Contentful vs Sanity: Headless CMS for Modern Web Development

Contentful and Sanity are the two most popular headless CMS platforms for modern web development. Both decouple content from presentation, delivering content via APIs. The differences are in developer experience, pricing, and flexibility.

Architecture Differences

Contentful: Fully managed SaaS. Content models defined in the web UI. Content delivered via REST and GraphQL APIs. Opinionated structure.

Sanity: Open-source content platform. Content models defined in code (JavaScript/TypeScript). Content delivered via GROQ (Sanity's query language) or GraphQL. Highly flexible schema.

Feature Comparison

Developer Experience

Contentful

Content modeling happens in the Contentful web app. You define content types (Blog Post, Page, Author) with fields (title, body, image) through the UI. Then fetch content via REST or GraphQL APIs.

const entries = await client.getEntries({
  content_type: 'blogPost',
  'fields.slug': 'my-post',
})

Pros: Quick setup, visual content modeling, well-documented APIs. Cons: Content models cannot be version-controlled (they live in the web app), migrations are complex for schema changes.

Sanity

Content models are defined in TypeScript files:

export default defineType({
  name: 'blogPost',
  title: 'Blog Post',
  type: 'document',
  fields: [
    defineField({ name: 'title', type: 'string' }),
    defineField({ name: 'slug', type: 'slug', options: { source: 'title' } }),
    defineField({ name: 'body', type: 'portableText' }),
    defineField({ name: 'author', type: 'reference', to: [{ type: 'author' }] }),
  ],
})

Queries use GROQ:

const post = await client.fetch(
  `*[_type == "blogPost" && slug.current == $slug][0]`,
  { slug: 'my-post' }
)

Pros: Schema in code (version-controlled), GROQ is powerful for complex queries, Sanity Studio is fully customizable. Cons: Learning curve for GROQ, requires developer for schema changes.

Pricing

Contentful

Contentful charges per space, API calls, and records. Costs scale significantly for large content volumes.

Sanity

Sanity's growth plan is pay-per-use: $0.015 per 1,000 API CDN requests, $0.12 per 1,000 API requests, $1 per 100K documents.

Cost at Scale

For a site with 5,000 content pieces and 2M monthly API calls:

For a site with 50,000 content pieces and 20M monthly API calls:

Sanity is significantly cheaper at scale.

Content Editor Experience

Contentful Studio

• Clean, structured interface
• Familiar form-based editing
• Good for non-technical editors
• Preview requires configuration
• Asset management is straightforward

Sanity Studio

• Fully customizable (built with React)
• Real-time collaborative editing
• Portable Text editor is more flexible than markdown
• Custom input components for unique content types
• Visual editing and preview

Sanity Studio can be customized to match any workflow. Contentful's interface is simpler but less flexible.

Performance

Both are fast. Sanity's CDN tends to be slightly faster, and GROQ queries are optimized to return only the data you request (no over-fetching).

When to Choose Contentful

1. Large editorial teams that need a polished, familiar editing interface
2. Enterprise requirements (SOC 2, SLA, dedicated support)
3. Team without a developer for initial setup (visual content modeling)
4. GraphQL-first teams (Contentful's GraphQL is more mature)
5. Established content workflows that fit Contentful's structure

When to Choose Sanity

1. Developer-led teams that want schema-in-code
2. Cost-sensitive projects (cheaper at scale)
3. Custom editorial workflows (Sanity Studio is fully customizable)
4. Complex content models (references, arrays, nested objects)
5. Real-time applications (live collaborative editing)
6. Large content volumes (better pricing model)

Our Choice

We prefer Sanity for most projects. Schema-in-code means content models are version-controlled alongside application code. GROQ's flexibility reduces API calls. And the pricing is straightforward and scales well.

For enterprise clients with large editorial teams requiring a polished out-of-the-box editing experience, we recommend evaluating Contentful.

Contact us to discuss CMS selection for your project.