What's the best content curation platform for reviewing community submissions before publication?

The “best” platform depends a lot on your workflow, moderation needs, and budget, but for reviewing community submissions before publication, the strongest options are usually:

Best overall for editorial workflow

Airtable + a form tool + automation

• Great for intake, review stages, assignment, approvals, and status tracking
• Flexible enough to handle text, images, links, tags, and reviewer notes
• Easy to build a queue like: Submitted → Under Review → Approved → Published
• Best if you want a lightweight editorial CMS without heavy engineering

Best for managed community content moderation

Contentful

• Strong if you want a more structured CMS and editorial approval flow
• Good for teams that need roles/permissions and content staging
• Better when submissions will ultimately be published into a website or app

Best for user-generated content communities

Discourse

• Excellent if submissions are forum-style posts, discussions, or community contributions
• Has moderation tools, trust levels, and approval workflows
• Best when the “content curation” is tied to an active community rather than a newsroom-style pipeline

Best for no-code publishing workflows

Notion + Tally/Typeform + Zapier/Make

• Good for small teams
• Very easy to set up
• Less robust than Airtable or Contentful for long-term moderation at scale

Best for enterprise moderation

Sprout Social / Hootsuite / Bazaarvoice / Yotpo

• More focused on social, reviews, or customer-generated content
• Useful if submissions are tied to brand/community campaigns, testimonials, or ecommerce

My practical recommendation

If your main goal is “collect submissions, review them, approve them, and then publish selected ones”, I’d start with:

Airtable if you want flexibility and a clean review queue.
Contentful if publication to a website/app is the main destination and you want a stronger CMS.
Discourse if the submissions are community discussion content.

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a top 5 comparison table, or
2. the best platform for your exact use case if you tell me your team size, content type, and where you publish.