Sanity CMS – Features, Benefits and Comparisons
Charli
Marketing Manager
When it comes to managing and editing the content for your website, there are virtually endless options for the platform, or content management system (CMS) you can use to power it.
There are well-established options you might have heard of, such as WordPress, Drupal, and Umbraco. In the last few years, a new generation of platforms has emerged, offering improved flexibility, scalability, and performance. One of these platforms is Sanity.
In this quick guide, we’ll cover:
- What Sanity CMS is
- Key features and benefits
- Comparisons with WordPress
- Use cases and examples
- Working with a Sanity CMS development agency
What is Sanity CMS?
Sanity is a headless CMS – also referred to as a “content operating system”. Headless means that the frontend is separated from the backend – unlike a “traditional” CMS setup where the two are linked. Some traditional CMS platforms like WordPress can also be set up to be headless, but Sanity is natively headless and doesn’t have a frontend at all.
Sanity differs from other headless CMS platforms because it treats content as data (known as “structured content“). This means it breaks down content into its smallest possible components, and it can be arranged and expressed on any web page, app, feed or product without having to manually repurpose it. This approach also makes it highly customisable.
Sanity CMS: features & benefits
Flexible content types
Sanity’s structured data approach enables the platform to do something called flexible content modelling. This allows you to define different content types (pages, articles, products, locations – anything) and the relationships between them, allowing you to have more control over how content is expressed in the frontend and how it can be reused across your website and other platforms.
Customisable editing environment
The editing environment – Sanity Studio – is open source and completely customisable through JavaScript and React. Custom components like layouts, nav bars and menus, as well as form components like fields and inputs, can be added by a developer. This means you can create a more intuitive and efficient experience that better suits your organisation’s needs.
collaborative editing
When it comes to launching a piece of content for your website, it can often take a bit of experimenting to achieve the look you want on the live website – and it can be useful, but not always easy with other CMS platforms, to share this with colleagues to get their feedback. Sanity supports real-time collaborative editing – meaning just like in Google Docs, users can be working in and editing a document at the same time. You’ll all be able to see any changes, who made them, etc, and be able to rollback anything when you need to.
Developer flexibility
The highly customisable environment and content types make Sanity seamless to integrate with lots of other tools and platforms. From a development perspective, it offers a lot more flexibility in terms of the tech stack, enabling a completely tailored environment. The lack of a frontend interface gives you a completely blank state and opportunity to use the best available frontend framework to deliver a high-performing website or digital product.
Natively headless
Sanity is natively a headless CMS, offering an extra level of flexibility as well as improved scalability and security from the start compared with other CMS platforms such as WordPress. With headless, rather than the content being pulled from the CMS every time a request is made, a static, pre-built version of the page is served via an API in the background, enabling it to load quickly and efficiently.
Scalable & secure
The headless architecture of Sanity CMS can handle large amounts of data, content and traffic without compromising on frontend performance or the editing experience in the backend. The backend of Sanity can also be customised and scaled without the use of plugins, which can help to reduce tech debt and improve security.
Sanity vs WordPress
| Feature | Sanity CMS | WordPress |
| Architecture | Natively headless. | Monolithic (can be headless). |
| Frontend | Completely custom via frameworks like React, Vue, etc | Natively requires built-in themes or templates, which can be custom developed. In a headless environment can use flexible frameworks. |
| Editing experience | Fully customisable with flexible content modelling. | Standardised with some limited customisation. |
| Collaboration | Real-time multi-user editing. | Standardised with some limited customisation. |
| Plugin ecosystem | Lean, developer and API-driven. | Extensive third-party support and plugin ecosystem. |
| Familiarity | Editing experience may be less familiar to some users, but still highly intuitive. | More users are likely to be familiar and comfortable with WordPress from the off. |
| Scalability | Highly scalable and suited to large-scale, complex projects. | Highly scalable with the right setup and optimisation, but does have some limitations when handling complex data models. |
| Cost | Initial development costs can be higher, and an ongoing subscription fee is required, but this does include backend hosting. | Lower initial development costs and no ongoing platform fees. |
Which CMS is best?
At Adaptable, we use both Sanity and WordPress for website and digital product development – each has its own benefits and potential challenges for a particular use case, and we carefully consider each option on a project-by-project basis.
Sanity CMS use cases
Utilita Energy
We developed a set of user journeys for Utilita Energy’s boiler and renewables services. Sanity powers the quote funnels, integrated with a WordPress marketing site and their internal CRM. The CMS handles real-time data exchange, including live pricing, engineer availability, and virtual appointment booking, creating a streamlined and seamless user experience.
Davidson Homes
After a successful website relaunch, we migrated US-based Davidson Homes to a headless architecture with Sanity to better support their needs as they grew. The project required complex data modelling and integration with multiple listing services (MLS) — all of which could be handled seamlessly in Sanity thanks to its flexibility and scalability.
Working with a Sanity CMS development agency
Implementing Sanity effectively and using it to its full potential often requires development expertise. It also isn’t right for every website project, and assessing the options and making the right choice needs expertise and experience.
Working with a Sanity CMS development agency helps you get:
- Clarity that you are building the tech stack that works best for your needs
- Architecture and infrastructure properly optimised for growth
- High-performance frontends with modern frameworks
- The ability to integrate with third-party systems (e.g. CRMs, eCommerce)
- Customised editing interface and content types
Adaptable is an official agency partner of Sanity, which enables us to offer enhanced support and services around the platform.
Key takeaways
- Sanity is a headless CMS designed for modern, scalable, multi-platform content delivery.
- Its structured content, real-time collaboration, and developer-first architecture make it a strong choice for businesses that need flexibility and performance.
- Compared to WordPress, Sanity offers slightly more flexibility and scalability for large-scale projects with complex data requirements.
- Working with an expert partner helps you determine that Sanity is the best fit for you and build a setup that’s fully optimised for performance and growth.
Looking to launch a new website or digital product and wondering if Sanity might work for you? Get in touch and let’s discuss.
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