Sanity vs Strapi

Sanity or Strapi is a hosting decision before it is a CMS decision. Sanity's pricing page lists a hosted, real-time content database on Free, Growth and Enterprise alike. There is no tier where the Content Lake runs on your servers, and no server of yours for it to run on.

That removes a whole job. Nobody on your side patches the store, sizes it or upgrades its engine. What you give up is custody, because the data sits in a proprietary service. Getting it out means the CLI export, which writes every document to an NDJSON file with the image and file binaries beside it.

Strapi assumes the opposite. Its deployment docs list the databases it supports: PostgreSQL 14 or later with 17 recommended, MySQL 8.0 or later, MariaDB 10.3 or later, and SQLite 3. They set a minimum server of one core, 2GB of memory and 8GB of disk, and recommend two cores and 4GB.

The same docs exclude MongoDB and the databases Strapi calls cloud native, naming Amazon Aurora and Google Cloud SQL. So "bring your own database" means a conventional SQL server you size and run, not whichever managed store your platform team already prefers.

They also carry the warning that matters most. Starting Strapi with a changed content-type schema alters the database, and removing a content type drops its table. That is ordinary for an application you run and unusual for a CMS. Someone has to review what a deploy will do to the data before it reaches production.

Strapi Cloud splits the difference. It provides a pre-configured PostgreSQL database, and you can point a project at an external one, though Strapi says it cannot provide security or support for that. On Cloud, Strapi runs the database, and because you now hold a Cloud account, the MIT grant in the LICENSE file no longer describes your position.

Both repositories carry the words MIT License, and that is where the resemblance ends. Sanity's file, copyright 2016 to 2026, is the plain MIT text with no conditions. It covers the Studio, the React editing interface you keep in your own repository. You may fork it, host it anywhere and ship it inside your own application.

What it does not cover is the Content Lake, because a hosted service is not distributed code. Your rights there come from Sanity's terms and your plan, not from a licence file. Sanity's open source half is real and unconditional, and it is the half that does not hold your data.

One related detail helps on the way out. groq-js, Sanity's JavaScript implementation of its GROQ query language, is MIT as well. It runs queries over JSON in memory, so an exported dataset can still be queried with GROQ on your own machine. That is a long way from a production store, but it is not nothing.

Strapi's file opens with conditions before the licence text begins. The MIT Expat grant applies only if you use no software under an ee/ directory and "you have no registered account on our cloud offering". GitHub's own licence detection labels the repository Other rather than MIT, which is a fair summary of a file that is MIT only some of the time.

The enterprise code is also wider than the ee/ folders the headline condition names. As of Strapi 5.54.0, Live Preview, Content History and Content Releases ship in directories carrying their own Enterprise License file, which points to Strapi's enterprise terms. Buying the self-hosted Growth plan to unlock them is buying your way off MIT for that code.

One inconsistency is worth putting in front of a lawyer. The root file links the enterprise licence to a copy pinned at a January 2023 commit. That copy allows development and testing use without a licence, and assigns your production modifications to Strapi. The current enterprise licence file points at the enterprise terms page instead. Read both before relying on either.

Sanity charges for people. Growth is $15 a seat a month, up to 50 seats, and every role except Viewer takes a seat. Viewers are free. Usage above the included quotas is metered too, at $1 per 25,000 API requests. On a marketing site of ordinary size, though, the seat line is usually the one that moves.

Strapi's Community edition charges nothing per person. Its CMS pricing lists unlimited seats and unlimited roles, and the Cloud pricing page lists no seat charge at all. The Strapi bill grows with the project instead, through API requests, asset storage, bandwidth and environments. Cloud Pro is $90 a month, and each extra environment is $60.

That gives a clean crossover. $150 a month buys ten Sanity Growth seats, or one Strapi Cloud Pro project with a staging environment. Below ten editors, Sanity costs less than that Strapi setup. Above ten, Strapi does, and the gap grows by $15 with every editor you add.

The crossover disappears the moment you want Strapi's Growth features. That plan is $45 a month for three seats and $15 for each seat after, which is Sanity's seat price exactly. Ten editors cost $150 on either, and a self-hosted Strapi still needs its server on top.

Billing terms differ as well. Sanity's self-serve plans are monthly only, with annual billing reserved for Enterprise. Strapi Cloud offers yearly billing at $348, $900 and $4,500, about 17% below twelve monthly payments. Sanity's Free plan has no overage billing at all, while every Strapi Cloud plan bills overage at $1.50 per 25,000 API requests.

If your front end already deploys to a serverless platform, this is where the difference stops being abstract. Sanity asks nothing of that platform. Sanity will host the Studio at no charge on every plan, or you can mount it inside your own app, and the content API is already running.

Strapi cannot follow it there. Strapi's FAQ says it is not well suited to serverless environments, because booting takes several seconds and the application is designed to run as an always-on service. It adds that there are no plans to shorten that boot time for the foreseeable future.

So self-hosted Strapi means a second host: a server or container platform, a database, and an object store for uploads. The FAQ explains why the last one is not optional. Platform file systems are usually ephemeral, so an SQLite file and local uploads can vanish when the container restarts.

An r/nextjs thread from April 2023 asked where to host a Next.js site with Strapi. Its most upvoted replies reached the same answer: the Next.js half can go to Vercel, and Strapi needs a server somewhere else. Strapi's current FAQ gives no sign that this has changed.

Priced as an example, the second host is cheap but not free. DigitalOcean is one of the four platforms Strapi's docs link a deployment guide for. At Strapi's documented minimum, an App Platform container with 1 vCPU and 2 GiB is $25.00 a month. The smallest managed PostgreSQL node is $15.15, and Spaces storage is $5.00. That is $45.15 a month, before a staging copy and before anyone's time.

The row a Sanity vs Strapi comparison most often gets wrong is where the content model lives. The easy assumption is that Sanity's is code and Strapi's is a UI. Strapi's own FAQ says otherwise, and it is worth getting right, because it changes how a team reviews a schema change.

In Sanity, the schema is TypeScript you write by hand in the Studio project. It is reviewed in a pull request and deployed with the Studio, and content keeps flowing through the hosted API while you do it.

In Strapi, the admin panel's builder writes schema files such as src/api/restaurant/content-types/restaurant/schema.json into your project. The FAQ says content types cannot be created or updated in production or staging, and that there are no plans to allow it. The model travels with your code and reaches production through a deploy.

The practical difference is who can start a change. In Strapi, someone who does not write code can shape a content type in the builder on a development instance, and a developer commits the files. In Sanity, someone has to write the TypeScript. Both end in version control, which is the part that matters for review.

Where they genuinely differ is what a deploy touches. A Sanity schema change alters the editing interface and leaves stored documents alone. A Strapi schema change alters database tables when the server restarts, so a removed field or type is a data change as well as a code change.