Contentful vs Sanity
This is the comparison for teams who have decided they still want somebody else running the CMS. Neither product can be self-hosted, so nothing here is about servers. It is about which meter you would rather be on: Contentful's flat plan, gated on how many roles and languages you use, or Sanity's per-seat price with usage billed on top.
Pick Sanity if you have a small editorial team, publish in more than two languages, and can model your own content structure: $15 per seat is a fraction of $300 a month and languages are never a line item. Stay on Contentful if you have high uncached request volume and few editors, if you need a predictable flat invoice rather than a usage bill, or if you want localization handled for you instead of designed by you.
Side by side
Contentful vs Sanity at a glance
| Contentful | Sanity | |
|---|---|---|
| What it bills | A flat plan, gated on roles and locales | Per seat, plus metered usage |
| Free plan | 10 users, 2 roles, 2 locales, 10,000 records | ✓ 20 seats, 2 roles, 10,000 documents, 2 public-only datasets |
| Cheapest paid tier | ✗ $300/mo (Lite) | ✓ $15/seat/mo (Growth) |
| Five editors would pay | $300/mo | $75/mo plus usage |
| Locales | ✗ 2 free, 3 on Lite, 4+ unpriced | ✓ Not metered, modelled in your schema |
| Roles | 2 free, 3 on Lite | 2 free, 5 on Growth |
| Requests | ✓ 1M API calls included in Lite | ✗ $1 per 25K API requests, $1 per 250K CDN requests |
| Bandwidth | 100 GB included in Lite | $0.30/GB, assets $0.50/GB |
| Extra environments | 2 environments on free | ✗ Extra dataset $999/mo on Growth |
| Self-hosting | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| Editing experience | Polished, non-technical editors do fine unaided | Sanity Studio, a React app you configure and deploy |
| Best for | High traffic, few editors, one or two languages | Small teams, many languages, developer nearby |
Sources: Contentful pricing · Sanity pricing · Contentful technical limits. Compiled August 2026.
Where Sanity wins
The entry price is a twentieth of Contentful's
Contentful's cheapest published paid plan is $300 a month, flat, whether you are two people or twenty. Sanity Growth is $15 per seat per month. Five editors pay $75, ten pay $150, and you would need twenty seats before the base subscription matched Contentful Lite. For a team that outgrew Contentful's free plan by one role or one language, this is the difference between a rounding error and a budget conversation.
Languages are a modelling decision, not a plan tier
Sanity has no concept of a billable locale. You decide whether translations are fields on a document or separate documents per language, and then you have as many as you want. Contentful gives you two on free, three for $300 a month, and no published price for a fourth. If multilingual publishing is your growth path, one of these two products charges you for it and the other does not.
Content modelling and querying are genuinely stronger
Sanity's schemas are TypeScript, versioned in your repository, and GROQ lets you shape a response to exactly what a page component needs instead of fetching entries and stitching them client-side. The editing environment, Sanity Studio, is a React application you configure and deploy yourself, so custom input components and previews are ordinary code rather than a plugin marketplace. For a product with a complicated content graph this is the substantive reason to move, well ahead of price.
The free plan holds twice as many people
Sanity Free allows up to 20 seats against Contentful's 10, with the same 10,000 document ceiling. If your problem is simply that too many people need to log in, the free tier alone may solve it.
Where Contentful still wins
Contentful's invoice is predictable and Sanity's is not. Lite includes 1 million API calls and 100 GB of bandwidth in the flat $300. On Sanity, uncached API requests are billed at $1 per 25,000, which is 40 times the rate of CDN requests at $1 per 250,000, and bandwidth is $0.30 per GB on top. A site that serves most traffic from the CDN will barely notice; a site with personalised or preview-heavy traffic that misses the cache can find the usage half of the bill dwarfing the seat half. If finance needs a number that does not move, the flat plan is a feature.
The free tier also has a catch that is easy to miss: Sanity's two free datasets are public only, meaning readable by anyone with the project ID. That is fine for published marketing content and wrong for anything confidential. Private datasets need a paid plan, and an extra dataset costs $999 per month on Growth, which makes Sanity a poor fit if your workflow depends on many parallel environments. Contentful gives you two environments on the free plan for comparison.
And the editor experience is not equivalent. Contentful ships a finished, hosted editing interface that a non-technical marketing team can use without anyone deploying anything. Sanity Studio is a codebase you maintain and deploy alongside the rest of your stack. That is a strength when you have engineers and a liability when you do not.
Migrating Contentful to Sanity
The path most teams take:
1. Inventory first. Export with contentful-export, then decide the localization pattern before you write a line of import code. Field-level versus document-level translation is the decision that shapes everything downstream, and changing your mind later means reprocessing the whole dataset.
2. Rebuild the schema in TypeScript. Content types become Sanity schema files. Contentful's rich text is a structured JSON document and Sanity's Portable Text is a different structured format, so the rich text converter is usually the largest single piece of migration code.
3. Import with the CLI, then run both for a cycle. Sanity's CLI ingests NDJSON, so the importer is a transform from the Contentful export. Keep production reading Contentful while a staging front end reads Sanity, and reconcile page by page.
4. What does not move. Roles and permissions, scheduled publishing, webhooks and any App Framework extension are rebuilds, not migrations. Entry version history stays in Contentful, and Sanity's own document history starts at import, so if you need the old audit trail keep a read-only Contentful space rather than assuming it travels.
Common questions
FAQ: Contentful vs Sanity
Is Sanity cheaper than Contentful?
For a small team, usually yes on the base plan. Sanity Growth is $15 per seat per month, so five editors cost $75 against $300 for Contentful Lite. The catch is that Sanity's bill has a second half that Contentful's does not: usage overages, charged at $1 per 25,000 API requests, $1 per 250,000 CDN requests, $0.30 per GB of bandwidth and $0.50 per GB of assets. Contentful Lite includes 1 million API calls in the flat $300. So the answer depends on the ratio of editors to traffic: Sanity wins on a small team with modest request volume, and the gap narrows as uncached requests grow.
Does Sanity limit how many languages I can publish?
No. Sanity has no locale count in any plan because localization is not a platform feature you switch on, it is something you model in your schema, either as fields on a document or as separate documents per language. That is a real advantage over Contentful, where the third locale is what moves you from $0 to $300 a month. It is also more work: you decide the localization pattern yourself and you implement it, rather than getting a locale switcher out of the box.
What is the catch with Sanity's free plan?
The free plan is generous on people and stingy elsewhere. You get up to 20 seats, which is twice Contentful's ten, but only 2 roles, 10,000 documents, and 2 datasets that can be public only. Public datasets mean the content is readable by anyone with the project ID, which is fine for a marketing site and not fine for anything unpublished or sensitive. Private datasets require a paid plan, and extra datasets beyond the included two cost $999 per dataset per month on Growth.