Contentful vs Sanity: A Practical Comparison for Modern Web Development

Pricing and Scalability

Contentful’s pricing model follows a tiered structure. It starts with a free Community plan, but pricing jumps significantly as you scale. The Team plan starts around $489/month, which can become challenging for growing agencies or multi-site organisations.

Sanity, on the other hand, uses a usage-based pricing model. You can start for free and pay only for the resources you use (API calls, bandwidth, etc.). This makes it more predictable at scale, particularly for content-heavy sites.

✅ Best for predictable scaling: Sanity

✅ Best for early-stage simplicity: Contentful

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Editor Experience

Contentful provides a polished, straightforward editor interface that works well for marketing teams who prefer minimal setup. Editors can jump in quickly, but flexibility is limited. The layout and content structures are largely fixed.

Sanity offers the Sanity Studio, which can be tailored to match exactly how your team works. You can define custom input fields, layouts, and validation rules, all in code. This makes it ideal for larger organisations that need to adapt the CMS to their unique workflows.

Once again, the selection relies on your team’s needs and the level of flexibility required.

✅ Best for simplicity and quick onboarding: Contentful

✅ Best for customised workflows and advanced use cases: Sanity

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Content Modelling and Structure

This is one of the biggest philosophical differences.

• Contentful uses a UI-driven model. What does this mean in practice? Editors and developers define content types and relationships directly in the app. It’s fast to set up but can become restrictive when managing complex, nested content.
• Sanity models content in code (JavaScript/TypeScript schemas). This gives developers total control and allows for dynamic relationships, deeply nested content, and reusable components. Everything is version-controlled in Git, making collaboration and rollback simple. The big dependency here then, is developer support.

✅ Best for simple websites or marketing pages: Contentful

✅ Best for scalable, complex architectures: Sanity

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Localisation and Multi-Region Support

Both platforms support multilingual and multi-region content, but in different ways:

• Contentful uses a field-level localisation model. This means every field can have multiple language versions. This works well for smaller projects but can become complex at scale.
• Sanity allows global and local content layers, meaning editors can decide what content should be shared or regionalised. This makes it more flexible for enterprises managing large amounts of content, for multiple brands or countries.

✅ Best for straightforward language toggling: Contentful

✅ Best for advanced regional strategies: Sanity

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Developer Experience

Developers tend to love Sanity for its flexibility and modern tooling:

• Built on React, integrates seamlessly with Next.js, Nuxt, and Vercel.
• GROQ lets you query content exactly as you need it, without over-fetching.

Contentful, meanwhile, provides solid REST and GraphQL APIs and a polished SDK ecosystem. It’s less flexible but requires less setup, making it appealing to teams who value convenience.

✅ Best for rapid setup and plug-and-play integration: Contentful

✅ Best for custom frontends and developer control: Sanity

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Hosting and Architecture

Contentful is entirely hosted. You can’t self-host or version the backend.

Sanity gives you a choice: use their managed hosting or self-host the Sanity Studio. All configurations live in Git, enabling CI/CD workflows, environment parity, and better versioning.

✅ Best for teams who want to avoid dev-ops complexity: Contentful

✅ Best for teams that value flexibility and control: Sanity

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Company Vision and Ecosystem

Both companies are well-established and growing.

• Contentful, founded in 2013, is a Berlin-based company with a large enterprise customer base (Nike, Spotify, etc.).
• Sanity, founded in 2015 in Norway, raised $39M in 2021 and is known for its open-source approach and active developer community.

Both are stable choices. Both are showing continuous advancements and show no sign of letting up. Where Sanity has the edge in terms of future-proofing is its open, composable ethos. This resonates strongly with modern frontend ecosystems and gives the adaptability to meet the ever changing technical landscape.

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Our Experience: Why We Typically Choose Sanity

At Represent, we’ve built with both. We appreciate Contentful’s polish, but Sanity consistently performs better for complex, composable architectures. While it’s not the right choice for every business, Sanity is the closest we’ve come to a “One size fits all” CMS.

For example, we once replaced four separate CMS systems for a large Norwegian corporation with a single Sanity implementation, resulting in streamlined workflows and faster deployment.

That doesn’t mean Contentful is “bad.” It’s often the right fit for:

• Marketing-led teams who want minimal configuration
• Projects with tight deadlines or limited development resources
• Organisations happy to trade flexibility for simplicity

We choose Sanity when:

• Custom workflows or data models are key
• Clients need multi-region, composable architectures
• Developers want full control and scalability

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Now it’s up to you: Contentful or Sanity?

Both Contentful and Sanity are strong contenders in the headless CMS space. Your best choice depends on your team’s workflow, technical expertise, and growth plans.

If you’re seeking a CMS that grows with your business, allows deep customisation, and empowers both developers and editors, Sanity is our preferred option.

That said, we always start with the problem, not the platform. If you’re unsure, we will always give honest and transparent advice to help guide you toward the right fit. Let’s have a chat.