What is Sanity in October 2026?
Sanity is a hosted content platform. Documents are stored as JSON in its Content Lake and read through GROQ, its query language, or GraphQL. The editing interface, Sanity Studio, is a React app that you configure in code and deploy yourself, so the content model is a TypeScript schema in your repo. Sanity calls itself a content operations platform for apps and AI workflows, and it ships content releases, live previews, an MCP server and agent tooling alongside the Studio.
You do not run a database or an API server. You do pay by seat and by usage. As of October 2026 the Free plan costs $0 for up to 20 seats, with 10k documents and 250k API requests a month. Growth is $15 per seat per month with 25k documents, and extra quota is sold in add-ons. Enterprise is custom. Check Sanity’s pricing page before you budget, since quotas are the part that surprises people. Our cloud CMS comparison puts Sanity next to the other hosted vendors.
Who Sanity suits, and who should pick something else
Sanity suits teams whose content is not a pile of pages. Product catalogs, editorial archives, documentation, structured data reused across a site, an app and email: a flexible schema and fast queries pay off there. Editors who work in parallel also benefit from multiplayer editing and per-field presence.
Pick something else when:
- Marketers want to build pages visually without a developer shaping every block. Storyblok and Prismic lean that way.
- Your data must stay in your own database or region of choice. Self hosted Payload fits better, and Payload vs Sanity covers hosting, GROQ and costs.
- A large enterprise needs a mature governance suite and procurement paperwork. Contentful vs Sanity covers the SaaS alternative.
What we build with Sanity
A tailored Studio. Custom input components, document actions, desk structure per role and validation rules that stop broken content before it publishes.
GROQ driven front ends. We shape queries so each page fetches one projection, not five round trips, and pair them with Next.js or Astro. Visual editing and live preview connect the Studio to the real site.
Content for several channels. One dataset feeding a website, a mobile app and a search index, with webhooks or GROQ powered webhooks triggering revalidation.
Release workflows. Content releases let editors group changes for a launch, and we wire them to staging previews.
We have not published a Sanity-only case study. Our general headless CMS delivery is described on the headless CMS agency page.
Migrating into Sanity
The work splits in two. First, a schema that models your content rather than copying the old CMS fields one for one. Second, an import script using Sanity’s client that is safe to rerun, with asset upload and reference resolution. We keep old URLs mapped to the new routes and test redirects before launch. HTML or WordPress body content is converted into Portable Text, Sanity’s structured rich text, and that conversion needs a manual review pass. See the CMS migration checklist.
What does Sanity cost to own?
The licence line is seats plus usage, and usage is where plans surprise teams. Asset bandwidth, API CDN requests and document counts all have quotas, and the Growth plan sells extra capacity in add-ons. A site with image heavy pages and many editors should be modelled against those numbers before launch. The second cost is the Studio: it is code, so schema changes need a developer and a deploy. Build cost depends on schema size, custom inputs, migration volume and integrations, and we scope it after a short audit.
How an engagement runs
We begin with a content audit and a schema review with your editors, because a Sanity schema is hard to reshape once thousands of documents exist. Then we build the Studio and queries in git, run the import against a staging dataset, and connect previews. Launch follows a content freeze, a final import and redirect checks.
Typical stack around Sanity
| Layer | Usual choice |
|---|---|
| Studio | Embedded in the Next.js app or deployed on its own |
| Front end | Next.js or Astro with GROQ queries |
| Images | Sanity’s image pipeline with hotspot crops |
| Search | Algolia or a vector index fed by webhooks |
| Hosting | Vercel or a container platform for the front end |
If you need engineers who already know the Studio and GROQ, hire a Sanity developer. The platform sits in our wider headless CMS practice.
