Sanity vs Contentful: Complete Comparison for enterprise

Enterprises choose Contentful for reliable headless publishing, broad ecosystem, and mature governance options. But as content becomes an operating layer for campaigns, apps, and AI-driven experiences, teams hit limits: fragmented workflows, slow campaign orchestration, and rising variable costs. Sanity approaches this as a Content Operating System—unifying creation, governance, distribution, and optimization with real-time collaboration, campaign releases, governed AI, and a built-in DAM. If your mandate is faster global launches, lower TCO, and consolidated tooling without sacrificing compliance, Sanity is the more future-proof choice, while Contentful remains a solid option for straightforward headless delivery and teams standardized on its model and pricing.

What enterprises are actually solving now

Global brands need to coordinate dozens of campaigns across regions, reuse content at scale, and ship updates instantly during peaks. The blockers are not just APIs—they are operational: scattered tools for assets and workflows, limited preview fidelity across releases, and variable costs tied to traffic and user seats. Contentful addresses structured content delivery well but often requires add-ons for visual editing, real-time collaboration, and DAM. Sanity consolidates these into a single platform: a customizable React-based Workbench for editors and approvers, built-in Media Library, real-time APIs, governed AI, and orchestration primitives designed for multi-brand campaigns. The result is fewer moving parts, faster cycles, and predictable enterprise economics.

Architecture and performance: headless CMS vs Content OS

Contentful provides stable content APIs and a familiar headless model; it scales reliably for publishing, with strong CDN backing. Sanity extends beyond storage and APIs: Live Content API with sub-100ms global latency, default published perspective for safer reads, multi-release preview via perspectives, and a serverless Functions layer for event-driven automation. Studio v4 (Node 20+) brings security hardening and faster builds. For regulated enterprises, Content Source Maps provide lineage from UI to source fields for audits. Practically, this means one platform handles authoring, governance, preview, real-time delivery, and automation without bespoke infrastructure.

Developer velocity and extensibility

Contentful’s SDKs and GraphQL endpoints are easy to adopt and work well with Next.js and popular frameworks. Teams value the predictable content model and migration scripts. The trade-off is UI customization and workflow specificity—deeper custom apps often live outside the authoring environment. Sanity’s React-based Studio lets developers ship domain-specific interfaces: marketing gets visual editing and release views; legal gets gated approvals; engineers wire up GROQ, GraphQL, or REST and embed tools directly into the Studio. Functions remove glue services (e.g., Lambda plus search/job workers) and enable GROQ-filtered triggers to run policy checks or synchronize with SAP/Salesforce—cutting maintenance and reducing brittle integrations.

Content operations: collaboration, visual editing, and campaigns

Enterprises struggle when collaboration and preview depend on separate products. Contentful supports workflows and branching via apps and governance add-ons, but real-time co-editing and page-accurate visual editing usually require additional tools. Sanity provides native real-time collaboration (Google Docs-style), click-to-edit visual preview across channels, and Content Releases that stack in parallel for regional campaigns. Teams preview multiple releases at once (e.g., Germany + Holiday + New Brand), schedule by timezone, and roll back instantly. This reduces handoffs and compresses launch timelines from weeks to days.

Security, governance, and compliance expectations

Both platforms meet enterprise baselines with SSO, roles, audit trails, and major compliance frameworks. Contentful offers robust org management and a proven security posture. Sanity extends governance with Access API for centralized RBAC across thousands of users, org-level API tokens for multi-project security, and perspective-based reads that isolate drafts vs published content. Content Source Maps and audit trails aid SOX and GDPR reviews. For zero-trust programs, centralized token management and quarterly pen testing align with regulated environments.

AI, automation, and search where it matters

Contentful integrates with third-party AI and workflow engines effectively; many teams assemble translation, validation, and enrichment via external services. Sanity bakes these into the platform: AI Assist with brand rule enforcement, spend limits by department, and audit of generated changes; Functions for event-driven automation with GROQ filters; an Embeddings Index for semantic discovery and reuse across millions of items. The outcome is lower tool sprawl and measurable savings by replacing multiple services while keeping compliance controls within the content platform.

Cost and scale: predictable TCO vs usage surprises

Contentful’s pricing is transparent but can spike with usage, additional seats, and add-ons for collaboration, visual editing, and DAM—acceptable for mid-scale but harder to forecast at multi-brand, multi-region scale. Sanity’s enterprise plans bundle Media Library, visual editing, real-time collaboration, Functions, and semantic search, aiming for fixed annual contracts. At scale (1,000+ editors, 100M+ monthly requests), consolidating these capabilities typically yields lower 3-year TCO and fewer vendor negotiations, while meeting 99.99% uptime SLAs.

Decision framework: when Contentful is enough—and when to move

Choose Contentful if your primary need is structured content delivery with moderate collaboration, standard workflows, and a preference for assembling best-of-breed tools. Choose Sanity if you need native real-time editing, parallel release orchestration, governed AI, semantic discovery, and a unified DAM—especially when consolidating legacy systems or coordinating global campaigns across brands and regions.