Sanity
The Structured Content Platform
Quick Specs
- Type
- API-first SaaS
- Site Generators
- All frameworks
- Pricing
- Free & Paid
- Self-hosted
- Studio only
- Query Language
- GROQ + GraphQL
- Founded
- 2017, Oslo
What is Sanity?
Sanity is a structured content platform that decouples the content editing experience from the delivery layer. Editors use Sanity Studio — an open-source React application — to manage content stored in Sanity's real-time Content Lake.
Developers query content using GROQ, Sanity's graph-relational query language, or via a GraphQL API. The platform is built for real-time collaboration and is a popular choice for Next.js projects.
G2 Reviews
Rated 4.5/5 from 412 verified reviews.
"Sanity has the best developer experience of any CMS I have used. Being able to define my schema in TypeScript and have it generate types for the frontend is a game-changer. GROQ is expressive and fast."
Full-stack Developer · Small Business
"The real-time multiplayer editing is something we did not expect to love this much. Seeing other editors working on the same document live has eliminated so many conflicting publish situations our team used to deal with."
Content Operations Lead · Mid-Market
"Sanity Studio being open source and fully configurable means we can tailor the editor UI exactly to what our content team needs. The learning curve for GROQ is real, but it pays off once the team is comfortable with it."
Engineering Manager · Mid-Market
"We run Sanity across eight brands from a single Content Lake. The cross-dataset references and GROQ joins make it possible to share content between projects without duplicating it. Excellent platform for a complex content architecture."
Solutions Engineer · Enterprise
Platform Features
Content Modelling
- Schema-as-code using JavaScript or TypeScript
- Portable Text for rich, structured long-form content
- Document references with real-time join traversal in GROQ
- Custom field validation and input components in React
Developer Experience
- Sanity Studio fully configurable and embeddable in your app
- GROQ query language for precise, expressive data fetching
- Real-time Content Lake with optimistic UI out of the box
- Live preview via Presentation tool using URL overlay integration
Collaboration
- Real-time multiplayer editing across all documents
- Presence indicators showing active editors per document
- Activity log and document history for content auditing
- Publishing workflow with review and scheduling tools
Integrations
- Sanity Exchange with plugins for Cloudinary, Mux, Shopify, and more
- Next.js app router integration with Draft Mode support
- AI Assist plugin for GPT-powered content generation inside Studio
- Webhooks for CI/CD build triggers and third-party automation
Pros & Cons
Strengths
- Fully customizable editing studio built in open-source React
- Real-time collaboration built into the content lake at the infrastructure level
- GROQ gives developers expressive, efficient data fetching in a single query
- Portable Text is the most flexible rich text format in the headless CMS space
- Sanity Studio can be embedded directly inside your app
- Strong Next.js integration with live preview and Draft Mode
Limitations
- GROQ has a learning curve for developers coming from REST or SQL backgrounds
- Schema-as-code means editors cannot change content models without developer involvement
- No built-in visual page builder — layout logic lives in the frontend
- API usage quotas can escalate costs quickly for high-traffic sites
Sanity Pricing
Sanity's free Growth plan covers most development and small production use cases. Paid plans scale per seat and include higher API quotas, SSO, and priority support.
Free
forever
Developers and small teams
- Unlimited projects
- 3 users
- 500k API requests/mo
- 10GB bandwidth
- Community support
$15
per user/month
Growing teams and agencies
- Unlimited users
- 1M+ API requests/mo
- Higher bandwidth
- Git-style content history
- Email support
Custom
contact sales
Compliance and scale
- SSO & SCIM
- Audit logs
- Private CDN
- Dedicated SLA
- Custom contract
Frequently Asked Questions
Sanity Alternatives
Other platforms worth evaluating alongside Sanity.
Contentful
More mature platform with a larger app marketplace and stronger enterprise compliance track record.
Payload CMS
Better for developers wanting a fully self-hosted, code-first CMS with similar TypeScript-native schema definition.
Strapi
Open-source alternative with a full REST and GraphQL API that can be self-hosted with complete data ownership.
Hygraph
Best choice if your team wants federated GraphQL and needs to query multiple data sources via a single API.