Choose Strapi when you want to own the whole content backend: a Node.js server and a SQL database in your own cloud account, with no per-seat fee. Choose Sanity when you would rather rent the backend, query content with GROQ from any channel, and give editors a Studio where several people can work on one document at once.
Most of the differences below come back to one decision: who operates the system.
Where does the content live?
With Strapi, content sits in tables in PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB or SQLite that you provision. You can put that database in a specific region, inside a private network, behind your own backup policy. Your team also owns uptime, scaling and patching, unless you pay for Strapi Cloud to run the server for you.
With Sanity, content sits in the Content Lake, a document store Sanity runs. The Studio, the editing app, is open source and you may deploy it yourself or on Sanity’s hosting, but the data does not leave Sanity’s platform. Nobody on your side patches a database, and nobody on your side can move it into your own VPC either.
For a regulated company, that one point often settles the question before anyone compares editors.
Strapi vs Sanity at a glance
| Strapi 5 | Sanity | |
|---|---|---|
| Who runs the backend | You, or Strapi Cloud | Sanity |
| Storage | Your SQL database | Hosted Content Lake |
| Query | REST with populate rules, GraphQL plugin | GROQ, GraphQL |
| Rich text format | Blocks (JSON) or Markdown | Portable Text |
| Schema defined in | Content-type Builder or schema files | Studio config in code |
| Live co-editing | No | Yes, with presence |
| Pricing unit | Licence per plan, hosting per project | Seats plus API usage |
| Export | strapi export archive | sanity datasets export tarball |
How does content modelling differ?
Strapi organises content into collection types, single types, reusable components and dynamic zones. Relations come in six kinds, from one-way to many-to-many, and they are real foreign keys in your database. A product owner can sketch types in the Content-type Builder during development, and the result lands in the repository as files your developers review.
Sanity has documents and objects defined in JavaScript or TypeScript in the Studio project. References link documents, and arrays of objects play the role Strapi’s dynamic zones play for page sections. There is no visual builder, so every schema change is a developer task. The benefit is that validation, field visibility rules and custom inputs sit right next to the field definition.
For rich text, Strapi’s Blocks field and Sanity’s Portable Text both store JSON instead of HTML, so the front end renders each node with its own components. Converting between the two is mechanical but needs a script, which matters if you ever migrate.
What is daily editing like?
In Strapi, editors work in the Content Manager: a list per type, a form per entry, draft and publish, and roles that limit who sees what. The free Community plan stops there. As of October 2026, Live Preview, Releases for grouped publishing and Content History come with the paid Growth plan, and Review Workflows come with Enterprise.
In Sanity Studio, editors see who else is in a document and watch changes arrive live. Comments and tasks are built in. Structure can be customised per team, so a news desk and a product marketing team can see the same dataset arranged differently. That customisation is developer work, but it is ordinary React.
If your editors rarely touch the same entry, Strapi’s form-based admin is enough. If five people edit a launch page the afternoon before release, you will want Sanity’s live editing.
How do the APIs compare for developers?
Strapi returns one content type per REST call and only follows relations you name in populate. That keeps payloads predictable and permissions checkable per endpoint, but a page assembled from many types needs several calls or a careful populate tree. The GraphQL plugin helps there. Custom endpoints are ordinary Koa controllers in your codebase, so anything a Node service can do, Strapi can do.
Sanity’s GROQ lets one query filter documents, follow references and reshape the result into exactly the JSON a page needs. It is a new language for the team, and query cost shows up as API usage on the bill. Server-side logic runs outside Sanity, in your own functions or in webhooks that call them.
What drives the cost of each?
Strapi’s licence can be zero, and the bill is mostly hosting and people. As of October 2026:
| Option | Price as of October 2026 | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Strapi Community, self-hosted | Free | MIT, unlimited users |
| Strapi Growth, self-hosted | $45 a month, 3 users, $15 per extra user | Adds Releases, Content History, Live Preview |
| Strapi Cloud Pro | $90 per project a month | 1M API requests, weekly backups |
| Sanity Free | $0 | 20 seats, 2 roles, public datasets only |
| Sanity Growth | $15 per seat a month | 50 seats, 5 roles, private datasets |
On Sanity Growth, extra API CDN requests cost $1 per 250k and extra API requests $1 per 25k, and an added dataset costs $999 a month. So Sanity’s total climbs with editors and traffic, while Strapi’s climbs with infrastructure and the engineering hours to run it. For a small team with a DevOps habit, Strapi is cheaper. For a large editorial team with no backend engineers, Sanity often is.
Migrating between Strapi and Sanity
Moving Strapi to Sanity: run strapi export with encryption off. The archive includes entities, relations, schemas and assets but not admin users or API tokens. Write Sanity schemas for each type, map components to objects and dynamic zones to arrays, turn relations into references and Blocks into Portable Text. Import with the Sanity CLI, then rewrite front end data fetching in GROQ.
Moving Sanity to Strapi: export the dataset as a tarball, create Strapi content types, convert Portable Text to Blocks and load entries through a script that calls the Document Service API. Plan where the logic that lived in webhooks will now run. Either direction needs redirects and a content freeze; our CMS migration checklist lists the steps.
Proof
We have not published a Strapi or Sanity case study yet. Our published headless CMS builds ran on Payload with Next.js, and the work that decides a Strapi or Sanity project, content modelling, import scripts, preview and redirects, is the same work.
Which one we would pick for whom
- Data must stay in your cloud account or region: Strapi.
- No one on the team wants to run a server: Sanity, or Strapi Cloud if you prefer Strapi’s model.
- Many editors on the same pages, every day: Sanity.
- The CMS also feeds internal tools that need custom server endpoints: Strapi, where those endpoints live in the same codebase.
- The same content goes to a site, an app and partner feeds in different shapes: Sanity, for GROQ.
- Small budget, small editorial team, a developer who can host Node: Strapi Community.
Our Strapi development services page covers how we build and upgrade Strapi projects, and our Sanity development page does the same for Sanity. To extend your own team, hire a Strapi developer or a Sanity developer. If cost is the deciding factor, our free headless CMS platforms guide compares what each free plan includes. For how we choose a stack, see headless CMS development, and for another self-hosted option against Sanity, read Payload vs Sanity.
