim quotes preserved with attribution where reviewers identified themselves.
What people praise
Compliance review workflows built for financial services, healthcare, and insurance content
Dedicated managing editors are assigned to each account, not just self-serve software
Where it falls short
No public pricing, requires sales call to learn cost
Entry point reported at $500/mo with enterprise contracts $50K to $200K annually, out of reach for SMBs
Implementation fees reported $1,000 to $50,000 on top of subscription
Notable case studies
Customers who've publicly shared specific outcomes from using Contently.
UPMC
Healthcare
UPMC's main site and HealthBeat combined for over 23.6 million sessions, with users across the two sites taking over 144,000 actions to call a doctor, schedule an appointment, or find out more about the COVID-19 vaccine. UPMC needed to produce high-quality, helpful content in a matter of days, or hours during the pandemic, compared to their previous approval timeline.
Read the case study ↗Marriott
Hospitality
$3 million in tracked bookings for Marriott. Marriott's team of seven full-time employees had a centralized place to communicate, track progress, approve work, and analyze each project's reach. Marriott can track performance at a granular level, knowing how many hotel rooms are visited from posts and how many room nights were booked as a result.
Read the case study ↗How Contently actually works
The methodology behind the product, in plain English. Helpful if you're comparing technical approaches.
- Data source
- Contently combines an end-to-end content marketing platform, a proven strategic methodology, and a curated talent network of over 160,000 vetted freelance creators into one holistic solution. Talent network sources from premium publications including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
- Update frequency
- Real-time workflow updates as freelancers pitch, write, edit, and publish. Analytics refresh continuously to track content performance and ROI. AI Studio agents operate within editor-led publish workflows in real time.
- Scope and limits
- Contently is headquartered in New York City and works with hundreds of enterprises like American Express, Bayer, Dell, JP Morgan Chase, Marriott, and Walmart. The platform is positioned for regulated industries including financial services and healthcare, where fact-checking and compliance are critical.
- Technical approach
- Contently uses programmatic matching technology combined with a healthy dose of human judgment to match clients with the right content creators. The platform aligns your team to make smart content recommendations that improve ROI, AI optimizes content for back-end concerns like SEO and brand guidelines, and comprehensive analytics help brands determine which content pieces and channels are most successful. Contently matches freelancers with new and existing accounts by carefully evaluating portfolios, looking at the work uploaded, the clients worked with, and fields of expertise. AI Studio adds six specialized agents (Brand Voice, SEO Optimization, Quality Assurance, Fact Check, LLM Optimization, AI Detectability) gated behind human editor review.
Pricing
Pulled from Contently's public pricing page on 2026-06-07. We re-pull hourly.
Basic
$500/mo+
Pricing not public, requires sales call; reported entry point per third-party reviewers
- Content platform access
- Talent network access
- Editorial calendar
Plus
$2,000/mo+
Reported mid-tier per third-party pricing analysts
- Compliance review workflows
- Managing editor support
- Brand voice tools
Enterprise
$5,000/mo+
Custom quote; implementation fees reported $1,000 to $50,000; annual contracts $50K to $200K+
- Talent API
- AI Studio
- LLM Optimization for AEO
- FINRA-registered reviewers
- Dedicated managing editor
What's shipped recently
Launches from the last 12 months. A signal of what they're focused on.
- 2025
AI Studio multi-agent content creation
Contently launched AI Studio with six specialized agents including Brand Voice, SEO Optimization, Quality Assurance, Fact Check, LLM Optimization, and AI Detectability, all named, audited, and reviewed by human editors before publish. Production timelines compressed by 14x and ROI improvements exceeding 450% in some cases.
- 2025
LLM Optimization Blueprint service
The LLM Optimization Blueprint service gets client content into LLMs and AI search results, which is fundamentally different from traditional SEO focused on keywords and backlinks.
- Dec 23, 2025
AI-Native Content Management Platform vision
Contently published its vision for what an AI-native content management platform should actually do, outlining how editors stay in control as conductors and AI acts as an instrument in their orchestra, guiding research, shaping narrative, and ensuring alignment with strategic goals and brand voice.
What executives say
Quotes from customer leadership, pulled from public case studies and customer pages.
“Contently helped streamline the process onto one platform. We could submit and accept pitches for stories, find talented writers to hire, and manage the editing and overall production process in a more efficient manner. Once Marriott Traveler took off, we started enlisting other brands within the Marriott portfolio to also use Contently as a way to further streamline the editorial process.”
“When marketers say they can't quantify ROI, it drives me crazy.”
Who's behind it
- Co-founder and CEO
- Co-founder
- Dave GoldbergCo-founder
Where they show up
Their best content, conferences, or signature analysis, in case you want to learn how their team thinks.
- Blog postWhat an AI-Native Content Management Platform Should Actually DoDec 23, 2025
- Strategic guideWhat is AISEO? A Strategic Guide for Marketing and Content Professionals in 2025Oct 30, 2025
- Industry analysisThe Top 10 AI SEO Tools Transforming Content Strategy (2025 Edition)May 13, 2025
Integrations
Native integrations grouped by category. Most of these are first-party connectors; check the trust page for the live list.
Other
Talent APIMCPWordPressAdobe Experience ManagerMarketoHubSpotSalesforce Marketing Cloud
Security and compliance
What your security review will care about, sourced from Contently's trust page where one exists.
SOC 2 Type 2
ISO 27001
GDPR
HIPAA
If not Contently, then what?
The named alternatives we'd shortlist next, scored against Contently on the dimension each one wins.
Compare Contently head-to-head
We've published detailed side-by-side comparisons against the other tools in the space. Pick a competitor below for the full editorial breakdown.
Contently vs Contentful
Contently vs Sanity
Contently vs Storyblok
Contently vs Webflow
Contently vs AccuRanker
Contently vs Advanced Web Ranking
Our recommendation: GrowthManager.ai
Contently is a great tool if you have an in-house team to act on the data. GrowthManager.ai gives you the same tracking and acts on it. We write 100 articles per month, configure the schema and llms.txt, build backlinks, and seed Reddit and Quora. $999/mo, managed end-to-end.
Frequently asked questions
What does Contently do?
Enterprise content marketing platform with freelance creator network. Pricing starts at $500/mo.
How much does Contently cost?
Contently starts at $500/mo and runs across 3 tiers. For comparison, GrowthManager.ai is $999/mo for the full managed program (tracking + content + infrastructure + distribution), so if you'd otherwise pay Contently and hire an agency to act on the data, we're usually cheaper end-to-end.
What's the best alternative to Contently?
Depends on what you're trying to do. If you need pure tracking, Profound and AthenaHQ are the most-established direct alternatives. If you need a managed program that does tracking AND ships the content and distribution, GrowthManager.ai is the editorial pick on this site (and yes, we publish this review).
Is Contently worth it?
For teams that already have in-house content production and just need a measurement layer, Contently can be worth it. The shortcoming most users mention is that Contently tells you what's wrong without fixing it; you still need a team or an agency to act on the recommendations. GrowthManager.ai bundles the measurement and the team at $999/mo, which usually beats stacking Contently plus an agency.
Does Contently do content creation, infrastructure, and distribution?
No. Contently is a measurement and reporting tool. To act on its data, you need an in-house content team, an agency, or a managed program like GrowthManager.ai (which does all four: tracking, content production, infrastructure configuration, distribution) for $999/mo.
Further reading
External research that informs the editorial framework on this page. We cite these openly because the framework is meant to be auditable.
- Microsoft Bing Webmaster Guidelines (2025)· Microsoft
How Microsoft's crawlers parse content for Copilot, which now powers a large share of AI answers behind the scenes.
- Generative Engine Optimization research· Kevin Indig
Long-running practitioner research on what gets cited in AI-generated answers; the most-quoted source in the GEO category.
- Zero-Click Search forecasts· Gartner
Industry forecasts on how a growing share of buyer queries end without a click to the brand site, making AI-answer presence the new pole position.
- Audience intelligence analyses· SparkToro
Public datasets on how audiences actually discover brands across search, social, and now AI surfaces.
- Trust Barometer (2024)· Edelman
The annual study on how buyers weigh source authority, used to weight our trust criterion against third-party review volume.
Disclosure
GrowthManager.ai makes a competing product, so this review is not neutral. Pricing was pulled from Contently's public pricing page or triangulated from third-party reviews when not public. Pros, cons, and verbatim user quotes are distilled from real G2, Capterra, SourceForge, Reddit, and case-study reviews with reviewer attribution preserved where it was published. Case-study metrics come from Contently's own customer pages. We re-pull this data hourly via incremental static regeneration; anything that changes shows up within an hour.