The short answer
Both are mature, API-first content platforms that pass demanding security and procurement reviews. You won’t go wrong on capability with either. The decision comes down to a single question: how much do you want to own the editing experience? Contentful gives you a polished, governable platform your team can operate and hire for with very little risk. Sanity gives you a content system you shape in code (a bespoke authoring experience and content you can query like a database) in exchange for more engineering ownership.
Where they differ
| Sanity | Contentful | |
|---|---|---|
| Content modelling | Schema as code, version-controlled alongside your front end | Content types defined in the web app or via the Management API; strict and governable |
| Editing experience | A Studio you build: an open-source React app shaped to your workflow | Polished fixed editor: autosave, versioning, scheduled releases, approvals |
| APIs & querying | GROQ query language, GraphQL, real-time listeners, Portable Text | CDN-backed Content Delivery API, GraphQL, read-write Management API, broad SDKs |
| Governance | SSO/SAML, roles, audit logs, SLAs at the top tier | Same checklist at the top tier, with a longer procurement track record |
| Pricing shape | Usage-based: API requests and documents drive the bill | Usage-based: records, API calls, and seats drive the bill |
| Ecosystem & hiring | Developer-led community; smaller agency bench | Market standard; the easiest headless platform to hire for |
| Lock-in & portability | Structured content exportable at any time; the Studio is your own code | Content exportable via the Management API; editor, apps, and workflows stay on the platform |
The editing philosophies are opposites. Contentful ships a clean, fixed editor (autosave, versioning, scheduled releases, preview, and approval workflows) tailored at the margins through its App Framework. It’s productive on day one and familiar to editors coming from other tools. Sanity’s Studio is an open-source React app you build and deploy, so the editing surface is exactly as good as the effort you put into it. That’s a superpower when the authoring experience is part of the product, and a cost when you just want a working dashboard now.
The API story splits the same way. Contentful offers a CDN-backed Content Delivery API, GraphQL, and a read-write Management API with strong documentation and SDK coverage across languages. Sanity offers GROQ, a query language that treats your content like a queryable database, plus GraphQL, real-time listeners, and Portable Text for structured rich content. If you reuse the same structured content across many sites and channels, GROQ is a real advantage; if you want the broadest, most conventional API surface, Contentful is the safe pick.
On governance, both cover the checklist at their top tiers: SSO/SAML, granular roles, audit logs, SLAs, compliance, and residency options. And both price on usage, so the number to model is growth. Contentful’s bill rises with records, API calls, and seats; Sanity’s with API requests and documents. Estimate against your real traffic and integration load, not seat count, on either platform.
Choose Sanity when
- The editing experience is part of the product and worth designing deliberately.
- Content is highly structured and reused across many surfaces: sites, apps, campaigns.
- You have (or want) a developer-led team that treats the content platform as code.
Choose Contentful when
- The lowest-risk, most-hireable platform is the priority.
- You’re consolidating many brands, sites, and locales onto one system and governance matters most.
- The team needs a productive editor on day one without building one.
If you’re switching
Moving between the two is a real project, not a connector. The work concentrates in three places. First, content model mapping: Contentful content types translate to Sanity schemas (or the reverse), and rich text has to be converted between formats, which is the least mechanical part of the job. Second, the query layer: your front end’s GraphQL or REST calls get rewritten in GROQ, or vice versa. Third, the editorial side: editors need retraining, and workflows like approvals and scheduled releases need to be rebuilt rather than assumed.
Because both platforms expose full read-write APIs, the migration itself runs as staged, repeatable scripts (export, transform, import, verify) with a short content freeze and a parallel preview environment before cutover. URLs usually don’t change when the front end stays, but where they do, redirect mapping is part of the plan, not an afterthought. Coming off a legacy platform like Sitecore or Drupal onto either, the same controls apply with heavier extraction work up front.
The Bejamas take
We build and migrate on both platforms, and we’re a Sanity partner, so read this as field notes, not a vendor pitch. The right stack is the one your team can run, not the one an agency needs to sell. In an audit we model your locale count, content structure, editor autonomy, and team capacity against each platform, and recommend the one that fits your rebuild, with the reasoning written down. If you want the safe, governable default, it’s usually Contentful. If the authoring experience and structured content are central to what you’re building, it’s Sanity. Either way, our headless CMS team designs the content model, migrates the content, and hands your editors a system they can publish to without waiting on developers.