We’re back with another head-to-head CMS matchup. This time, comparing two of the top contenders for headless CMS champion of the world, Sanity and Contentful.
And honestly, it’s not hard to see why. Both platforms are excellent in their own right, and they share a lot of similarities in approach and capabilities.
However, there are also a number of significant differences that set them apart, making each platform better suited for certain types of projects than the other.
So, if you’ve been burning the midnight oil trying to decide between these two heavyweights, you’ve come to the right place. Our Tech Lead at Nerder, Glen Hayes, takes a trip down the headless lane to walk us through the good stuff.
Overview of Sanity and Contentful
“Sanity and Contentful are leading headless CMS solutions, each offering distinct advantages. Both enable the separation of backend content management from frontend presentation, but they cater to different priorities. Sanity is ideal for projects requiring high flexibility and extensive customization, while Contentful provides robust API capabilities and scalability. Your choice should be guided by your project’s needs and how much control you want over your content architecture.”
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder
What is Sanity?
Sanity is a powerful, composable content cloud platform that enables you to build data-driven, highly customizable content architectures. With Sanity Studio—an open-source single-page application (SPA)—developers can create rich content editing experiences tailored specifically to the project at hand. Content creators can then use the Studio to maintain, update, and publish content effortlessly.
Key Features of Sanity
- Customizable Studio: Sanity Studio is completely open-source. That gives your developers complete control over how they configure and deploy stuff. The Studio is built using React, so if you’re comfortable with JavaScript frameworks, you’ll feel right at home.
- GROQ and GraphQL Support: While Contentful works with GraphQL, Sanity has its own query language, GROQ (Graph-Relational Object Queries), which is intuitive and powerful, especially for querying complex datasets.
- Real-time Collaboration: Teams can work on content simultaneously, view changes in real-time, and maintain multiple workspaces tailored to different content scenarios.
- Localization & Language Support: Sanity’s localization tools allow you to cater to a global audience with ease. You can create separate content models for different locales or manage multilingual content effortlessly.
- Self-Hosting Option: Sanity gives you the option to self-host, making it more attractive for projects that require higher levels of security or data control.
What is Contentful?
Contentful, on the other hand, takes a different approach. As a proprietary Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) CMS, Contentful focuses on ease of use and a polished experience, particularly for enterprises that need a robust, off-the-shelf solution.
Key Features of Contentful
- Enterprise-Grade Capabilities: Contentful is built to support the complexities of large organizations. You get the good stuff like content governance, role-based permissions, and advanced publishing workflows right out of the box.
- Seamless Localization: Contentful’s localization support is straightforward, with locales that can be added directly through the web-based dashboard or via API calls.
- Extensive SDKs & Integration Support: Contentful offers SDKs for various languages and frameworks, including JavaScript, PHP, Python, .NET, and Ruby. Its integrations and API-first approach make it easy to slot into existing tech stacks.
- Structured Content: Unlike Sanity’s flexible approach, the content modeling here is more rigid. That being said, it is easier for marketers and non-technical users to navigate.
We’ve covered some basics here; now, let’s get into the woods of things.
Comparing The Top Headless CMS: Sanity vs.Contentful
1. Ease of Use
Sanity Studio’s user interface is intuitive and mobile-friendly, so you get a smooth content management experience. Your developers can create custom content types, develop dynamic content models, and set up real-time collaboration between team members. Content creators can even enjoy tailored workspaces designed for specific use cases.
Contentful, meanwhile, focuses on a user-friendly interface that’s equally loved by developers and non-technical users alike. Its comprehensive documentation and interactive UI make it accessible for content editors and developers to manage content without diving into code.
What’s Better? “I’d say it’s a tie! Both platforms provide ease of use in different ways. Sanity is slightly better for developers looking for flexibility, while Contentful wins out for non-technical users. Not a major difference.”
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder
2. Flexibility
Sanity’s entire architecture is designed around flexibility, making it a favorite among developers who want total control over their content models and management workflows.
The content models are defined using JavaScript and a schema definition API, allowing developers to create intricate and nested data structures with complex relationships. Need a content model with deeply nested fields or one that ties into custom logic? No problem! Every aspect of a content model, from validation rules to custom inputs, is customizable.
Sanity also has a rich plugin ecosystem that allows you to extend the CMS’s functionality with ease. The plugins range from simple UI tweaks to complex integrations like workflow management, analytics, or third-party APIs.
Contentful’s flexibility shines when you look at it from an enterprise perspective. It gives us a set of pre-built content types and templates that can be quickly set up to get your project started. While this does limit customization in terms of creating new content structures from scratch, it does allow for rapid content modeling that works well for many traditional use cases.
Contentful’s integrations aren’t as extensive or community-driven as Sanity’s plugin ecosystem, but it does offer integrations with popular tools like Netlify, Gatsby, and Vercel.
What’s Better? “Sanity takes the crown for this, but I have to say, Contentful’s structured approach makes it a reliable option for enterprise needs.”
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder
3. Platform Customization
Sanity’s flexibility is rooted in its open-source nature and the fact that the Sanity Studio is a React application. This setup allows you to tailor every component of the CMS, from the user interface (UI) to how content is structured and presented.
Let’s say you need a content type for a product page that includes a complex feature list. Out of the box, Sanity doesn’t just offer you a text field. You can build custom input components that let your content editors select icons, add nested fields, or even use conditional logic to show or hide fields based on previous selections. Assume your product comes in different variations, like colors and sizes. You can create custom dropdown fields that dynamically change based on the selections made, giving your editors a guided experience.
Meanwhile, Contentful’s interface is not as flexible—some pages are non-editable, and its content modeling capabilities are limited to fixed UI options.
So, for the same scenario, with Contentful, while you can create a structured content model, these advanced custom fields would need to be handled outside of the CMS or using external UI extensions that don’t integrate as seamlessly.
What’s Better? “Sanity. Let’s put it this way; when it comes to customization, Sanity is like clay in a sculptor’s hands, whereas Contentful is more like a pre-cut jigsaw puzzle: you can arrange the pieces as you like, but you’re not going to reshape them.”
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder
4. Version Control
Both platforms offer version control but with some differences in retention based on pricing tiers. For Sanity, the retention times vary; the free version is 3 days; Growth is 90 days; Enterprise is 365 days.
Contentful offers content versioning, but the details aren’t as transparent. The retention period and specifics depend on your plan and usage.
What’s Better? “Sanity takes the edge here. Having clear versioning policies can help you understand exactly what you’re getting and plan accordingly. That transparency makes all the difference when managing content at scale.”
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder
5. AI Integration
Sanity leverages AI to automate repetitive content management tasks and enhance the editorial experience. With AI integration, you can:
- Automate mundane tasks like generating meta descriptions, auto-tagging content, and suggesting SEO improvements.
- Generate multiple variations of the same content based on existing data or previous drafts, which is especially useful for A/B testing and content personalization.
- Automatically translate content into different languages, making it easier to manage multilingual sites.
- Integrate AI models like GPT or custom AI workflows directly within the Studio.
Contentful has also integrated AI tools but focuses more on using AI for content recommendations and user engagement strategies. You can:
- Use AI to suggest related content or products based on user behavior and content metadata, which is particularly useful for e-commerce or media sites.
- Analyze your content and provide insights or suggestions, like improving readability or detecting missing information.
- Support integrations with third-party AI services like AWS Comprehend and Google’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) APIs, making it easy to add additional AI functionality.
What’s Better? “Both platforms are doing great things with AI, but they have different focuses—Sanity for content creation and automation, and Contentful for recommendations and insights. It really depends on what you need, so it’s a tie for us!”
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder
6. Pricing
For most people, we feel this might be the main difference, and we can see why.
Contentful’s basic version is free. The entry-level plan starts at $300/month, making it less accessible for small teams or startups.
https://www.contentful.com/pricing
Sanity, on the other hand, provides a generous free tier, which is more than enough for many sites (up to 20 user seats, 10GB of bandwidth/month, unlimited content types & locales, and a hosted real-time content database). The Growth package gets you up to 50 user seats, scheduled publishing, AI assistance, and more.
But here’s the kicker; because Sanity’s prices are based on “seats”, it can be more difficult to get an accurate estimate of how much it would cost you per month without getting a custom quote. In addition, while the basic free plan is pretty comprehensive, the add-ons may become expensive. Regardless, because of its free package, most users find that a better option.
What’s Better? “Sanity’s pricing is just more accessible for smaller teams and startups. Their free tier offers a ton of value, and even their paid plans are more flexible compared to Contentful’s high entry point.”
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder
7. Community & Support
Sanity has a thriving developer community that contributes actively to forums and open-source projects. You’ll find a wealth of resources like GROQ cheat sheets, guides, and community support through channels like Slack.
Contentful also boasts a strong community and excellent support for developers and non-technical users. It’s known for its comprehensive documentation and active discussion groups.
What’s Better? “Both communities are incredibly active and supportive. Sanity’s developer focus and open-source contributions are fantastic, while Contentful’s comprehensive documentation and broader user base are great for enterprises. It’s a tie for sure!”
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder
8. Performance and Scalability
Both Sanity and Contentful are built to scale, but their architectures differ.
Sanity’s infrastructure is hosted on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), known for its robust performance and global reach. This is why Sanity can handle high-traffic loads and deliver low-latency responses.
It uses a globally distributed Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve content quickly regardless of the user’s location. The Graph-Relational Object Queries (GROQ) language, in particular, is optimized to handle complex queries without impacting performance, making it a great fit for applications that require real-time content updates and complex data structures.
Contentful’s infrastructure is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is renowned for its high availability, performance, and scalability. It’s built to handle large content repositories and deliver content quickly across many channels.
That being said, Contentful employs API rate limits based on pricing tiers to ensure stable performance, even under heavy load. This can be a limitation for high-traffic applications but can be managed if you get higher tiers or enterprise plans that offer greater allowances.
What’s Better? “Both perform exceptionally well depending on your specific use case. Sanity is better suited for projects that require complex data models and real-time content updates, while Contentful’s AWS infrastructure makes it a solid choice for large-scale enterprises managing heavy content loads.”
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder
9. Security and Compliance
Sanity is hosted on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) which is known for its security. It’s compliant with PCI DSS, SOC 2, GDPR, & CCPA, and encrypts data, both, at rest and in transit.
Contentful, on the other hand, is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud solution known for its high-security standards. You get web application firewall, rest and transit encryption, and periodic backups.
What’s Better? “Oh, it’s a tie for sure. Both Sanity and Contentful are top-notch when it comes to security and compliance. You really can’t go wrong with either one in this department.”
Glen Hayes, Tech Lead at Nerder
Sanity vs. Contentful In a Nutshell
| Feature | Sanity | Contentful |
| Ease of Use | ✔️ Intuitive for developers | ✔️ Intuitive for non-technical users |
| Flexibility | ✔️ Highly flexible | ❌ Limited customization |
| Platform Customization | ✔️ Completely customizable | ❌ Pre-configured interface |
| Version Control | ✔️ Clear retention policies | ❔ Unclear retention details |
| AI Integration | ✔️ Task automation | ✔️ Content recommendations |
| Pricing | ✔️ More affordable | ❌ High scaling cost |
| Community & Support | ✔️ Strong developer community | ✔️ Comprehensive support |
| Performance & Scalability | ✔️ Scalable on GCP | ✔️ Scalable on AWS |
| Security & Compliance | ✔️ High compliance standards | ✔️ High compliance standards |
Final Verdict—Which One Is Right for Your Business?
So, who’s the true head honcho of headless CMS? Well, let’s just say it’s less of a knockout and more of a friendly sparring match.
Both Sanity and Contentful have their own superpowers, and it all boils down to what you’re looking for in a CMS partner.
If you’re the kind of creative agency that loves getting into the weeds and tinkering with every little detail, Sanity is your choice. It gives you the power to build a CMS that’s exactly how you want it—no compromises. Want to swap out your rich text editor for a custom one with dancing unicorns? You can do that. (Okay, maybe not dancing unicorns, but you get the point!)
On the other hand, if you want something solid, reliable, and ready to go straight out of the box, Contentful is your no-nonsense buddy in a suit, complete with a briefcase full of enterprise-ready solutions. It’s great for larger teams or businesses that need a CMS that just works, without getting too fancy. Plus, it’s got the added benefit of built-in stability and support from a big community.
So, which one gets to be crowned the Headless CMS Champion? It depends on what your clients need:
- Want customization and flexibility? Sanity is your guy.
- Prefer stability and enterprise capabilities? Contentful is the way to go.
Ultimately, whether you’re building a small website or managing a large content empire, either option will have your back. So go ahead, weigh your options, and pick the CMS that makes you go, “Yep, that’s the one.”
And when you’re ready to get rolling, give the best development team in town a call (that’s us, by the way). You don’t have to take our word for it—just check out our awesome work, and let’s talk!
