Sanity vs WordPress, Strapi & Contentful: a detailed comparison

Sanity CMS is an increasingly popular headless CMS which powers some of the world’s leading brands. It’s powerful, flexible and scalable, and well suited to highly complex projects. But is it right for you?

In this blog post, we’ll compare Sanity’s features and benefits with other popular headless CMS platforms: WordPress, Strapi and Contentful, before concluding on the best fit for each one.

Note: you can get more detail on Sanity features, benefits and use cases in our post here. 

The stats: usage

The popularity of a CMS can guide you in terms of the support ecosystem, availability of development expertise, and reference-ability.

According to BuiltWith:

• 56,669 live sites are built with Sanity 👑
• 47,918 live sites are built with Contentful
• 10,711 live site are built with Strapi

Within the top 1m sites by traffic rank:

• 35.94% built with Contentful
• 17% Sanity
• 4.67% Strapi

With WordPress, it’s hard to tell as it’s not natively headless, and you can’t detect this automatically. WordPress as a CMS powers 36.8m live sites worldwide. It’s not possible to say how many are headless, but it’s becoming increasingly popular as an approach.

Sanity vs WordPress

Architecture

WordPress is traditional monolithic, but can be adapted to be deployed in a headless environment. This does require some additional development. Sanity is natively headless.

Frontend

Sanity allows for completely custom frontends off-the-shelf, with no frontend attached, your developers are free to select whichever framework best fits your needs. WordPress can have custom frameworks when adapted for headless, but natively requires built in themes/templates.

Backend customisation

Sanity has a fully customisable editing experience, while WordPress is pretty standardised. Some customisations can be made using plugins, but there is a limit to the customisation options.

Editing experience

WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS, so there’s a stronger chance users will be familiar with its editing experience. Sanity is highly intuitive though and can be picked up quickly and easily. One advantage Sanity currently has over WordPress and a number of other CMS platforms, is that it allows real-time collaboration and multi-user editing (like Google Docs). However, this may change in the future. WordPress will roll out collaborative editing with WordPress 7.0, and it’s already available in WordPress VIP.

Ecosystem

Sanity has a lean plugin ecosystem which is API-driven, whereas WordPress has a vast ecosystem of plugins with extensive third-party support, due its open-source design and popularity. That being said, there is often a degree of customisation and additional development required to make some WordPress plugins work with a headless frontend.

Scalability

Sanity is extremely scalable for complex projects, and offers serverless scaling. WordPress is highly scalable with the right setup, but does have some limitations when it comes to handling complex data relationships.

Cost

Initial development costs can be higher on a Sanity project, and there is an ongoing platform fee, although this fee does go towards covering some of your hosting costs. WordPress (even headless) will offer lower upfront development costs, and no platform fee.

Sanity vs Strapi & Contentful

We’ve grouped Strapi and Contentful together here as there are more similarities when compared to each other, but there are some important differences with Sanity.

Architecture

Both Strapi and Contentful are natively headless like Sanity. Both Sanity and Contentful offer cloud-only hosting. Strapi has the option to self-host, as well as cloud-based hosting through Strapi Cloud.

Frontend

Contentful and Strapi are completely flexible out-of-the-box in terms of frontend frameworks. Performance-wise, the querying language that Sanity uses for API integrations (GROQ) can make complex requests in a single query, which can boost both frontend and backend performance. Contentful and Strapi use REST/GraphQL, which is not quite as efficient on complex queries.

Backend customisation

The Contentful and Strapi backends can be customised and extended through plugins and middleware. Sanity can be customised natively (without additional plugins), using code (React), and also offers field-level editing. The way that Sanity structures and interprets content means that more custom and complex relationships can be defined between content types, whereas Contentful and Strapi are more standardised.

Editing experience

The Contentful and Strapi editing UI (user interface), while obviously different from each other, are more traditional, WYSIWYG editors, more akin to the WordPress of editing . Neither Contentful or Strapi offer real-time collaboration, which Sanity does – they provide more traditional, version-based workflows – again, more like WordPress. Another important point is that both Contentful and Strapi offer a live visual editor, but they are not included on the free tier, and Contentful’s requires some additional development compared to other platforms. Sanity’s visual editor is free, but does require some manual setup.

Ecosystem

Both Contentful and Strapi have a large open-source community and plugin marketplace. Sanity has a smaller ecosystem but you can custom-build integrations.

Scalability

Sanity has automatic serverless scaling and managed performance, and its flexibility makes more custom integrations and extensions possible. Strapi must be scaled manually. Contentful offers enterprise-level infrastructure and CDN-cached delivery (the database is cached and delivered by a Content Delivery Network) for more efficiency at-scale.

Cost

Strapi has a free open-source core with flat-rate pricing on cloud tiers. Self-hosted Strapi can be cost-effective but there will be an overhead in terms of management and devops. Contentful also offers flat-rate pricing but can be costly at-scale. Sanity is a usage based SaaS – meaning typically lower operating costs.

Which CMS platform is right for you?

To sum up:

• CMS platforms like WordPress, Strapi and Contentful offer headless performance with a more “traditional” management and editing environment.
• Headless WordPress offers the most familiarity, largest support and plugin ecosystem. It is also the easiest in terms of migration from traditional WordPress.
• Strapi and Contentful offer a more familiar CMS experience with added benefits like increased backend customisation and enterprise scalability, but they are not as flexible/customisable as Sanity.
• Sanity is a more modern and extremely customisable approach to content management. It’s highly suited to large, complex projects that need to scale effortlessly. Additionally, the editing UI can be heavily customised, completely tailored to your organisation’s needs.

An expert partner can help you by assessing your organisation’s individual needs and requirements, with in-depth knowledge and experience of different platforms, their capabilities and suitability for different use cases. Adaptable typically work with both headless WordPress for more “standard” projects (although configured correctly it’s still a powerful platform) and Sanity for ones with more complex data structures. We deep-dive on required functionality, integrations, key users and potential roadmaps ahead of a project to make the best recommendation on which CMS is best-suited.

Wondering which CMS platform could be best for you and your project? Looking for backend migration, or a completely new website? Get in touch, we’re happy to chat through how we could help.