To thrive in today's fast-paced digital landscape, you need a flexible, scalable, and performant CMS. One that swiftly delivers omnichannel content to your readers. A CMS that fosters collaboration among your developers, content creators, and thought leaders; and allows you to build a unified content repository, and seamlessly connect it to all your digital touchpoints. Enter the headless CMS.
A headless CMS allows you to decouple your content backend from the presentation layer. It leverages a central content repository and APIs to deliver content across all platforms and devices. No need to duplicate efforts or reinvent the wheel. Enjoy streamlined content delivery without compromising efficiency.
When choosing a headless CMS for your business, there are important buying criteria to keep in mind. Firstly, you must consider ease of use, i.e. how intuitive is the user interface? Does it have a steep learning curve? Does it offer native support for your favorite programming frameworks?
Another crucial factor is the speed of core features, like migrations, integrations, editing, and testing. A headless CMS should enable you to manage content with minimal effort and time. You should also assess the pricing structure of the CMS and make sure it fits within your budget.
Customizability is another key aspect. Look for a headless CMS that gives you the flexibility to build experiences that are truly aligned with your brand identity. Finally, assess whether the unique features of the CMS match your specific needs, or provide added value to your content management workflow.
In this article, we will compare Sanity and Contentful, two popular headless CMS platforms, while keeping in mind the buying criteria mentioned above. However, it’s important to note that ButterCMS is a compelling alternative to both Sanity and Contentful. With an expansive array of features, ButterCMS effectively caters to the diverse requirements of developers and marketers alike.
Therefore, we will also be evaluating ButterCMS in this article. By the end, we expect you to have a well-rounded perspective to guide your selection process and find the best CMS solution for your business.
Sanity is a composable content cloud that enables businesses to build composable, customizable, and data-driven content architectures.
It’s powered by a schema-less data store that lets you store JSON documents, without having to define a schema beforehand. You can query data using the proprietary GROQ (Graph-relational Object Queries) language, and subscribe to runtime changes in stored documents.
The open-source Sanity Studio connects with the content lake and offers a seamless, customizable editing experience to your content creators. You can use the Studio to build applications from scratch or use one of the many pre-built templates to get a head start. Templates are available for a variety of frameworks, including Next.js, Astro, and Angular.
Sanity offers several clients, tools, and plugins to enhance the development experience. There are API clients for JavaScript, Rust, PHP, Go, and more. Useful tools like scheduled publishing and a media browser are also available on the Sanity ecosystem. You can even build custom plugins for adding functionalities tailored to your specific needs.
Contentful is a composable content platform that excels in customizability, composability, and scalability. With a range of content modeling patterns, it allows organizations to structure and manage their content according to their personalized needs.
The Contentful Studio is packed with a host of useful features for automating content workflows, collaboration, and omnichannel experiences. Contentful also offers third-party orchestration (albeit, through an early access program currently) that allows you to import content from external systems into the CMS.
Contentful supports numerous languages and frameworks, including JavaScript, PHP, Python, .NET, and Ruby. Sample applications, tutorials, demos, and starter kits are also available for all supported platforms.
The Contentful marketplace is home to plugins and tools that can be used to build a feature-rich content delivery system. Whether you want to incorporate an AI content generator, compare and merge content models, or implement Elasticsearch, you can find a tool on the marketplace to do so.
| Features | Sanity | Contentful |
| Hosting | Cloud-based or Self-hosted | Cloud-based |
| Editor Experience | ||
| WYSIWYG Editor | No | Yes |
| Scheduled Publishing | Yes | Yes |
| Previews | Yes | Yes |
| Version History | Yes | Yes |
| Workflow | Yes | Yes |
| Drag and Drop reordering | No | No |
| Multilingual content | Yes | Yes |
| Scheduled Unpublishing | Yes | Yes |
| Plug n Play Blog Engine | No | No |
| In-app image editing | yes | Yes |
| Team Management | ||
| Team Presence | No | No |
| User Roles | Yes | Yes |
| Custom User Roles | Yes | Yes |
| Multi environment | Yes | Yes |
| Developer Experience | ||
|
Client libraries
|
Yes | Yes |
| REST API | Yes | Yes |
| CLI | Yes | Yes |
| Image API | Yes | Yes |
| Webhooks | Yes | Yes |
| Migrations | Yes | Yes |
| Security and Compliance | ||
| SSO | Yes | Yes |
|
Encryption
|
Yes | Yes |
| ISO 27001 | Yes | Yes |
| PCI DSS | Yes | Yes |
| GDPR | Yes | Yes |
| Backups | Yes | Yes |
Sanity offers a diverse range of features to help you create, manage, and deliver content. Let’s explore some of these key features:
Sanity offers several advantages that may make it a compelling choice for content management:
Sanity's data model is highly customizable, allowing you to tailor it to the specific needs of your business. You can store structured content in the Sanity database, and use it to build different parts of your frontend. Structured content scales well, reduces complexity, and leads to a better content strategy.
For example, the content used for a news article can be reused in the body of a social media post, email newsletter, or even a blog post. This can save a lot of time and effort, as you don’t have to create the content from scratch each time.
Sanity allows developers to create custom input components that can fetch data from external sources and import it into internal documents. This imported data can then be referenced from inside the Content Lake. Developers can also write their own custom plugins to implement desired functionality or integrate with an unsupported third-party service.
Sanity offers a generous free forever plan that includes a hosted content database, free admin users, and an open-source editing environment. It serves as a great way for small businesses to get started and scale up as their needs grow.
Sanity boasts a diverse ecosystem of plugins that can be used to extend its functionality. This allows you to add new features to your application without having to write any code. For example, you can seamlessly integrate Sanity with Giphy, Netlify, Bynder, and more.
While Sanity has numerous strengths, it also lacks in certain areas:
Sanity doesn’t have a built-in WYSIWYG editor. Users who are accustomed to working with WYSIWYG editors may find Sanity less intuitive or convenient.
Sanity's developer documentation is not as comprehensive as other CMSs. This can make it difficult to find information on how to use certain features.
Even though GROQ offers powerful querying capabilities, it does come with a steep learning curve. Developers who are unfamiliar with the language may need to dedicate time and effort to understand its syntax, semantics, and best practices.
Sanity offers four plans for businesses, without any up-front fees. The following table compares the key aspects of the four plans:
|
Plan |
Features |
Users and usage |
Price |
|
Free |
Sanity Studio, hosted infrastructure, content lake, unlimited users, real-time editing, global CDN, live preview, GROQ support. |
3 non-admin users, 2 datasets, 100K API requests/month, and 10 GB bandwidth/month. |
Free + pay-as-you-go for add-ons. |
|
Team |
All features of the free plan, along with: scheduled publishing. |
10 non-admin users, 4 datasets, 500K API requests/month, and 500 GB bandwidth/month. |
$99 per project/month. |
|
Business |
All features of the Team plan, along with: cloud cloning, full audit trail, and single sign-on (SSO). |
20 non-admin users, 6 datasets, 2 million API requests/month, and 1 TB bandwidth/month. |
$949 per project/month. |
|
Enterprise |
All features of the Business plan, along with: dataset hot swap, shared content, access logs, unlimited test projects, custom CDN domains, custom access control, and 24/7 support. |
Custom |
Contact Sanity for pricing. |
Let’s explore some of the key features of Contentful:
Here are a few advantages of choosing Contentful as your headless CMS:
Using pre-built templates can increase your operational efficiency, enabling you to build applications or features faster. For example, if you want to add a store to your website, you can leverage the e-commerce starter template instead of building from scratch.
Contentful is built with flexibility in mind, empowering you to tailor the platform to your unique requirements. Whether you want to integrate with third-party tools, extend the Studio application, or design responsive and engaging frontends, Contentful provides the tools and capabilities to make it happen.
Contentful's ecosystem offers a wide range of resources that can help you enhance your content management experience. With an active community of developers and agencies, you can easily find the help you need to get started or troubleshoot any issues.
The Contentful marketplace offers a plethora of apps, across various categories such as AI, commerce, and collaboration, that enable you to go beyond the built-in Contentful functionalities and build more engaging content.
Contentful is channel-agnostic, which means that you can deliver your content to a wide variety of channels, including websites, mobile apps, conversational interfaces, and kiosks. This empowers you to maintain a unified brand experience while catering to the unique needs of each channel.
For all its strengths, Contentful also has a few drawbacks that you should consider.
Contentful lacks native drag-and-drop functionality for creating content, which can be a drawback for users who prefer a visual and intuitive approach.
Contentful does not support collaborative real-time editing. This means that if you and another team member are editing the same document, you will not be able to see each other's changes in real-time. This could lead to conflicts and collaboration challenges.
Contentful has a steep learning curve. There are several concepts (e.g. content model, spaces and organizations etc.) unique to the Contentful platform that new users must understand to leverage it to its fullest.
Contentful is a flexible platform, which means that it can be configured to meet a wide range of requirements. However, this flexibility can also lead to complexity. For example, if you need to create complex content models or integrate Contentful with several other systems, you may need to do some custom development. This can add to the overall cost and complexity of your project.
Another factor that can contribute to complexity is the platform’s steep learning curve. While Contentful has a lot of unique features, and it generally takes a good chunk of time to learn how to use them effectively. If you don't understand the concepts behind Contentful, e.g. if you don't know how to treat your content as data, you may find it difficult to build and maintain a large Contentful project.
Contentful does not come with built-in a blog engine. If you want to create a blog with Contentful, you will need to use a third-party blog engine or build one from scratch.
While Contentful offers a free tier and flexible pricing plans, costs can escalate as the scale and usage of the platform increase.
Contentful offers three plans for businesses, each with its own set of features and benefits. The following table compares the key characteristics of the three plans:
|
Plan |
Features |
Users and usage |
Price |
|
Free |
Community-based support, Tasks app, Compose app, developer Slack community, client libraries, content delivery API, image API, sync API, encryption at rest, 24/7 monitoring, and more. |
5 users, 4 standard roles, 2 locales, 1,000,000 API calls per month, 0.1 TB/month bandwidth. |
Free. |
|
Basic |
All free features, along with: technical support, Launch app, and support for commenting on fields. |
20 users, 4 standard roles, 4 locales, 2,000,000 API calls per month, 0.75 TB/month bandwidth. |
$300 per month. |
|
Premium |
All Basic features, along with: compliance, security, and governance features, customizable roles, reference view, custom aliases, Single sign-on (SSO), user management API, SCIM provisioning, security reporting, dedicated infrastructure, and more. |
Custom |
Contact Contentful for pricing. |
While Sanity and Contentful are both powerful CMSs, they each come with their own distinct strengths and weaknesses. If you find yourself struggling to choose the right platform, or compromising on certain aspects, there’s an alternative worth considering: ButterCMS.
ButterCMS combines the best features of both platforms, without any of the drawbacks. It is a scalable, API-first headless CMS that both marketers and developers have rated as the “easiest-to-use” on G2. It simplifies multi-channel and multi-site content management, provides a globally cached API, and offers maximum customizability.
Let’s explore other reasons why ButterCMS could be the ideal headless CMS for your business.
ButterCMS is officially the easiest-to-use headless CMS out there, with user reviews to back it up. You can manage all your content types from a central dashboard, and easily organize your data across pages and collections.
Whether you want to preview changes, maintain review history, create dynamic landing pages without developer input, or manage all your assets with a centralized media library, ButterCMS enables you to do so.
ButterCMS also provides an exceptional developer experience. You can configure webhooks to receive change notifications, use the API explorer to view API responses and get sample code, and migrate across ButterCMS environments in minutes.
A component-driven architecture, starter kits, integrations with popular tools, built-in SEO, and comprehensive tutorials increase productivity and decrease your time to market.
ButterCMS comes with a pre-built blog engine which makes it super convenient to add a blog to your website. Unlike Contentful, there's no need to do any custom wiring or build from scratch.
Smooth drag-and-drop features empower your marketers to build flexible and beautiful pages without knowing how to code, or worrying about breaking anything.
ButterCMS makes migrations easy, whether you're migrating from a traditional CMS to Butter or migrating your content and schema between Butter sites and environments.
For example, to migrate from WordPress to ButterCMS, all you need to do is send a WordPress export file to support@buttercms.com.
Or, to migrate content schema from a staging to a production instance on Butter, all you need to do is navigate a simple, 4-step migration wizard. The wizard will walk you through the process of migrating your schema, and you'll be up and running in no time.
With ButterCMS, you can track content changes and revert to previous versions of your content with a single click. This is a great way to ensure that your content is always up-to-date and accurate.
ButterCMS is more interoperable than both Sanity and Contentful. It is compatible with a wider range of technologies, including JavaScript, Express.js, Next.js, React, React Native, iOS, Android, Kotlin, and several others.
The team presence feature (not available in Contentful) lets you know if any of your colleagues are viewing the same content as you on ButterCMS. This ensures that you are always in sync with others, and reduces the chances of conflicts and data loss.
ButterCMS takes security and compliance seriously. The platform and your data are hosted on AWS data centers, which adhere to industry-leading standards, including ISO 27001, SOC 1, SOC 2/SSAE, PCI Level 1, FISMA Moderate, and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). Additionally, your data is automatically backed up daily, ensuring its safety and providing peace of mind.
In this section, we will compare the user ratings of ButterCMS, Sanity, and Contentful on G2. G2 is a leading software review platform, and its user ratings are based on real-world feedback from actual users.
|
Criterion |
Rating (# of responses) |
||
|
|
ButterCMS |
Sanity |
Contentful |
|
Meets requirements |
9.1 (110) |
9.1 (466) |
8.5 (202) |
|
Ease of use |
9.3 (109) |
8.8 (470) |
8.4 (204) |
|
Ease of setup |
9.2 (67) |
8.8 (364) |
8.2 (92) |
|
Ease of admin |
9.2 (68) |
9.1 (369) |
8.4 (96) |
|
Quality of support |
9.7 (108) |
9.0 (369) |
8.4 (165) |
|
Has the product been a good partner in doing business? |
9.7 (67) |
9.3 (320) |
8.5 (87) |
|
Product direction (% positive) |
9.1 (95) |
9.2 (375) |
7.4 (190) |
The above table compares the G2 user feedback for the three platforms. Overall, ButterCMS has the highest ratings across most criteria. Sanity is a close second, and Contentful has the lowest ratings.
In conclusion, when comparing the headless CMS platforms ButterCMS, Sanity, and Contentful, it becomes clear that ButterCMS stands out as the most feature-rich and user-friendly option. With its diverse set of features and high ratings on G2 across different categories, ButterCMS offers a comprehensive solution for content management needs. Its user-friendly interface and extensive functionality make it a top choice for businesses and developers alike.
Do you want your product or marketing team to test Butter CMS? We can set up a live demo to walk your team through the fast, easy-to-use interface.
