Why opt for Sanity instead of Contentful
Contentful and Sanity stand out as excellent headless CMS solutions, enabling easy content management for websites or applications without compromising performance.
In this article, we outline five reasons why we favor Sanity over Contentful.
Easy to use, setup, and administer
Sanity offers a user-friendly and mobile-responsive interface that is intuitive and straightforward to navigate. Setting up a Sanity project is as simple as clicking a button on the getting started page.
In contrast, setting up a Contentful app is more complex. It involves multiple steps to configure your project, such as creating your "space," setting up your project, defining various content types, and selecting the content type your app interacts with.
More data query options
Sanity can be queried with GROQ, GraphQL, and REST, whereas Contentful can only be queried with GraqhQL and REST.
GROQ is a powerful query language built into Sanity. It's simple, easy to learn and has free-form queries that translate well to GraphQL, which makes the learning curve of Sanity a lot less steep.
High customizability
Contentful lacks customizability due to its pre-configured interface, which cannot be customized, and certain pages cannot be deleted. In contrast, Sanity offers full customization as its studio is a React application that developers can edit.
Sanity provides a highly customizable interface through its "Structure Builder," allowing you to segment and navigate content according to your product's theme and needs.
Additionally, Sanity offers a fully customizable rich text editor, enabling you to add various components like text, tables, links, images, and code blocks to webpages without coding.
In Contentful, content types are created from the UI, limiting customization options. Sanity, however, allows developers to define content models through code, facilitating version control, data structure reuse, and providing complete control over layout and validation.
It might seem overwhelming for some people who are not experienced with code but it is much simpler than it sounds.
Built-in version control and backup
One of the most valued features of Sanity for us is its built-in backup and restore capability.
If you've published new content but later prefer an older version, Sanity allows you to easily browse through a document's change history and instantly restore any previous version. This ensures you never have to worry about losing old content or manually backing up your content.
Reasonable pricing packages
Contentful's first paid package starts at US$489, which may come as a surprise if you're transitioning from the free version.
In contrast, Sanity's initial paid plan begins at US$99, making it a more affordable option for small businesses and startups.
Furthermore, Contentful restricts users to a set number of locales based on their pricing plan. However, Sanity offers unlimited locales for localization, providing more flexibility.
Additionally, Contentful's pricing is tied to content types, which can incentivize users to limit types at the expense of user experience and flexibility.
According to G2, "reviewers found Sanity easier to use, set up, and administer. Reviewers also preferred doing business with Sanity overall".
Check out their side-by-side comparison of Contentful vs. Sanity.
