Friday, February 13, 2026
Contentful vs Sanity: Which CMS Best Supports Your Team?
The short answer: it depends on how your team works, not on which platform has a longer feature list. Contentful and Sanity are both mature, enterprise-grade headless CMS platforms capable of powering complex B2B websites. Choosing between them based on spec sheets alone is how teams end up re-platforming two years later.
Contentful is built for structured governance. It gives teams with large martech ecosystems, multiple content contributors and defined editorial workflows a clear operating model out of the box. Sanity is built for flexibility. It gives teams that prioritize developer customization, real-time collaboration and rapid content modeling a platform they can shape to fit almost any use case.
The real question isn't which CMS is better. It's which one removes friction from the way your team actually creates, manages and publishes content every day. That alignment between platform architecture and team operating model is what separates a CMS that accelerates your content operations from one that quietly becomes the bottleneck everyone works around.
This guide compares Contentful and Sanity across the dimensions that matter most: editorial workflows, content modeling, governance, integrations and long-term scalability. The goal isn't to pick a winner. It's to give you a framework for choosing the CMS that fits your team's structure, technical capacity and growth trajectory.
Contentful vs Sanity Comparison Overview
| Factor | Contentful | Sanity |
|---|---|---|
| Editorial Workflows | Structured draft-review-publish flow with content scheduling and polished defaults | Real-time multiplayer editing with a fully customizable Studio interface |
| Content Modeling | Visual, governed content types with field-level validation and field-level localization | Schema-as-code with Portable Text, flexible structures and document-level localization |
| Developer Experience | Mature REST and GraphQL APIs, visual model management, App Framework extensions | Open-source React Studio, GROQ query language, full codebase ownership |
| Governance | Built-in roles, permissions, environments and spaces at the enterprise tier | Custom roles, document-level permissions and workflow plugins configured to fit your model |
| Integrations | Curated marketplace with pre-built connectors; Compose and Launch for orchestration | API-driven custom integrations with webhooks and real-time listeners |
| Pricing Model | Tiered plans based on spaces, environments and users | Usage-based pricing that scales with API requests, bandwidth and dataset size |
| Best Fit | Large editorial teams, defined workflows, broad martech ecosystems | Developer-strong teams, complex content needs, rapid iteration culture |
Editorial Workflows: How Each Platform Shapes the Day-to-Day Publishing Experience
The CMS your team uses every day shapes how fast you can publish and how independently editors can work. This section focuses on the editing and publishing experience itself: what it feels like to create, collaborate on and ship content in each platform.
Contentful's Structured Publishing Model
Contentful's editorial interface provides a clean, standardized content entry experience. Editors work within defined content types, fill in validated fields and move entries through draft, review and published states. The interface is consistent across content types, which reduces the learning curve for new editors and creates a predictable publishing rhythm.
Content scheduling allows editors to prepare entries in advance and publish them at a specified time without manual intervention. For marketing teams running campaigns with coordinated launch dates, this removes the need for someone to be online at publish time.
The trade-off is that the editorial interface itself offers limited customization. The content entry experience follows Contentful's design patterns, and teams that want the editor to mirror specific internal workflows may find the out-of-the-box experience constraining. The interface works well when your team's processes align with Contentful's assumptions about how content gets created and published.
Sanity's Real-Time Collaborative Editing
Sanity Studio takes a fundamentally different approach to the editing experience. Its real-time, multiplayer editing environment shows changes instantly as multiple team members work on the same document. For teams accustomed to the collaborative editing model of Google Docs, Sanity's Studio feels familiar. It reduces the back-and-forth that slows content production in systems where only one person can edit at a time.
Because Sanity Studio is a React application, the editorial interface can be customized extensively. Custom input components, dashboard widgets, document views and navigation structures can be built directly into the Studio. This means the CMS interface your editors use can be tailored to match exactly how your team works. Custom preview panes, inline image editing tools and workflow status indicators are all possible.
The trade-off is setup and maintenance time. Out of the box, Sanity Studio is functional but minimal compared to Contentful's standard configuration. Teams that want a tailored editorial experience need developers to build it.
Which Editing Experience Fits Your Team
The decision here is about the content creation experience, not governance or permissions (covered in a later section).
If your editorial team values a polished, consistent interface that works without customization, Contentful is the stronger fit. Its structured editor reduces onboarding time and keeps the experience uniform across contributors.
If your team values real-time collaboration and benefits from a CMS interface customized to your editorial processes, Sanity's Studio gives you more control. The trade-off: you need development resources to build and maintain that experience.
Content Modeling: How Each Platform Structures Your Content for Editors
Content modeling determines how editors think about, create and reuse content across your site. This section covers what the content model means for people working in the CMS every day: field types, content reuse patterns, rich text and localization. A decision framework at the end helps you match your content needs to the right platform.
Contentful's Governed Content Types
Contentful's content modeling happens through a visual interface where teams define content types, fields and validation rules. Once a content type is defined, every entry of that type follows the same schema. Field-level validation ensures editors can't publish incomplete or improperly formatted content, which enforces consistency across large content sets.
For teams managing hundreds or thousands of entries across standardized content types (blog posts, case studies, landing pages, product pages), this predictability is a significant advantage. Editors know exactly which fields to fill, content previews are consistent and the risk of structural inconsistencies across entries is low.
Contentful's rich text editor supports standard formatting, embedded entries and inline assets. It covers most editorial needs for teams producing web content. However, teams needing custom embedded elements within rich text may find the format limiting compared to Sanity's approach.
Sanity's Flexible Content Structures and Portable Text
Sanity gives teams more latitude in how content is structured. Content types can include deeply nested objects, custom field types and flexible reference patterns that accommodate complex content relationships. For sites where content doesn't fit neatly into uniform templates, this flexibility lets the model match the content rather than forcing content into a rigid structure.
Portable Text, Sanity's rich text format, deserves specific attention. Unlike traditional rich text editors that store content as HTML, Portable Text stores content as structured data. This means rich text content can be rendered differently across channels (web, mobile, email) without reformatting. Custom block types like callouts, embedded components and interactive elements can be created directly within text fields. For teams producing content that needs to work across multiple platforms or formats, this is a meaningful architectural advantage.
Sanity's flexible modeling also makes it easier to evolve content structures over time. Adding new field types, adjusting content relationships or creating specialized content types for new use cases doesn't require the same level of governed migration that structural changes demand in Contentful.
Localization: A Content Modeling Decision with Operational Implications
For B2B companies serving multiple markets, how the CMS handles localized content is a significant factor. Contentful and Sanity take different approaches, and the right choice depends on how your localization workflow operates.
Contentful uses field-level localization. Each field within a content type can be toggled as localizable. Translators work within the same entry and fill in localized values for specific fields (title, body copy, CTA text) while non-localized fields remain shared. This keeps all language versions in one place, which simplifies management when most content shares structure across markets.
Sanity uses document-level localization as its default pattern, though its flexibility allows teams to implement field-level localization through custom schemas. The document-level approach creates separate entries for each locale, giving regional teams full independence over their content without worrying about accidentally modifying another market's version. For organizations with autonomous regional content teams that produce substantially different content per market (not just translations), this model provides cleaner separation.
If your localization workflow is primarily translation of shared content, Contentful's field-level model keeps things consolidated. If your regional teams produce distinct content that happens to share a topic, Sanity's document-level approach provides more independence.
Matching Your Content Needs to the Right Model
The platform-specific differences above matter most when they intersect with how your team actually produces content. Three dimensions tend to drive the decision: content structure consistency, rich text complexity and localization workflow. Use these to pressure-test which platform aligns with your content operations.
Content Consistency vs. Content Variety
Sites that primarily use well-defined page types with consistent fields benefit from Contentful's structured modeling, which keeps things clean. If your content spans many formats, includes custom embedded elements or needs to serve multiple output channels, Sanity's Portable Text and flexible schemas provide more room.
Rich Text Complexity
Teams that need standard formatting, embedded entries and inline assets will find Contentful's rich text editor covers those needs. If your team needs custom block types, structured rich text that renders across multiple channels or deeply customizable text editing, Portable Text is the stronger option.
Localization Model
The approach that works best depends on how your regional content operations function. Field-level (Contentful) works best for translation-centric workflows. Document-level (Sanity) works best for regionally independent content operations.
Developer Experience: Building, Customizing and Maintaining the CMS
The developer experience shapes not just the initial build timeline but the long-term cost and speed of maintaining and extending your CMS. This section covers how developers interact with each platform: APIs, schema management, query languages and the mechanics of building and evolving the CMS over time.
Contentful's API-First Ecosystem
Contentful's developer experience centers on its mature API layer. Both REST and GraphQL APIs are well-documented, battle-tested at scale and supported by SDKs across major languages and frameworks. For teams building with Next.js, Gatsby or other modern frontends, Contentful's content delivery and management APIs integrate cleanly with minimal custom code.
Content model management in Contentful happens through the visual web interface or the Content Management API. Changes to content models follow a governed migration process using Contentful's environment system: teams create model changes in a development environment, test them and then promote to production. This structured approach prevents accidental schema changes from breaking live content, which matters for organizations with formal change management processes.
Contentful's App Framework extends the platform through pre-built and custom integrations. For common needs (asset management, analytics, commerce), an existing solution often eliminates custom development.
The trade-off is less flexibility in both the editorial interface and the content model layer. Developers can extend the editor with sidebar apps and field-level extensions, but the core editing experience follows Contentful's design. Model changes go through a deliberate process that prioritizes safety over speed.
Sanity's Open-Source, Developer-Controlled Architecture
Sanity defines content models entirely in code. Schemas are JavaScript or TypeScript files that developers write, version-control and deploy alongside the rest of the codebase. This gives development teams full control over content structure using the same tools and workflows they use for application code. Adding fields, creating new content types and restructuring relationships happen through code changes rather than UI-based migrations. Model evolution can move at the speed of development rather than the speed of governed releases.
GROQ, Sanity's native query language, provides a flexible and expressive way to retrieve content. Developers who invest time learning GROQ often find it more intuitive for complex content queries than GraphQL, particularly for queries involving references, nested objects and computed fields. Sanity also supports GraphQL for teams that prefer it.
Sanity Studio's open-source, React-based architecture means developers own the full Studio codebase. Custom input components, editorial tools and workflow automation can be built directly into the CMS. This ownership is a strength for teams with dedicated development resources, but it also means your team is responsible for maintaining Studio customizations as Sanity releases platform updates.
The trade-off is higher initial setup investment and ongoing maintenance responsibility. Sanity's flexibility means there are more decisions to make upfront and more custom code to maintain long-term.
How Developer Resources Should Influence Your Choice
Your team's development capacity—both now and after launch—should be the deciding factor between these platforms. The three considerations below help you match your developer reality to the right CMS architecture.
Post-Launch Developer Availability
This is the single most important factor in the decision. If developer time will be scarce after the initial build, Contentful's out-of-the-box capabilities, visual model management and App Framework reduce ongoing development overhead. If developers will remain actively involved in the CMS, Sanity's code-based schemas, customizable Studio and GROQ give them more leverage to optimize and extend the platform over time.
Team Stability
Contentful's standardized interface and documented APIs are easier for new developers to learn. Sanity's customized Studio and GROQ queries carry institutional knowledge that can be harder to transfer if the team turns over. For organizations with high developer turnover, Contentful's lower learning curve reduces onboarding friction.
Schema Change Velocity
If your content model is largely stable post-launch with occasional additions, Contentful's governed migration process adds safety without significant friction. If your content structures evolve frequently as your content strategy matures, Sanity's code-based approach removes the ceremony around model changes and keeps development moving.
Governance and Scalability: Managing the CMS as Your Team Grows
A CMS that works for a five-person marketing team may not work for a 50-person organization with regional teams, compliance requirements and multiple product lines. Governance, the rules and structures that control who can do what within the CMS, determines whether scaling up is smooth or chaotic.
Governance in Contentful
Contentful treats governance as a first-class feature. Three built-in capabilities define its approach:
- Role-based access control. The enterprise tier lets admins define granular permissions: who can create content, who can publish, who can modify content models and who can manage integrations. These permissions are configurable through the web interface without custom development.
- Environment model. Content model changes can be tested in isolated environments before being promoted to production. This creates a clear separation between experimental changes and live content. For organizations with formal change management or compliance requirements, this mirrors governance patterns familiar from software development.
- Spaces for multi-team organizations. Separate content repositories with independent permissions and configurations let different business units or product lines operate autonomously within the same Contentful account while maintaining centralized administration.
Together, these features mean governance scales predictably as your organization adds contributors, teams and content types.
Governance in Sanity
Sanity provides the tools to build governance that fits your organization rather than shipping a single model. Custom roles and document-level permissions can be configured to match your team's operating model. Workflow plugins add approval flows, draft states and publishing rules on top of Sanity's base capabilities.
This flexibility is powerful for organizations with governance needs that don't fit a standard role-based model. A media company with contributor tiers, a multi-brand enterprise with regional autonomy and a regulated financial services firm with compliance workflows all have different requirements. Sanity allows each to build precisely what it needs.
The consideration is maintenance. Custom governance requires documentation and developer involvement when rules need to change. Organizations that invest in well-documented configurations get long-term value. Organizations that build governance quickly without documentation may find it brittle at scale.
Planning Governance for Growth
Three questions help clarify which governance model fits your trajectory.
- How many people will be in the CMS? If you're planning for dozens of contributors across multiple teams or regions, Contentful's built-in governance infrastructure reduces the configuration and maintenance burden. If your contributor base is smaller or more homogeneous, Sanity's custom approach offers governance without unnecessary complexity.
- How distributed is your team? Organizations with regional content teams, multiple brands or localized content operations benefit from Contentful's structured permission and space model. Teams centralized in one location with direct communication channels may find Sanity's lighter, custom governance sufficient.
- How defined are your governance requirements? If your organization requires formal approval workflows, audit trails and permission structures from day one, Contentful delivers these without additional development. If your governance needs are still evolving, Sanity gives you room to iterate on your model as your organization matures. You won't be locked into a rigid structure early.
Integrations and Martech Ecosystem Fit
A headless CMS doesn't operate in isolation. It connects to your analytics platform, your CRM, your marketing automation tools, your commerce system and your frontend hosting. How well the CMS integrates with your existing stack, and how much effort those integrations require, directly affects time to value and ongoing operational efficiency.
Contentful's Integration Landscape
Contentful's marketplace includes pre-built integrations with major martech platforms: HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, various analytics tools and commerce solutions. For enterprise teams running complex, multi-tool stacks, these integrations reduce the custom development needed to connect the CMS to the rest of the ecosystem.
Contentful Compose and Launch extend the platform's orchestration capabilities. Compose provides a page-building experience that lets editors assemble content from multiple entries into cohesive pages. Launch allows teams to coordinate multi-entry publishing events, grouping related content changes and scheduling them for simultaneous release. For marketing teams that coordinate campaigns across landing pages, blog posts, product pages and email, these tools remove the need for external project management to track publishing dependencies.
The marketplace model means Contentful's integration ecosystem grows over time as partners and developers contribute new apps. For teams evaluating long-term ecosystem support, the breadth and maturity of the marketplace is a relevant factor.
Sanity's Integration Approach
Sanity's integration model is API-driven and developer-oriented. Rather than a curated marketplace of pre-built apps, Sanity provides robust APIs and webhooks that developers use to build custom integrations. Technology partnerships with Vercel, Netlify and major frontend frameworks ensure the deployment and hosting layer connects cleanly.
For teams with strong development resources, this approach offers more control. Custom integrations can be built to match exact requirements rather than adapting workflows to fit a pre-built app's assumptions. Webhooks and Sanity's real-time listener API enable event-driven architectures where content changes trigger downstream processes (cache invalidation, notification, syndication) automatically.
Sanity's GROQ-powered Content Lake supports complex queries across your entire content dataset. This simplifies integrations that need to pull content based on relationships or computed conditions rather than simple entry lookups.
Evaluating Integration Fit
Integration fit comes down to more than whether a connector exists. Three factors matter: how much of your stack is covered out of the box, who maintains the connections and whether your team needs publishing orchestration inside or outside the CMS.
Audit Your Current Stack First
Start by listing every tool your CMS needs to connect with and check whether Contentful's marketplace already covers those integrations. If most of your tools are represented, pre-built connections will save development time. If your stack includes custom or niche tools, Sanity's API-first approach may give you a cleaner path to integration.
Consider Your Integration Maintenance Model
Pre-built marketplace integrations are maintained by their developers and updated as platforms evolve. Custom integrations built on Sanity's APIs are maintained by your team. Both models work, but they carry different long-term resource implications.
Evaluate Orchestration Needs
Marketing teams that coordinate complex, multi-page publishing events often want that coordination managed within the CMS. Contentful's Compose and Launch features provide native support for this workflow. If your orchestration happens in external tools (project management platforms, CI/CD pipelines), Sanity's webhook-driven model integrates into those workflows without requiring in-CMS orchestration.
Pricing and Total Cost of Ownership
Sticker price matters less than total cost of ownership. The CMS license is one component of cost. Developer time for setup and customization, ongoing maintenance, scaling costs as content volume and traffic grow and the opportunity cost of platform limitations all factor into the real number.
How Each Platform's Pricing Model Works
Contentful uses a tiered pricing model. The free Community tier supports small projects and evaluation. The Team and Enterprise tiers add features like roles, environments, localization and higher API rate limits, with pricing based on the number of spaces, environments and users. Enterprise pricing is custom and typically involves annual contracts.
Sanity uses a usage-based pricing model. The free tier is generous for small projects. Paid plans charge based on API requests, dataset size, bandwidth and the number of users, with costs scaling proportionally to usage rather than feature gating. Enterprise agreements are available for organizations that need predictable billing and dedicated support.
Hidden Cost Factors
The license fee is the visible cost. The factors below are where the real total cost of ownership diverges between platforms:
- Developer setup time. Initial setup is typically higher with Sanity due to Studio customization and schema-as-code configuration. Contentful's defaults get teams to a working state faster, but customization beyond the defaults requires App Framework development.
- Ongoing maintenance. Contentful teams maintain integrations through marketplace apps and monitor API usage against tier limits. Sanity teams maintain custom Studio configurations, GROQ queries and self-built governance tools. The costs differ in character, not necessarily magnitude.
- Scaling costs. Contentful's tier-based model can create step-function cost increases when teams outgrow a tier. Sanity's usage-based model scales more linearly but can produce unpredictable bills if traffic or API usage spikes.
Estimating Total Cost of Ownership
To estimate total cost of ownership accurately, model your expected content volume, API usage, number of contributors and integration requirements against both platforms' pricing calculators. Factor in at least 20-30 hours of developer time per month for ongoing CMS maintenance regardless of platform.
How to Choose: A Decision Framework Based on Your Team
Feature comparisons are useful reference material, but the decision should start with your team, not the platform. Here's how to match your team profile to the CMS most likely to support your operations effectively.
Large Marketing Org with Structured Workflows
Your team has 10+ content contributors, formalized review and approval processes and integrations with CRM, marketing automation and analytics platforms that need to work reliably. Your governance and compliance needs are defined and unlikely to change dramatically.
Contentful is likely the better fit. Its built-in governance, polished editorial defaults, governed content model management and marketplace integrations align with teams that need structure and broad ecosystem connectivity without heavy custom development.
Developer-Strong Team with Custom Content Needs
Your team has dedicated developers who actively maintain and extend the web platform. Content structures are complex or evolving, and your editorial team values a CMS interface tailored to their specific workflows. You're comfortable investing in custom tooling if it results in a better long-term fit.
Sanity is likely the better fit. Its code-defined content models, fully customizable Studio, real-time collaboration and developer-oriented architecture reward teams that invest in tailoring the platform to their exact needs.
Growing Team with Evolving Needs
Your team is somewhere between these two profiles. You have some development resources but not a dedicated CMS team. Your content operations are maturing, and your governance model is still taking shape.
Before committing, ask these questions:
- Where will your team be in 18 months? If you're scaling toward a larger editorial operation with formalized processes, starting with Contentful avoids retroactively building governance in Sanity. If you're scaling toward complex content experiences with dedicated development support, starting with Sanity avoids outgrowing Contentful's customization limits.
- What's your developer availability post-launch? If developer time will be scarce after the initial build, Contentful's lower maintenance overhead is a practical advantage. If developers will remain actively involved in the CMS, Sanity's flexibility becomes more valuable over time.
- Which trade-off is more costly: rigidity or responsibility? Contentful's constraints may slow you down in some areas but protect you from governance gaps. Sanity's openness gives you speed and control but requires your team to build and maintain what Contentful provides by default.
The answers to these questions should point clearly toward one platform. If they don't, prioritize the question your team feels most strongly about.
Factoring in the Migration Path
The transition itself is a decision factor, especially for teams currently on WordPress, HubSpot CMS or another platform. Migration complexity varies significantly depending on your current system's architecture, the volume and structure of existing content, and how much content restructuring you're planning alongside the platform change.
Teams migrating from traditional CMS platforms like WordPress often face additional considerations beyond the content itself. Custom plugins, theme-specific functionality and database structures that don't map cleanly to headless content models all require planning. A WordPress site with 500 blog posts using Advanced Custom Fields will migrate differently than a HubSpot CMS site with 50 landing pages built from standardized modules.
The migration timeline also affects team productivity. During the transition period, your editorial team may need to work in two systems simultaneously or pause publishing while content is transferred and validated. Understanding how each platform handles imports, content validation and editor onboarding helps you plan a transition that minimizes disruption to ongoing content operations.
Migration Tooling
Each platform takes a different approach to getting content into the system. Contentful provides structured import/export tools and a governed migration process that fits teams with formal change management. Sanity's scriptable migration approach gives developers fine-grained control over how content is transformed and imported, which is advantageous for complex migrations involving content restructuring.
Editor Onboarding
The time it takes editors to become productive varies between platforms. Contentful's standardized interface means editors can typically start working productively within days, since the experience is consistent regardless of the implementation. Sanity's customized Studio may offer a better long-term editing experience, but the ramp-up time depends on how much the Studio has been tailored and how well that customization is documented.
Content Restructuring
Migrations that involve consolidating content types, splitting entries or transforming data models favor different platforms. Sanity's code-based approach gives developers more control over the transformation logic for complex restructuring. If your migration is primarily a platform swap with minimal structural changes, Contentful's import tools and visual model management simplify the process.
Choose the CMS That Fits How Your Team Works
Choosing between Contentful and Sanity isn't a feature comparison exercise. It's a decision about which platform architecture best matches how your team creates, governs and scales content.
Contentful provides structured governance, a mature integration marketplace and polished editorial defaults that reduce time to value for teams with defined workflows and broad martech ecosystems. Sanity provides deep customization, real-time collaboration and schema-as-code flexibility that reward teams with strong development resources and complex content needs.
The cost of choosing wrong isn't the license fee. It's the re-platforming cycle 18 months later, the months of migration work, the disrupted content operations and the opportunity cost of a team fighting its tools instead of using them.
Start with your team's operating model: who's in the CMS, how they work, what they need to publish and how fast content operations need to scale. Match the platform to those realities. The CMS then becomes infrastructure that supports growth rather than a constraint your team works around.
Webstacks works with both Contentful and Sanity as a platform-agnostic implementation partner. We help B2B teams evaluate, implement and optimize the CMS that fits their team structure and governance needs. The goal: a platform decision that supports your content operations for years, not months.
Talk to Webstacks about choosing and implementing the right CMS for your team.
