Contentful vs Sanity

If you are a large organisation with several brands, markets or business units, a procurement process and a need for roles, workflows and an uptime commitment, Contentful is the safer bet. It is a mature, vendor-run platform where content types are configured in a web interface, and its Enterprise plan is built around governance.

If your team has developers who want the content model in the repository and editors who would benefit from an editing interface shaped around their work, choose Sanity. Its Studio is an open-source React application you configure in TypeScript, several people can edit the same document in real time, and the entry price is per seat rather than a flat platform fee.

Both are good products, and neither will hold back a typical marketing site. The deciding questions are who will own the content model, how fast your team will grow, and whether you want a platform you configure or a toolkit you build on.

Contentful is a hosted headless CMS: it stores structured content and delivers it through APIs to any front end, a website, an app or a kiosk. Content lives in spaces, each with its own content types, environments and records. Editors work in Contentful’s web app; developers read content through the Content Delivery API, unpublished drafts through the Content Preview API, and can also use a GraphQL Content API generated from the content model.

The company positions the product as a full content platform. Around the core, it sells Personalization, a visual page-building canvas called Studio and AI Actions, all priced on top of an Enterprise plan. Its strengths are maturity, governance and a large partner ecosystem. The trade-off is a pricing structure that jumps quickly once you leave the free tier, and a model where you configure the platform rather than shape it in code.

Sanity splits the CMS in two. The Content Lake is the hosted database that stores your documents and serves them through APIs, queried with GROQ, Sanity’s own query language. Sanity Studio is the editing interface: an open-source React application released under the MIT licence, which you configure in TypeScript and can deploy on Sanity’s hosting or alongside your site.

Because the schema is code, content types are versioned, reviewed in pull requests and deployed like the rest of the project. Editors get real-time collaboration, with several people in the same document at once, and visual editing through the Presentation tool, which shows the live site next to the fields and lets you click a block on the page to edit it. Rich text is stored as Portable Text, a JSON format you can render anywhere. The trade-off: Sanity asks for a developer to set up and evolve the Studio, and the Content Lake itself is a proprietary hosted service, not something you can run yourself.

The criteria we look at when a client hesitates between the two. The last column says which tool has the edge, from our experience on headless projects.

This is the most structural difference between the two. In Contentful, a content type is created in the web app: you add fields, set validations and link types together by clicking. A marketer or a product owner can follow and even adjust the model. Changes can also be scripted with migration tools, and environments let you test a model change before it reaches production. Each Starter Space on the free and Lite plans comes with 25 content types, 2 environments and 10,000 records, which is plenty for a marketing site and tight for a large catalogue.

In Sanity, the schema is TypeScript in your repository. Every field, validation rule and custom input is code, reviewed in a pull request and rolled back like any other change. That makes complex models easier to keep consistent, and it lets developers build custom inputs, previews and tools inside the Studio. The other side of the coin is that nobody changes the model without a developer.

Our view: if the model is stable and owned by a content team, Contentful’s interface is a comfort. If the model evolves with the product and lives next to the front-end code, Sanity’s schema-as-code removes a whole class of drift between the CMS and the site.

Contentful gives every editor the same clean, form-based web app. It is predictable and easy to train on, and paid plans add comments, task management, scheduled publishing and live collaboration. For richer page assembly, Contentful sells Studio, a drag-and-drop canvas, as a separate product on Enterprise contracts.

Sanity Studio starts plainer but goes further once configured. Several editors can work in the same document at the same time and see each other’s changes field by field. The Presentation tool opens the real site next to the form: you click a heading on the page and land on the right field, with the preview updating as you type. Developers can add dashboards, custom inputs or whole React tools to the Studio, so a product team, a newsroom or a marketing team can each get an interface shaped around their own work.

In practice, editors with a simple publishing routine are happy in either tool. Teams that publish a lot, work together on the same pages or need visual context tend to prefer a well-configured Sanity Studio, provided someone builds it properly.

Contentful exposes a family of REST APIs, one for published content, one for previews, one for managing content and an Images API, plus a GraphQL Content API whose schema is generated from your content model. The documentation is extensive, SDKs exist for most languages, and the API design has been stable for years, which matters to enterprise IT teams. The GraphQL API documents its own limits, such as a cap on query complexity and a default rate limit for uncached requests.

Sanity’s main query language is GROQ, which lets you filter, join references and reshape the response in a single query, so the front end receives exactly the JSON it needs. A GraphQL API is also available. Because the schema is TypeScript, Sanity can generate types for both the schema and your GROQ queries, catching errors before they reach production.

Both work well with Next.js, Astro or any modern framework. Developers used to REST and GraphQL feel at home in Contentful on day one. Developers who value type safety and precise queries usually prefer Sanity after a short learning curve on GROQ.

Contentful has localization built into the content model: each field can be translated per locale, with fallbacks. The number of locales is part of the plan, 2 on Free and 3 on Lite, with custom numbers on Enterprise. Its Enterprise Spaces add locale-based publishing, localized workflows and connected spaces, designed for groups running many brands or regions from one platform. This is where Contentful is at its strongest.

Sanity does not count locales in its pricing. You choose how to translate, field by field or document by document, usually with official plugins, and you can model several sites or brands in the same dataset or across datasets. The flexibility is real, but the structure is yours to design, and the governance features that large groups expect, such as custom roles and SSO, sit on the Enterprise plan.

For a bilingual company site, both are comfortable. For thirty markets with local teams and approval chains, Contentful’s ready-made structure saves design work; Sanity can do it, with more decisions to make up front.

Both vendors now present themselves as AI-ready content platforms, with different packaging. Contentful sells AI Actions, which automate content creation, translation and transformation, on Enterprise plans, with included credits and pay-as-you-go or pre-paid options beyond that. Its Personalization product also uses AI to suggest experiences and audience segments.

Sanity includes AI credits in every plan, 1,000 a month on Free and Growth and 5,000 on Enterprise, along with embeddings queries for semantic search and serverless Functions that react to content changes. Its Content Agent, included on every plan, can draft, translate, audit and bulk-edit content while respecting the schema; extra AI credits cost $0.05 each on Growth.

For a team that wants to try AI-assisted editing without an enterprise contract, Sanity is the easier starting point. For a large organisation that wants AI inside a governed content operation, Contentful’s offer is designed for that buyer.

The two pricing models are built differently, and that is often what decides the choice. Contentful charges a flat fee per plan. The Free plan includes 10 users, 2 roles, 2 locales, 100,000 API calls and 50 GB of CDN bandwidth a month, with hard caps. The Lite plan is listed at $300 a month for 20 users, 3 roles, 3 locales, 1 million API calls and 100 GB of bandwidth. Beyond that, an extra Lite Space costs $850 a month, overages are $5 per million API calls and $0.15 per GB, and Enterprise is quoted.

Sanity charges per seat. The Free plan allows up to 20 seats with Administrator and Viewer roles, 2 public datasets and 10,000 documents, with no overage. Growth costs $15 per seat per month, billed monthly only on self-serve, for up to 50 seats, 5 roles, private datasets and 25,000 documents, with usage-based overages and add-ons such as a $299 monthly quota pack. Enterprise is quoted and adds SSO, custom roles and an SLA.

The practical consequence: for a small team of 3 to 10 editors, Sanity Growth costs a fraction of Contentful Lite. For a team of fifty, the gap narrows, and at enterprise scale both are negotiated contracts where governance and support matter more than the list price.

Contentful and Sanity are both hosted services: your content lives in their databases, and the bill follows your usage and your team size. Two open-source CMS take a different route.

Payload is a TypeScript CMS released under the MIT licence that installs directly inside a Next.js application. The admin panel, the API and the website share one codebase, and the content sits in your own database, Postgres or MongoDB, on the hosting of your choice, in Europe if you need it. It is the stack we use for our own site and for client projects that need custom features or full ownership of the data. There is no per-seat fee; you pay for hosting and for the developers who maintain it.

Strapi is the other well-known open-source headless CMS, with a visual content-type builder and a self-hosted community edition, plus a managed Strapi Cloud. It suits teams that want an admin interface to model content without writing the schema in code.

The trade-off is the same for both: you gain control and predictable costs, and you take on hosting, updates and security, or delegate them to an agency.

Contentful wins in large organisations. Choose it when several brands, markets or business units must share one content platform with clear roles, approval workflows and locale-based publishing, when your IT team expects a vendor with an uptime SLA, 24/7 support and professional services, or when procurement prefers one enterprise contract to a set of tools.

It is also a sensible pick when the content model will be managed by non-developers after launch, since types and fields are edited in the interface, and when your developers prefer standard REST and GraphQL APIs to learning a new query language.

The limits show up on budget. The free plan is generous for a prototype, but the step to Lite, then to extra spaces or Enterprise, is steep for a small or mid-sized company.

Sanity wins when developers and editors work closely together. Choose it when the content model evolves with the product and belongs in the repository, when editors need visual editing and real-time collaboration, or when you want to build custom tools into the editing interface instead of adapting your process to a fixed one.

It is also the more accessible option for startups and growing teams: the free plan covers a real project, and paying per seat keeps the bill proportional while the team is small. Typed schemas and GROQ queries make it a natural fit for Next.js or Astro sites where performance and precise data matter.

The limits: someone has to build and maintain the Studio, which makes Sanity a poor fit for a team without developer access. The per-seat model also adds up as the number of editors grows, and the Content Lake cannot be self-hosted.

What we recommend when a client asks, and why. We build headless sites in Next.js, mostly with Payload, and we integrate Contentful or Sanity when a client already uses one or when the context calls for a hosted platform.

Both platforms store structured content as JSON and both have export tools, so a migration is a data project, not a rewrite of your writing. The work sits in three places. First, the content model: Contentful types become Sanity schemas in TypeScript, or the other way round, and it is the right moment to clean up fields nobody uses. Second, rich text: Contentful’s rich text and Sanity’s Portable Text are both structured JSON but not identical, so a conversion script maps blocks, marks, links and embedded entries. Third, assets and references, which need new IDs and a mapping table.

The front end changes too. Queries written for Contentful’s REST or GraphQL APIs are rewritten in GROQ, or the reverse, and preview and webhooks are reconnected. If the site stays on the same URLs, search engines see no change; if URLs move, every old address gets a 301 redirect.

Run both CMS in parallel for a short period, freeze edits on the old one before the final import, and plan a content check with the editors before switching DNS or deploys.

A quick summary of where each platform is strong and where it holds you back.

Pick Contentful if you are a large organisation that needs one governed content platform for many teams, brands or markets, with a vendor contract, an SLA and an interface where non-developers manage the model. Pick Sanity if your developers want the schema in code and your editors deserve a studio built around their work, with a free plan that covers a real project and per-seat pricing that stays proportionate.

Neither is a wrong choice for a marketing site. If what you really want is to own the CMS, the data and the hosting, look beyond both at an open-source option such as Payload or Strapi. And if nobody technical will touch the site after launch, a visual platform like Webflow may serve you better than any headless CMS.

Prices, limits and features were checked on these pages on 11 November 2026.