Sanity review

An editorial read across the six dimensions that actually decide whether a platform survives contact with a real content team. Scored against the rest of this directory, not against an abstract ideal.

• Developer experience5/5

  Schema as code, typed GROQ queries, and a Studio you extend like any other React app.

• Editor experience4/5

  Real-time collaboration and visual editing are excellent. Portable Text takes editors a week to stop fighting.

• Content modelling5/5

  References, arrays of blocks and portable rich text handle genuinely complex models without escape hatches.

• Pricing clarity3/5

  The rate card is published and readable, but per-seat billing punishes exactly the teams that get value from collaboration.

• Lock-in risk3/5

  Content exports cleanly as NDJSON, but GROQ queries and Portable Text do not port anywhere else.

• SEO and AEO fit5/5

  Nothing about the delivery layer constrains rendering, so metadata, canonicals and schema stay entirely yours.

An editorial read, not an aggregate of user reviews, and deliberately kept out of this page's structured data.

From Sanity's own YouTube channel. Vendor marketing rather than an independent review, included because it is the quickest way to see the product before you sign up.

Sanity overview

A minimal fetch against the live API, with credentials read from the environment rather than pasted inline.

import { createClient } from "@sanity/client"

const client = createClient({
  projectId: process.env.SANITY_PROJECT_ID!,
  dataset: "production",
  apiVersion: "2026-08-01",
  useCdn: true, // hits the API CDN quota, not the smaller uncached one
})

// GROQ projects the exact shape the page needs, and follows the
// author reference in the same request. No second call, no over-fetch.
const post = await client.fetch(
  `*[_type == "post" && slug.current == $slug][0]{
    title,
    "slug": slug.current,
    publishedAt,
    "author": author->{name, "image": image.asset->url},
    body
  }`,
  { slug: "headless-cms-platforms" },
)

• Free: 10,000 documents, 250,000 API requests and 1,000,000 API CDN requests per month, 100GB assets, 100GB bandwidth. Overages are not billed, they are blocked.
• Growth: 25,000 documents and the same request and bandwidth allowances, with overage at $1 per 25,000 API requests and $1 per 250,000 API CDN requests.
• Assets and bandwidth overage on Growth run $0.50 per GB and $0.30 per GB respectively.
• Two datasets on both Free and Growth. Additional datasets are a $999 add-on, which makes per-environment or per-brand separation an expensive habit.
• Draft history is 3 days on Free and 90 days on Growth.
• Free is capped at 2 roles (Administrator and Viewer). Growth adds Editor, Developer and Contributor for 5 total.

• “Yeah Sanity and Prismic aren't actually self-hosted, your content still lives on their servers. the whole "create a project locally and deploy" thing is just so your schema is code you can version in git instead of clicking it together in some dashboard. sanity will even host the studio UI for you if you run sanity deploy.”

  r/webdev on Reddit

• “look at Contentful, Sanity, or Strapi Cloud. Contentful and Sanity have very polished UIs that editors pick up quickly, strong editorial workflows, and good Next.js support.”

  r/nextjs on Reddit

• “If the client only needs to manage public content (products, text, images) and there's no authentication or private data involved, Sanity on the free tier is probably all you need. Choosing Headless WordPress here feels like adding complexity without solving any real problem.”

  r/nextjs on Reddit

• “Sanity or Payload CMS are worth looking into, both give you full control over the structure while the client gets clean interface for editing content”

  r/webdev on Reddit

• Contentful$0
• Storyblok$0
• Prismic$0
• Cosmic$0