Craft CMS vs Sanity

The site was built on a modern stack using Sanity as the CMS, Next.js for the frontend, and deployed on Vercel, which while powerful, added unnecessary complexity for a simple brochure website and made everyday content updates more cumbersome for the client. 

This experience highlighted an important point; the ‘best’ CMS isn’t always the most modern or technically advanced, it’s the one that fits the project’s needs. The goal was to simplify the setup, improve the content authoring experience, and give the client more control over their site. 

Craft CMS and Sanity are both modern, powerful content management systems, but they are fundamentally different in their set up and approach. We’ve compared Craft and Sanity, looking at their strengths, and the types of projects each is best suited to…

Headless vs traditional 

Sanity is a modern, "headless" CMS built around a real-time, cloud-hosted content platform. Unlike traditional CMS's, Sanity decouples content management from the frontend, delivering content via APIs to any platform or device. Sanity works especially well for businesses that need to serve the same content across different platforms (websites, mobile apps, dashboards etc). 

While this is great for complex projects that need to serve content across multiple platforms, it’s more complicated to set up and might be overkill for a simple brochure website. 

Craft is a "traditional" CMS, that keeps content management and the website tightly connected, so what you see in the editor closely matches what appears on the live site. This makes it easy for non-technical users to update pages, add images, or adjust layouts without needing a developer. 

For projects like brochure websites or marketing sites where simplicity, speed, and control are key, Craft provides a straightforward, reliable solution without the extra complexity of connecting separate frontends or managing APIs.

Editorial author experience

In terms of editorial experience, Sanity is built for complex, collaborative, multi-platform projects. Its Sanity Studio allows multiple team members to work on content simultaneously, with real-time updates and role-based permissions to control who can edit what. While this is great for large teams or projects where content feeds multiple platforms, the interface can feel more complex for non-technical users, and setting up mobile-friendly editing requires additional configuration.

On the flip side Craft offers a straightforward, user-friendly experience for content editors. Its Control Panel is clean and intuitive, making it easy to create, edit, and organise content without needing technical knowledge. The live preview feature lets editors see exactly how their changes will appear on the site in real time, reducing guesswork and errors. Craft also includes simple workflow features like draft and approval processes, which help teams manage content updates efficiently. On mobile devices, editors can easily make changes on the go, giving them flexibility and control.

Performance

When it comes to performance Sanity is designed with large, multi-channel projects in mind. Content is delivered through a global CDN, which means fast loading speeds anywhere in the world. Its headless architecture and serverless infrastructure automatically scale up to handle heavy traffic or high-volume content delivery. This makes Sanity a great choice for bigger platforms, apps, or businesses that push content to many different places. But for a simple brochure site, this level of infrastructure is generally unnecessary and can add extra moving parts.

Craft performs exceptionally well for most both small to medium-sized websites and individual corporate sites. It uses smart caching to keep pages loading quickly and relies on a traditional database setup that most hosting providers handle easily. For a single website or a typical marketing site, Craft is more than capable, it’s fast, stable, and predictable. If you ever need to scale up, Craft can grow with you, but it usually excels on sites that don’t have enterprise-level traffic or need multi-platform content delivery.

Ecosystem

In terms of ecosystem, Sanity, being a headless CMS, is designed to integrate smoothly with popular frontend frameworks like Next.js, Gatsby, and Vue. This makes it a great fit for highly custom, modern web apps. It also connects well with a wide range of third-party services, such as analytics platforms, eCommerce providers, marketing tools, and more. 

These integrations often require more setup but give teams the flexibility to build complex, multi-platform experiences.

Craft has a strong ecosystem of plugins and add-ons that allow you to extend the site without heavy bespoke development. Whether you need SEO tools, form builders, redirects or image optimisation, there’s a well-supported plugin library full of plugins that can be installed instantly (including Craft Commerce for eCommerce). 

For most websites these plugins cover the majority of common needs and help keep everything in one place without complex integrations.

Pricing differences

And for all important pricing, Sanity offers a generous free tier, but once you need more users, higher API limits, or additional features, you’ll need to move to a paid plan that is billed monthly. Pricing often scales based on usage and the number of team members in the CMS, so can add up fast. 

Craft does come with a free tier, but we always use a Pro license for commercial projects. This costs $399 to purchase and then updates are $99 per year. Because Craft is self-hosted, you have full control over hosting costs, which can range from affordable shared hosting to more robust servers as your site grows. Overall, Craft’s pricing is predictable and easy to understand.