Sanity vs WordPress, Strapi & Contentful: a detailed comparison
Charli
Marketing Manager
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
| Feature | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Architecture | WordPress is traditional monolithic but can be adapted for headless environments with additional development. Sanity is natively headless. |
| Frontend | Sanity offers completely custom frontends off-the-shelf, allowing developers to choose any framework. WordPress natively requires built-in themes but can support custom frameworks if adapted for headless. |
| Backend Customisation | Sanity provides a fully customisable editing experience. WordPress is more standardised; while plugins allow some customisation, there are inherent limits. |
| Editing Experience | WordPress benefits from widespread user familiarity. Sanity is intuitive and features real-time, multi-user collaboration (similar to Google Docs). WordPress plans to roll out similar collaborative editing in version 7.0. |
| Ecosystem | Sanity has a lean, API-driven plugin ecosystem. WordPress has a vast ecosystem with extensive third-party support, though many plugins require extra development to work in a headless setup. |
| Scalability | Sanity is built for extreme scalability and complex projects via serverless scaling. WordPress is highly scalable with the right setup but may struggle with very complex data relationships. |
| Cost | Sanity typically involves higher initial development costs and an ongoing platform fee. WordPress generally offers lower upfront 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.
| Feature | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Architecture | WordPress is traditional monolithic but can be adapted for headless environments with additional development. Sanity is natively headless. |
| Frontend | Sanity offers completely custom frontends off-the-shelf, allowing developers to choose any framework. WordPress natively requires built-in themes but can support custom frameworks if adapted for headless. |
| Backend Customisation | Sanity provides a fully customisable editing experience. WordPress is more standardised; while plugins allow some customisation, there are inherent limits. |
| Editing Experience | WordPress benefits from widespread user familiarity. Sanity is intuitive and features real-time, multi-user collaboration (similar to Google Docs). WordPress plans to roll out similar collaborative editing in version 7.0. |
| Ecosystem | Sanity has a lean, API-driven plugin ecosystem. WordPress has a vast ecosystem with extensive third-party support, though many plugins require extra development to work in a headless setup. |
| Scalability | Sanity is built for extreme scalability and complex projects via serverless scaling. WordPress is highly scalable with the right setup but may struggle with very complex data relationships. |
| Cost | Sanity typically involves higher initial development costs and an ongoing platform fee. WordPress generally offers lower upfront costs and no platform fee. |
The text in the cells will now look much more integrated with your site’s design. Would you like me to bold the feature names in the left column to give them a bit more “pop”?
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.
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