Sanity Reviews: 4.7/5 — Highly Rated

Sanity has designed their content platform with the developer in mind, their core offering is the api which provides real-time updates and a preconfigured CDN. Additionally they have developed an open-source application to interact with the api. Given this structure it is very extensible, developers can choose how they want to engage with Sanity. Taking the studio and using it as a CMS, developing their own custom application to interact with the api or taking a hybrid approach, building on top of Sanity's building blocks.

Some users find the collapsing navigation structure a little disorientating

Custom e-commerce solutions, un-opinionated content model

The way the content can be defined in code by using simple objects. Also that we can structure the content as desirable and are not relying on predefined layouts and content structures. The nesting, preview and live options are amazing when editing complex data structures and when working across larger teams.

There is a limited amount of users available in the free tier and we can't host Sanity ourselves, which is why a lot of our clients prefer other conventional CMSs. They want to be in control of their own data most of the times and cut down the costs. Continuous saving sometimes jumps and deletes our content as we write.

It is easy to use Git to manage versions and Sanity code when using across larger development team. The changes we make to our data structure are saved directly in the code base compared to other conventional systems, where the settings have to be exported when migrating. We also get clean data that we don't need to process and can simply use them in any front-end application our client might ask for. And reuse the content anytime they ask for a different application.

The flexibility to achieve almost any content workflow you can think of, with the productivity that comes with a developer-first approach to their product. The Sanity team spent so much time nailing the basics with a super flexible API, real-time collaboration, powerful change history and smooth user experience, that at the moment I don't see any strong contenders amongst other headless CMSs.

- There are a few rough spots around the UI for editors, but they've been making solid improvements on that front. - The documentation on extending beyond the basics is lacking. Hopefully Sanity UI, their new component library, will fix that. - Pricing is a bit unpredictable for high-volume projects as it's hard to pin-down the reasons of request counts that show up in the dashboard.

I'm helping organizations dramatically improve their content workflows with Sanity. Applications range from websites to technical documentation to paid content libraries. The biggest benefit is being able to realize on every vision the client has for their new CMS. Before Sanity we'd have to make many more tradeoffs than we do now, and the success of their management system is improving as a result of that. Clients are more excited about producing content, editors more empowered to maximize the results of their work and developers are more effective. It truly changed the way I work, to the point that now I specialize on working solely with Sanity.

It's flexibility, APIs and documentation

No good webhook support. Why is this not enough?

Editor experience in content management. Developer experience in developing such features.

- The flexible structure is great. Just define a schema in JASON form and get corresponding input components. - If you need a differnt input, you can create your own react component - Moreover the query language is super great! You can easily query different datatypes in on go and even transform the resulting data shape directly in the query it self. - Interacting with data, patching, downloading, migration is also pretty easy

- It's a bit hard to predict the pricing

- Easy hosting and deployment - CMS that has exactly what you want and not more - 100% JavaScript

The flexibility to create data structures for use cases

Haven’t found anything to dislike. Sanity is really great.

Decoupling from Shopify’s Cm’s

Sanity is very customizable, as the Sanity Studio (the frontend CMS SPA) is open-source and all the development is easily done in React and Javascript (or Typescript). Furthermore, the query language is very strong (GROQ), as it lets you query specific fields or populate references easily and efficiently. There is even a VS Code plugin providing syntax highlighting with their Query Language. Sanity, before anything, is very focused on developers UX, but makes it so easy for a developer to make a robust and enjoyable editing experience for Content Editors. Also, their Portable Text component (for Rich Text editing), lets editors easily edit full-text content while providing the developer easy-to-use tools to actually embed this rich content in any platform (web or native). Also, did I mention that drafts are edited in real-time? So you can easily build a real-time website preview, that updates as soon as you type or change a value in a document. And of course this preview can easily be embed inside the CMS through some minimal customization. Surprisingly, all this customization power doesn't come with such a steep learning curve, depending on what you're trying to achieve. Also, the documentation of Sanity is well done and very complete. If needed, you can always jump in the Studio source code to see how they approach certain features and how you can hook into them, but I think this is for very advanced use cases. Their documentation should cover 99% of the needs.

Pretty much everything in Sanity is near perfection, but there are some limitations that are not great. First, planned content publishing is a manual process. There is a cool Calendar plugin letting you do just that (plan content for release and have a nice calendar where you see when every document will be publised). However, once you schedule something for release, you can't release the already published version without unscheduling the publication, undo your planned edits, do your edits for the live version, publish, then put back your planned edits and schedule again. Also, it is not possible out of the box to have multiple versions of a single document and schedule different versions at different times. However, these concerns apply to the majority of CMS solutions out there. The support for these use cases would need to be done manually by the developer. Second, Sanity offers a basic Access Management feature, which is great! However, more granular and complete access management is available behind the Enterprise tier, which might be too expensive for smaller companies. With all the customizability of Sanity, it is a bit sad to see such feature hidden behind such a big paywall. At least they offer granular access management, which is not the case of every CMS.

With Sanity, we are mainly building CMS instances for website management (marketing and e-commerce websites). Our Sanity instances are also sometimes connected to external APIs through webhooks to trigger things in Sanity when something happens in an external data source. Somethimes, changes in Sanity also trigger things in other systems (e.g. publish a new job post on the Facebook Page of the company). The main benefits of Sanity come from its customizability. Without much trouble, the developers can create rich editing experiences for content editors to ease their work and make sure the CMS is built according to their specific needs.

It is super flexible, reliable and thought through. After a few years after I started using it, it's still moving in the right direction

We sometimes get feedback that the publishing tool is a bit technical for some, but it is remarkable how quickly they get the concepts and we rarely have users complain after the initial phase of getting used to it.

Multi-platform digital service with content publishing for native apps and the web. The posibility for customizing everything in the studio is super powerful!

Sanity's usage of portable text and open-source react platform allow developers to create customized solutions that fit client needs.

The main downside of Sanity is the initial knowledge gap, but the documentation makes it a breeze to overcome.

Sanity is being used to bring our Content Management needs to the next level.

Sanity is a first class platform for managing content. It gives you a very flexible way to store and edit content. Building with Sanity gives you great confidence about your data. The schemas make it very easy for a developer to quickly iterate on content modelling while developing. The studio provides a nice interface for editors to work together on content creation. Building on top of the studio, like adding custom components or integrating custom workflows is fun to do and makes the tool very versatile. The studio as a headless CMS living right next to your code has been a game changer. The cli tools make exporting, replacing and importing content a breeze. The Slack community is respectful and incredibly helpful for any type of question and level of experience and a great place to learn. The GROQ-query language is easy to use and super flexible. Documentation is very solid. You can get a new, free Sanity project started in a matter of seconds and pricing will grow with your project. Overall, Sanity is great for all kinds of use cases, from small to large, and an awesome tool to have.

I don't have any real complaints, other than with the open source side of Sanity. The Studio, the open source part living on Github, has been getting a lot of updates recently - not all of them being completely stable. I've had to downgrade a couple of times while waiting for a new bug that was introduced to be fixed. I have to add though, that even with an older version, everything keeps working fine. Also, some kind of public roadmap would be helpful. Lastly, a lot of issues have become stale and responses on Github have been slow lately.

Developing with Sanity brings a lot of speed and flexibility and makes you feel confident about your data.

Sanity studio is empowering and helpful.

There is a small amount of clunkiness in the interface. SSO integration with Okta isn't easily set up.

Our core engineering teams were spending too much time on our site upkeep. Sanity has enabled us to transition those duties to our content team, freeing up our engineers, and giving the content team the self-service experience they've needed.

I like that it is basically a CMS system on steroid. It's super powerful and we haven't met any limitations yet. We are a big fan of Sanity.

Not much that I don't like with Sanity. We are a huge fan.

Disjointing marketing from engineering. Make marketing able to create landinge pages and change our website without involving engineering.

As a developer, I like how easy it is to set up a project and to customize it to the needs of a client.

I want to have more video tutorials, but the documentation usually covers most of my questions.

Sanity solved the problem of getting up to speed fast is solved for me and some of our clients. The pain of working with "old-fashioned" CMSs was solved for me as a developer, and the need for community support is also strongly performed in Sanity.

- Extensively customizable - Have lots of tutorial - Excellent query language (GREQ) and image query/tools - Super generous free tier

- Small support for typescript (schemas, options,...)

- Customizable and beautiful text editor for non-coders - CMS - Images API

Sanity enabled us to dial up our velocity to 11 with maximum ease and a value to match. The ship of engineers, designers, editors, and stakeholders has never sailed so fast. Sanity is 100% apart of our Developer Workflow. It's incredibly common that the most expensive part of the product shipping process is the hourly Engineer. Sanity is here to save time and money on a companies most expensive link in the chain. Beyond this, their staff is super dedicated and always listening to feedback. I wouldn't have it any other way. I feel a real partnership between us, versus a customer. You don't have to enter a marriage between your code and the CMS. You can offload small bits over time and let it snowball, thus trialing Sanity is a piece of cake. Since the entire CMS interface is code-based, you can alter it to be anything you want, tailored perfectly for your content editors. It's data storage structure is built with a FE Framework in mind (it'll work with literally anything). There's no storing of HTML, thus there's no parsing of HTML into React components for example, only JSON, which is insanely easy using their plugin's. You can write custom storage blocks to match all your components from your Design System. It has honestly taken us from launching a site in weeks time, to 15 minutes. If you're not using Sanity, you're missing out on something really special. The internet is going to be moving away from WordPress, and onto Sanity. Be apart of something big. Our tech stack is Next.js + Sanity + Typescript. Sanity is equally as important as our FE Framework selection. It does not get better than this. The right product built by the right people.

Searching the docs can be tedious, but it's improving everyday, so it's hardly a reason to shy away from using the product.

Time to market! Choo choo, there's no brakes on this train! And minimizing expensive Engineering resources. We've even setup sanity to handle vanity url redirects and file uploading. Small wins like that really add up. We're also able to lazy-load all our images perfectly, going from a low-res image (generated by the Sanity edge servers) to a high quality image. It's kind of mind blowing how fast our sites are becoming, and if it wasn't for 3rd party JS, our Lighthouse scores are now int he 98+ range across the board.

The sheer customization and flexibility. Every CMS I've used before - Prismic, Contentful, Wordpress - to name a few, requires me to structure my data in the way that their CMS wants it to be structured. This can be quite limiting. Sanity comes out of the gate as a CMS as a Node package that is fully customizable end-to-end without having to deal with restructuring my data or changing our conventions that ultimately impact our content managers and time to ship products. Sanity provides an infinite product for us to fully tailor our content management experiences and focus on empowering those editors and of course, for developers, to work in an incredibly convenient way. You can build Sanity locally and deploy multiple instances of the CMS across any servers you wish - or use their free .studio.io domains. Incredibly convenient. Not to mention a fully fledged image pipeline so you don't have to do any crazy image mutations on your own - they provide a robust API for all of that. And, because it's in Javascript, if you're working with any other API's (such as the one on your product), you can integrate it easily with managing and using that data as well because of Sanity's extremely flexible and customizable desk & dashboard structures. Sanity was the answer to years of trial and error on various CMS systems, and truly comes out on top when it comes to speed of development, rich content editing experiences, developer experience, and flexibility. That's a win-win all around. I haven't had to worry about "what CMS am I going to use" for about two years now. Couldn't be more grateful to their team and my luck in finding it.

Not being able to fully integrate into my frontend's types when using Typescript. Sanity is very Typescript friendly, but it would be very nice to set Sanity up inside of my Next.js environment so I can use the same folders and utilities instead of having it in a separate /studio folder. I also think their docs on customizing some form fields and showing more examples could be improved quite a bit.

I've spent 7 years running a creative agency that in the latter 4 years of it shifted quite heavily into web development for small (3-10) to large (30-100) sized companies. We know that everybody has their preference of CMS, but when we are able to deliver a more clear (better UX), faster to market, and fully tailored CMS for any of our frontend languages (primarily Next.js and occasionally Gatsby) - we know that we can sell them quickly on the value of Sanity. In recent months I exited my business and will be starting as Head of Design with a medium-sized start up with intentions of high growth, and I immediately know what CMS will be our base of command to create tools for the marketing team without impacting our engineering resources as heavy as we would with writing something from scratch. To summarize: - Developer experience - Faster to market - Concise UX (It's literally bare bones, it doesn't get simpler) - Fully tailored content editor experiences - No restrictions - you make the call on your data structure - Integration into external APIs - Image pipeline - Typescript support - CMS as a Node package - run it locally & integrate into your CI & more - Easily migratable from other CMS's such as Wordpress, Contentful, or Prismic - Support for eCommerce

I can easily fit it into a 12fac architecture, quickly prototype and iterate on my daily work. My clients fall in love with it every time I do a demo. Because it is easy to implement, we are often able to do a quick POC within a week. Sanity also has amazing customer support over Slack and I feel like I am constantly in direct contact with them. All my new projects are done with Sanity.

The UI isn't as easy to customize as I'd like it to be, and changing the data shapes (migrations) requires some mental gymnastics.

It simply offers a very good balance for what my clients need. I fundamentally believe in simplicity in architecture, and Sanity does that amazingly well.

Creating dataset in sanity is super easy. Publishing dataset in sanity is real quick and new chnages can be seen on webiste in real time. Provide great cdn capability for images and dataset. Sanity has a great UI. Its documentation is good and rich on their website which provides ease of implementation. Slack is great medium to connect with their customer support team.

Sometime when we make any change in the code and rebuilds the sanity screen crashes than we have to reload to see the sanity ui. Moving sanity changes from one project to another is manual, sanity should provide automated way of it.

Managing content on the website. Its backbone of some of our websites.

Changes we do in sanity are always in sync. Multiple team members can do change in project at the same time. Publishing content in real time is really fast and can see changes in the website without any delay. Provide CDN not only for images, icons but also provide cdn for serving content to the website. UI of sanity is really good and interactive. Its so easy to make content changes in sanity. If at any point we need help than sanity team can be connected over slack. Also they have provided great documentation on their website.

We have different projects ex dev, qa, prod. When we make change in dev and test them. If we want to make the same change in QA or prod than we have to manually do the same change in next environment. There should be some way to sync projects/changes to move changes in a faster manner.

By using sanity we have created a great architecture which is hybrid and data driven from sanity. Most of the things we render on the website comes through sanity.

The most helpful aspect of Sanity is its improved team communication, which fosters smooth collaboration among team members. Furthermore, the design is user-friendly and easy to implement for daily use, while version control adds to its appeal.

There could have been more beginner-friendly documentation for the integration.

Sanity addresses the challenges of managing schemas. One of the best features is the ability to define the schema alongside the code. This way, proper versioning can be ensured and conflicts can be avoided.

A straightforward clear interface with some nice touches that make creating and reordering pages fast.

Very slow generation of preview pages. Not WYSIWYG, so you need to preview to see changes.

Sanity streamlines our publishing productivity and makes it quicker for us to maintain our site.

Expressive and powerful querying of content/data Ease of schema design and use of composition Great abstractions for developers to build solutions on - for example Input Components within the Studio for customised approach for content editors to add data

Takes some time to achieve full potential and requires team of designers/developers Would be useful to have a GROQ Vision debugger

The ability to manage content at scale and compose content across the organisation in a trusted and reliable manner. While the developer-first approach takes more time to get going - there is excellent DX and you can move at speed, whilst enjoying all the benefit of an engineering approach to data.

Pros: - Live Preview while editing, WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) - The entire platform is (mostly) customizable - Customer support is top tier. Private Slack channel with SLA support. - Live audit trail to see past changes - Google Docs-like live collaboration with team members - Great documentation - Easy to integrate, with many starter templates to get your project setup. Templates include

Cons: - Requires more initial time investment to learn how to effectively leverage the product (Sanity has their own GROQ querying language for data fetching) - Requires coding knowledge (JavaScript or TypeScript) - Slightly over-engineered for simpler use-cases

Sanity enables our clients and internal non-technical team members to create and update content. It also provides a fleshed-out framework to help create bespoke solutions for our end users.

Sanity is highly customizable, allowing us to support any content type we can think up. Additionally, Sanity provides support for modern frontend tooling like Next.js, working directly with their team to provide powerful features.

Technical Support can be difficult to find outside of their public Slack channels.

Sanity provides a content management system that is highly customizable, allowing our small team of developers to support a much larger team of content editors who require an ever-growing array of content types. This allows for very quick turnaround on marketing efforts to both generate the content and release it to our production site.

The flexibility and customizability and how well it integrates with common web frameworks

Some of the information in the documentation tends to be outtaded and asking question in Slack was not very helpful

It helps us maintain our website and makes it easy to write new content quickly

Studio excels in providing an intuitive and user-friendly content management system. Creating, editing, and organizing content is a breeze, thanks to its clean and well-organized interface. I particularly appreciated the drag-and-drop functionality, which made it easy to rearrange content elements effortlessly. Sanity Studio's version control and content history features are robust. It allows you to track changes, revert to previous versions, and see who made what modifications. This feature is invaluable for maintaining content accuracy and accountability.

While Sanity Studio is generally user-friendly, it does have a bit of a learning curve, especially for beginners. Setting up custom schemas and understanding the inner workings of the platform can be challenging initially. Improved onboarding resources or tutorials could mitigate this issue. The pricing structure for Sanity Studio may not be ideal for everyone. It can become costly, especially for larger projects or organizations with high data volumes. It would be beneficial if there were more affordable plans or flexible pricing options to accommodate a wider range of users.

The marketing team's ability to autonomously and regularly refresh our website content, without having to rely on developers for text updates.

Plug and play feature, once time developed and reuse as much as you want. Performance is very fast, multiple development language support to create schema and implemetation, cloud and APi support, multiple dataset support, n number of slug can be used to generate multiple websites.

It's support system needs to improve, in terms of faster response.

It provides robots way to create schema based components(step items) which can be used as a reusable components and once component created, it provides plu and play functionality to generate website or content on the web, it also provide css control from schema properties where based on defination in step or product/blog etc creation it can apply the css mentioned. It provides review functionality before publish. It also provides migration functionality which helps to promotes entire change from one env to another. It helps invVersion control, and keep draft version of changes till published, it also provides on the fly revert the changes with any previous version.

The history of changes to a particular piece of content. The ability to organize your content in a structure that benefits your workflow. The adaptability of using different media types in a sensible way. Sanity is also clear to communicate about outages and the team is willing to help partners on new features with technical questions and assistance.

Can be difficult to identify bug if updates are not working. Sometimes there is too much choice/flexibility. Media folder is good but not a true DAM. With the depth of customization it can tricky to dive into an issue with so many potential solutions or reasons for problems.

Sanity has helped create a Content architecture for my company that keeps thousands of individual pieces of media aligned and structured for backend and frontend users.

Sanity is easy to set up, configure and customize to your needs. It supports most features out of the box and you can even expand on it with custom plugins. There is a great community creating custom plugins. It was super easy to integrate with Astro. Never had to contact customer support for help. We use Sanity frequently for client projects and they always think its easy to administer.

User interface is a bit bland. Should be able to customize the theme more

Sanity is providing an easy way to administer most of my backend needs for storing data. It allows our team of developers to create custom websites for clients with an easy to use headless CMS

Sanity has been a game-changer compared to WordPress. It elevates the design, performance, and user experience of our website. What I like best: 1. The customizability of components to create a custom experience for our website. We've easily been able to integrate our brand design into new components that offer a better experience for our end users. 2. The usability for internal folks creating new pages, blog posts, etc. within Sanity. We've been able to self-serve build new pages with a speed never possible with the clunky complexity of WordPress. 3. The ability to better integrate with our analytics platform and track things we couldn't before, such as the location of CTA clicks.

1. There are not enough custom plugins available compared to WordPress. Hopefully, this will change with time as more developers add them. 2. Related to the above, there are no built-in ways to add things commonly required, like image cropping and resizing. 3. While internal users can easily and quickly build new pages, there is some residual slowness when multiple panes are open simultaneously.

With faster speeds, more customizability, and ease of use, Sanity ultimately enables us to offer a better digital experience to our external audience and internal users.