Which fits your team?
Choose Sanity when your content structure and editing workflow need deliberate customization, and you have a team responsible for maintaining that implementation. Choose Contentful when its content types, references, and platform workflows fit the work, or when extending an existing Contentful implementation avoids an unnecessary migration.
Both offer visual preview and structured content delivered through APIs. Marketing autonomy depends on the model, components, permissions, and preview your team implements. A CMS selection should include who maintains those pieces after launch.
Editing and preview in practice
Give an editor the same task in both products: create a campaign from existing components, reference a customer story, change one market’s offer, and review the result before publishing. Include a new layout requirement to expose where developer work starts.
| Decision | Sanity | Contentful |
|---|---|---|
| Content structure | Schemas defined in code and deployed with the Studio | Content types and references configured in the platform or through APIs |
| Editor workspace | A configurable Studio whose tools and inputs can be tailored | The platform editor, with extensions where the workflow needs them |
| Visual preview | Presentation and visual-editing integration with your website | Live-preview integration with your website |
| Ongoing responsibility | Maintain schema code, Studio customizations, frontend, and integrations | Maintain models, extensions, frontend, and integrations |
Sanity’s Presentation Tool lets editors work with a preview of the website. Its visual-editing setup connects page content to the corresponding fields. It is not necessary to build every editor control from scratch, but custom inputs and workflows still need an owner.
Contentful’s live preview lets editors see the website alongside content changes. Check the required preview features against the proposed plan, including locale switching. Calling Contentful a fixed forms-only editor overlooks this capability and its extension options.
Measure how many steps the editor needs and which changes require help. A missing preview integration is implementation work to estimate, not evidence that a CMS cannot support preview.
Content reuse and APIs
Sanity’s GROQ can filter documents, follow references, and shape query results for the frontend. That is useful when a page combines content from several related records. It also means someone must own the queries and understand how model changes affect them.
Contentful provides published-content delivery, draft preview, management APIs, and GraphQL. Its API overview distinguishes those responsibilities. A familiar API format can reduce integration work, but it does not remove the need to design references and update dependent pages.
Try a shared product record used in a campaign, a support article, and a second brand website. Change it once and check each result. Identify where content is reused, where a local override is allowed, and how the team reviews all affected pages. Both products can serve several channels; the content model determines whether that reuse is practical.
Localization, permissions, and releases
Sanity documents field-level and document-level localization. Localizing individual fields can suit closely aligned translations. Separate language documents can give translations their own document lifecycle. Choose the model from publishing needs, then test references and fallback behavior.
Contentful’s locale configuration supports translated fields and fallback locales. Test the actual requirements for independent market publishing and approvals on the proposed plan, rather than assuming that adding a locale creates the whole workflow.
For either platform, write down who can edit, approve, schedule, publish, and change the model. Demonstrate a correction to one market while another market’s campaign remains in draft. Confirm whether the proposed configuration covers custom roles, sign-on, release coordination, and the history your team needs.
Pricing and the work behind it
As checked on September 8, 2026, Sanity Growth lists $15 per seat per month, with usage allowances and paid options for additional capacity. Custom roles and SAML sign-on require a custom plan. Contentful Lite lists $300 per month with 20 users, three locales, and defined usage allowances. Additional spaces and other requirements can change the bill.
For ten editors, Sanity’s listed Growth seat charge is $150 per month. That calculation is only the seat charge. It is not a like-for-like quote against Contentful Lite, because permissions, content capacity, environments, support, and usage must also match.
Ask for a proposal that separates recurring platform charges from implementation work. Include Studio or editor customization, content modelling, preview, integrations, migration, hosting, and maintenance. Identify who will update those parts when the team adds a new content type or market.
If either CMS already meets your requirements, improving its model or preview can be a smaller project than replacing it. A migration needs a clear benefit that pays for the transfer, verification, retraining, and ongoing ownership.
Evidence from Bejamas projects
The State of Maryland project uses Sanity and Netlify for a modern publishing platform. Its published case establishes that delivery context; it does not provide a controlled comparison of editor speed against Contentful.
Rippling used Contentful in a WordPress migration that included blog and resource content, shared design-system components, and regional content requirements. Custom migration scripts and content-structure work were part of the delivery.
The useful lesson is to connect the platform decision to work your team needs done. A product’s feature list cannot replace that implementation plan.
Moving between Sanity and Contentful
Map documents and content types, references, rich text, assets, translations, and publishing states. A data export alone does not recreate the other platform’s models, preview configuration, or editorial workflow.
Import a representative sample and render it with the proposed frontend. Check relationships, missing translations, embedded content, metadata, URLs, and internal links. Then rehearse the final content sync and editor handover. Preserve working URLs where possible and verify redirects when they change.
We are a Sanity partner and work with both platforms. Our Sanity development service covers the Studio and content implementation; our Contentful development service covers its models, integrations, and migration work. Bring a real publishing task and the responsibilities your team wants to keep or hand over.