Sanity vs Contentful

Both vendors publish a free plan, one paid plan and a quote. The useful question is not which paid plan is cheaper. It is which of your requirements pushes you past the paid plan, because after that point neither vendor publishes a number.

On Contentful the list is short and close. The twenty-first user, the fourth locale, a third space, SSO, EU data residency, custom roles and an uptime SLA all sit on Enterprise. Workflows exist on Lite only inside the $850 Lite Space.

On Sanity the list starts further out. Growth runs to 50 seats and charges nothing for locales. Extra datasets cost $999 a month each, the price of 66 seats. SSO, custom roles, content releases, the audit log, an uptime SLA, invoicing and annual payment all need Enterprise.

That is why a Sanity vs Contentful comparison built on feature ticks misleads. Most of the ticks are shared. The difference is how many ordinary growth steps each plan absorbs before it asks for a sales call. Hiring an editor is one. Adding a market is another.

Both vendors meter delivery, and they meter different things. The definitions are worth ten minutes before you model traffic, because the same site can look cheap on one and expensive on the other.

Sanity counts every HTTP request to its API CDN hostname and, separately, every request to its uncached API hostname. OPTIONS requests, failed requests and traffic from Sanity's own Studio and Dashboard are not billed. Requests made from inside a Sanity Function count like any other.

Contentful counts calls to its Delivery, Preview and Management APIs together, against one monthly allowance. Its usage terms say cached CDN responses generate no additional calls, so a high cache hit rate works as a direct discount.

The overage shapes differ too. Sanity bills $1 per 250,000 CDN requests and $1 per 25,000 uncached ones, so an uncached request costs ten times as much. Contentful bills $5 per started million, and its terms say it sets no cap on extra calls.

What happens at the limit differs most on the free plans. Sanity emails administrators at 80% and 100% of quota, and a Free project then stops serving content until someone upgrades or the month resets at midnight UTC. A Growth project keeps serving content past its request quota, and the excess is simply invoiced. Contentful's Free plan uses hard caps in the same spirit.

Sanity keeps the content model in your repository. Schema types are code inside the Studio configuration, usually TypeScript, so a change is reviewed and deployed like any other code. Nobody adds a field from a settings screen.

The cost of that design is stated in Sanity's own documentation, updated 6 August 2026. The Content Lake is schemaless, and validation rules run only in Studio. Writes through the HTTP API, the client library, migrations or imports are accepted without any check.

So every script, integration or agent that writes content has to validate for itself. Sanity's CLI can check a whole dataset against the schema after the fact, which makes a sensible last step for any bulk import.

Contentful keeps the model in the platform. Admins edit content types in the web app. Teams that want the model in git write migration scripts for the Contentful CLI instead. Either way, the model is a server-side object the API knows about.

That has a practical consequence. Since 14 November 2024, Contentful's Management API refuses to publish an entry with an empty required field, even when the field is hidden. Environments and an environment alias come with every plan, so a model change can be tested on a copy first.

Contentful treats a locale as a platform setting and counts it. Free allows two and Lite three, with no add-on for a fourth. Its plan table puts localised workflows and previewing by locale on Enterprise as well.

Sanity does not charge for locales at all. Its pricing FAQ says you can create as many as you like. The limit is unique attributes per dataset: 2,000 on Free and 10,000 on Growth.

That limit is where the real constraint hides. Sanity stores a translation as data inside a document. Its localisation guide shows that one object key per language adds a new attribute for every language. Arrays of language and value pairs avoid that, which is why its recommended plugin uses them.

Sanity also leaves the pattern to you. Field-level translation keeps every language in one document, so they publish together. Document-level translation gives each language its own document and its own publish button, joined by references.

The trade is plain. Contentful gives you localisation that works the day you enable it, then caps it. Sanity gives you as many languages as your attribute budget allows. In return, a developer has to choose the pattern, the plugin and the fallback query.

Sanity's Free plan already includes real-time collaborative editing, presence, live preview, visual editing and the Presentation tool for page building. Growth adds comments, tasks and scheduled drafts, and keeps draft history for 90 days instead of 3.

The catch is that Studio is a React application your team owns. It can be customised almost without limit, and somebody has to maintain it, upgrade it and fix it when a plugin breaks. Sanity will host a deployed Studio for free, but it does not maintain your code.

Contentful's plan table ticks live preview, the rich text editor, versioning, bulk editing, comments on entries and the tasks app on every plan. Lite adds comments on fields, presence indicators and the Launch app for releases.

The visual page builder is a different story. Contentful Studio, its drag-and-drop canvas, is sold only with Enterprise plans, and so are Timeline and localised workflows. Workflows on Lite exist only inside the $850 Lite Space.

One inconsistency is worth checking in a trial. Contentful's plan table ticks scheduled publishing and the tasks app on Free, while the Lite card lists both as things Lite adds. I would not plan around either reading until you have seen the Free editor yourself.

Salesforce announced its agreement to buy Contentful on 1 June 2026. It completed the deal on 1 September 2026, according to the editor's note on Salesforce's own announcement. Contentful's pricing page now carries a banner saying it is officially part of Salesforce.

Salesforce says Contentful will be integrated natively across Customer 360 while preserving the composability developers expect. Co-founder Sascha Konietzke wrote on the same day that customers "remain our top priority". He committed to "the same level of innovation, flexibility, and enterprise-grade support".

Neither post says anything about pricing, contract terms or how long the self-serve plans will run. That is not evidence of a change. It is a reason to get renewal and price-protection terms in writing before signing a multi-year contract this year.

I found no comparable ownership event at Sanity to disclose. The practical advice is the same for both vendors. Keep content access behind a thin layer of your own code, because the query language and the SDK cost most to replace.