Choose Contentful when you need a standard enterprise platform that many editors, agencies and vendors already know, with fixed conventions and governance built in. Choose Sanity when your developers want to shape the editing tool and query content freely, and when a per-seat price suits your team better than a platform fee.
Both are hosted SaaS products. Neither asks you to run a server, both deliver content over APIs to any frontend, and both have a free plan. The differences are in how you model content, how much the editor UI can be changed, and what makes the bill grow.
How do they differ at a glance?
| Contentful | Sanity | |
|---|---|---|
| Content model | Content types built in the web app or by migration | Schema written in code in the Studio project |
| Editor UI | Fixed web app, extended with apps | Studio, an open source React app you customise |
| Query | REST delivery API, GraphQL API | GROQ, GraphQL API |
| Rich text | Contentful rich text (JSON) | Portable Text (JSON) |
| Localisation | Field-level locales, count set by plan | Modelled by you, unlimited locales on every plan |
| Environments | Sandbox environments and aliases | Datasets (2 on Free and Growth) |
| Pricing basis | Platform plan with users, locales, API calls | Per seat, with document and request quotas |
| Collaboration | Comments, tasks and live collaboration on Lite | Real-time presence and editing in the Studio |
How does content modelling compare?
Contentful models content as content types with typed fields and references. You can build them in the web app, which non-developers like, or script changes with migrations for a repeatable process across environments. The free Starter space caps you at 25 content types and 10,000 records as of October 2026, so plan the model before you start.
Sanity models content in code. Document and object types live in the Studio repository, go through code review and can be nested freely. As of October 2026 the free plan lists unlimited content types and 10k documents. Developers tend to prefer this, and content strategists sometimes miss a visual builder.
Both store rich text as structured JSON rather than HTML, which keeps content portable across channels. Converting between the two formats is a known migration task.
What is it like for editors?
Contentful’s web app is the same in every space. That consistency is its strength: agencies, freelancers and new hires can work in it without training on your setup. Scheduled publishing, comments and tasks are on Lite. Visual page assembly comes through Contentful Studio, an Enterprise add-on.
Sanity’s Studio is a React app your developers configure. They can add custom inputs, dashboards and document views, and editors see each other working in real time. Visual editing and live preview are on the free plan as of October 2026. The trade-off is that a good Studio is designed, not installed, and that design is project time.
How do localisation and API limits compare?
Contentful counts locales as a plan feature: 2 on Free, 3 on Lite, a custom number on Enterprise. Each field can be marked localisable, and editors switch locales in the entry. For a site in ten markets, that pushes you towards Enterprise.
Sanity does not charge per locale. You choose a pattern, such as a field per language or a document per language, and build it into the schema. More freedom, more decisions.
On API volume, Contentful Free includes 100K API calls a month with no overages, and Lite includes 1M. Sanity’s Free and Growth plans both include 1m API CDN requests and 250k API requests a month, and Growth bills overage at $1 per 250k CDN requests and $1 per 25k API requests. Cache aggressively on either platform: static generation or ISR on the frontend keeps request counts low.
What drives the price?
Plan facts as of October 2026, from the vendors’ pricing pages:
| Plan item | Contentful Free | Contentful Lite | Sanity Free | Sanity Growth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $300 a month | $0 | $15 per seat a month |
| Users or seats | 10 | 20 | 20 | 50 |
| Locales | 2 | 3 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| API calls a month | 100K | 1M | 1m CDN, 250k API | 1m CDN, 250k API |
| Bandwidth a month | 50 GB | 100 GB | 100GB | 100GB |
| Records or documents | 10,000 (Starter space) | 10,000 (Starter space) | 10k | 25k |
What moves the total:
- Contentful: the step from Lite to Enterprise. More locales, more spaces, enhanced governance and security features, or an uptime SLA of up to 99.99% all sit on Enterprise.
- Sanity: seat count, document volume past the quota, uncached API traffic, and extra datasets at $999 a month each.
For a broader view of hosted options, our list of SaaS headless CMS platforms compares more vendors on the same criteria.
How locked in are you?
Both hold your content in a proprietary hosted store, so both involve some lock-in. Both also give you an exit.
Contentful’s official CLI, MIT licensed, exports a space to JSON with content types, entries and asset references. Sanity’s CLI command sanity datasets export writes a gzipped tarball with documents and assets. The data comes out. What does not come out cleanly is the work around it: Contentful apps and webhooks, Sanity Studio customisations, and every frontend query written for one API.
The Sanity Studio code stays yours under an MIT licence even if you leave. With Contentful, the editor UI belongs to the vendor, and your extensions are apps built for its framework.
What does a build on each involve?
The frontend work is close to identical. We usually build in Next.js, generate marketing pages statically, revalidate pages that change often, and wire draft preview so editors see a page before it goes live.
The CMS side differs. On Contentful most of the effort goes into the content model, migration scripts that keep environments in sync, and a few apps where the default editor falls short. On Sanity a larger share goes into the Studio: custom inputs, structure for the document list, validation rules and the preview setup. Expect a Sanity project to spend more time on editor tooling and a Contentful project to spend more time on governance, roles and environments.
Content migration into either one follows the same rules: map every old field, keep URLs or redirect them, and test with real editors before cutover.
Which one we would pick for whom
- Enterprises with many brands, agencies and a governance team: Contentful. Shared conventions and enterprise controls pay for the platform fee.
- Developer-led product teams that want to shape the editing tool: Sanity.
- Small teams of up to a handful of editors: Sanity on cost, unless you need what only Contentful Enterprise offers.
- Sites in many markets on a budget: Sanity, since locales are not a plan limit.
- Teams that expect to hire outside help often: Contentful, because more people already know it.
How we build on each one is covered on the Contentful development and Sanity CMS development pages. To add someone to your team, hire a Contentful developer or a developer who knows Sanity Studio. If a self-hosted CMS is still on the table, see Strapi vs Contentful.
Our headless CMS development work covers builds and migrations on both platforms, and the headless CMS agency page describes how we take a project from audit to launch.
