Unclaimed: Are you working at Sanity?
Sanity Reviews: 4.7/5 — Highly Rated
Sanity is a Composable Content Cloud that lets teams create amazing digital experiences at scale. It provides real-time collaboration, live multi-user editing, and track changes. Content creators, designers, and developers can come together while separating content from presentation
| Capabilities |
API
CLI
OSS
|
|---|---|
| Segment |
Small Business
Mid Market
Enterprise
|
| Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based |
| Support | 24/7 (Live rep), Chat, Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, Phone Support |
| Training | Documentation |
| Languages | English |
Compare Sanity with other popular tools in the same category.
Sanity is easy to get started and integrates with your existing stack. We use it for delivering content internally & externally to our stakeholders. It is fast & reliable!
I wish there were more integration available to implement collaboration tools within as plugins. Customer service can be little better but it's satisfying so far.
We wanted to find home to host & deliver all of our content using one tool instead of many like Wordpress or AEM etc. Sanity brought more clarity in the marketing org around our content creation.
Having a studio with all information you can query and various plugins, and very easy to add to your project. Very cheap and lot of queries.
Some complex input fields in input are not always best formatted, eg viewing graphs. Sometimes entering latex code isnt clearly visible with the plugin. Could have larger variety of plugins.
I wanted to create a learning platform, using variety of schemas, latex rendering and SEO. At the time as not the most proficient programmer, it had a nice smooth learning curve.
Well-written documentation. This is one of the most important aspects when deciding to use a service like this.
Some may not like the idea of Sanity Studio
I wanted a very customizable yet easy to use headless CMS for my personal blog. Sanity turned out to be just that.
I like that it is easy to use, has great documentation and the can get up to speed in few minutes with free templates for various usecases.
Probably bindings for cloudinary and Other services like AWS would be great. Although it's easy to write ur own.
Using it as a CMS for an e-commerce store along with Gatsby and the integration is butter smooth.
Their Content Lake db is awesome. Sanity has a great CLI. Santity studio is so easy to use for editing!
their is a bit of a learning curve, but its well worth the effort
Managing and publishing content for small to medium sized businesses
Super easy to get going, and very powerful with minimal configuration.
Not much. I would like some more preset starters, but I usually just need to make my own config anyway.
Quick CMS. Very usable for non-technical stakeholders.
I like how easy it is to add fields to the CMS and that the interface is highly customisable
The author experience is not the best. It could be improved to let for example order documents by drag-dop and make the left navigation a bit more narrow to have more space to edit content.
Trying to have a flexible CMS I realised it can all be configured as data within the code side effortlessly. It definitely makes me more productive when adding new fields to my CMS projects.
I love being able to write custom components for UI parts that my clients depend on for inputting data. That is the best part because it's all extensible and open source.
It can be frustrating to work with GROQ at first, especially with real world examples that go beyond the scope of mose articles and docs. But also, I learn from examples and the showcase provides a great resource to explore.
Sanity helps me develop a base component layer that I reuse for multiple clients. Having it run on Node.js and being open source, I save a lot of money and trouble having it. Thank you to all who made it 😊
With sanity, you can structure your content precisely the way you want. In addition, the sanity team does take great care of the community, is very approachable, and regularly hosts great online events.
As I'm not a react developer, I feel limited in creating more compex inputs and components within the sanity studio (where you manage your content).
I use it for almost all my jamstack websites. Mainly websites that feature strictly structured data where the data schema rarely changes. This way, I can build a fast decoupled frontend, and the client has an easy and convenient time managing the content without getting distracted with design decisions.
Sanity took my new business website (www.justincaseestates.com) from zero to launch. As a new capital-sensitive startup, I particularly valued the ability to get started building with Sanity for free on a package that (IMHO) outperforms what you get from similar starter tranches at contentful. Sanity also has a pretty decent knowledge base / documentation on its website, and the company also runs a slack channel for Sanity community members.
Sanity offers starter packages to help jumpstart different blogs, eCommerce, and other websites. While better than nothing, those starter packages are pretty bare-bones. Fortunately, I had the help of a great development agency to quickly build out the different components I needed to build a scalable website.
Sanity is the CMS for our website, and we also plan to use it for our web application launching later this year. For the website, my team got the right building blocks in place in the span of a few short weeks. Since then, we've been able to get even our non-developer laypeople churning out content and new pages with ease.
I work as a freelance developer, and Sanity is without a doubt the best technology to enable me to build an interface where my client can manage their content. Build the Content Management System (CMS) is very intuitive, and tools you have available to you are well documented. Because your Sanity Studio (the CMS you build for your project) has it's own codebase, there is very little constraints to what you can do with it. The Web UI, out of the box, is extremely clean and intuitive to use. It's a game changer for sure.
There's not much to dislike. There is a time investment to learn how to build a Sanity CMS and query content using GROQ (their querying language), but it is very much worth it.
It's the ultimate tool for allowing the web applications a developer builds to be interfaced and customized by their clients/users. It makes handing over a project very easy and increases it's lifespan because your clients can mould the app to meet their needs as their business changes.
How versatile the system and therefore my data is.
The power & customizability can be overwhelming, especially for non-devs. It's not hard, but unless you're already dealing with code, JSON, etc., it is overwhelming at first (but you quickly realize how doable it is!).
As a writer, both fiction & nonfiction, with output (frontend) that is more than just a blog, and data that doesn't fit the standard PAGE or POST schema, Sanity makes data management easy and removes unnecessary complexity while letting me present what I want, how I want.
I tend to be skeptical about adding another off-the-shelf tool to a website's stack, but having tried to build out a custom CMS a couple of times, that isn't fun. Sanity is just super easy to customize using code, and you can make it work however you'd like, but you don't have to mess with the absolute basics of building out your own CMS. I was able to pick up the basics in just a couple of hours and get it integrated quickly. Plus, their free tier is quite generous!
The "studio" editor isn't 100% smooth in complicated use-cases like LaTeX math equations. However, it's really quite a good editor and you can make it do pretty much anything you want.
Sanity allows my clients to edit their website easily, without having to get in touch with me. I can create an easy way for them to swap out content or write new content.
* The sheer flexibility of the platform that lets you build and link documents however you want * The performance and speed of using it - updates are near instant, editing is a fantastic experience * The level of configuration you can have in the UI - being a deployable UI that you control it means we have a lot of control over our editing experience whilst still leveraging Sanity backend * The support levels we have gotten and the care that the community has for building an amazing system
* Content auditing could be better as we'd like to see all information about editing of the systems from our users * The UI is very basic which means a lot of editing and tweaking has to be done on our end - this is the trade-off between flexibility and control from Sanity side
We want to give our marketing, content and product teams the power to edit anything on our site. By using Sanity we've been able to model the system to reflect what we do as a travel company and unlock the non-engineering teams to deliver value to the customer with no engineering effort whatsoever. Our entire UI / website is configuration and content driven, which means Sanity basically is the force behind how our pages look and function, giving us limitless options to customise our experience for customers
The extensive documentation and helpful community make it easy to solve any problems you have! Being able to define your schemas in code is very enjoyable too, no more clunky GUIs that take ages to do a simple task.
Sometimes it has seemed to lack "basic" features that more established editors have. Conditional fields (Now released) Were a long-awaited release. Otherwise I really can't find any problems!
Flexible ways to define a customer's content. Being able to write from the ground up leads to both the client and the dev being happy! Success. Also, the community mods and plugins are well documented, maintained, and forever useful to streamline development.
Ease of set up and integration. Lots of helpful documentation
Some outdated tutorials caused a bit of confusion in understanding how to configure sanity
I have built 3 sites in a months time, really fast and I am using sanity as a cms in a react native project. The pricing is also great for my needs
The best thing about Sanity is the data modeling via files as objects and documents. It's like working with lego bricks and the whole developer experience is fluid. It's super customizable and their documentation is spot on and a great help for when you want to make something more complex.
Sometimes when working with the CMS in developer mode, things like adding content or clicking buttons are a bit slow/laggy for me but I think it may be because of some of my chrome extensions.
I've saved a ton of time with Sanity as I can just copy and move over settings and the content structure to other projects. Be it a blog or an ecommerce site, Sanity has it covered. Customization is great and updating is easy as well.
After comparing many headless CMS solutions, Sanity.io stands out in both being very flexible in configuring and structuring content and also being very easy and convenient to use as a content creator. Other highlights from an editor's perspective: Collaborative real-time editing (and inspecting/rolling back to previous changes), an excellent rich-text editor ("portable-text"), and theoretically any editing interface an editor would need – as the Sanity Studio (the content editing interface) is entirely editable and extendable. Being a frontend developer, I love Sanity for its simplicity in structuring content models and being able to customize the Sanity Studio (an open-source React app) to give content editors the means to work as efficiently as possible. Sanity's developer documentation is well written and always up to date, and the ever-growing user community (https://slack.sanity.io/) is a great place to connect and get/offer support.
As Sanity is touchpoint-agnostic by design, it is not pre-configured to serve as a website cms. Everything can be configured = everything must be configured. Page title, URL pathname, SEO description, internationalization, etc.. – these web page-specific fields don't ship with sanity by default. That said, Sanity (and its community) offers a good amount of starter templates that are preconfigured for popular use cases (landing pages, blogs, e-commerce, ...). If your use case sees a fit, I'd recommend to start with a template, to build upon a solid content architecture, save time creating boilerplate code, and have code best practices and implementation examples handy. While still keeping complete flexibility for customization.
Any project requires content that is well structured and flexible to work with. Sanity offers such a tool for the whole project team – the content structure can be adjusted to fit its presentation, content editors can create and manage content conveniently and with high confidence. At the same time, developers get the content (or content parts) in the shape they prefer.
I appreciate the well-organized and thorough documentation provided by Sanity. It was super easy to troubleshoot issues and get up and running quickly. The content management UI is very nice looking as well.
The only thing I disliked about Sanity was that the free tier had limited customer service. I wouldn't fault them for that, however, since there is a helpful community forum that you can use even if you're on the free tier.
I utilized Sanity as a headless CMS for a small town's online business directory. Sanity solved many of the issues I had trying to do the same using WordPress with annoying plugins. WordPress was too complicated for my client, who was in charge of updating the directory.
- Powerful dataplatform with great APIs. - Highly customizable - Structured content allows using your content in multiple channels/platforms. - Great community!
- usability could be better for content creators in the Studio/editor. - missing some basic features for content creators. - pricing based on the number of users.
We are building a content production platform for public libraries in Norway. We have been able to go from product idea to first version in three months. Thanks to the power of Sanity!
Sanity has an amazing CLI. The CLI tool walks you through everything step by step. This makes creating a new sanity project a breeze.
The sanity CLI is slow sometimes to create a new project. When I ran sanity start it took 109685ms to compile the webpack. This may have just been my computer though.
I am using Sanity as a Headless CMS and realized that it works much faster than trying to use a full CMS. Sanity allows me to only grab the data that I need and then I can create a frontend in Next.JS.
Sanity's approach to supporting the design, creation, use, and reuse of structured content strikes an ideal balance between supporting known tasks and needs (like references, workflow management, user roles, editor experience, flexible content APIs, etc.) and leaving the doors open to build efficient tools and workflows for highly specific use cases. I've used a number of other headless/decoupled systems in the past (as well as content APIs on traditional tightly coupled CMSs), and each time have eventually run into weird system constraints that have forced me to mold my structured content design to the limitations of their systems. Not so with Sanity: anything I can think of, it can do.
Honestly, there's nothing I "dislike" about Sanity. They've gotten to the beating heart of the difference between "content as pages" and "content as data" and have built a tool that allows the rest of us to get on with the work of building a better web. I have found, however, some challenges in my experience so far: Getting clients to understand the mind shift. Setting up and integrating Sanity looks different to stakeholders and collaborators than standing up a Drupal or WordPress site. They worry that structured content is a fad. That decoupled architectures are unnecessary (and therefore a waste of resources). That they're getting locked into a monolithic system that will end up weighing them down like all the others have. I've found that there is some preparation and change management here that is unique among content-oriented projects. It can be managed, but it's worth being prepared for. Learning the technology. As other reviewers have no doubt noted, Sanity can be deployed and integrated by a team with bare-bones development skills, but to realize its full potential requires at least a working knowledge of React. (I say this having used Sanity both before and after learning React myself.)
Oh, so many! Content Quality Improvement: I recently helped a client move a crucial subset of their content from ad hoc markdown editing to structured content editing in Sanity. By structuring and providing guidance on what constitutes quality in different parts of the content model, content editors were able to produce higher quality content in less time and with less effort. A structured model helped them focus on communicating their expertise, instead of re-inventing a document structure and style guide every time they opened the editor. Linked Data Publication: On a separate project, we built linked data (think OpenGraph meta tags and Schema.org) into the editor experience, sometimes without even adding additional fields, and made them available on the front systematically via page templates. Instead of editors needing to remember to fill in meta-tags, it's been built into their workflow for every resource. Knowledge Graph Integration: For the moment, the most visible use cases for Sanity are for managing content intended for web pages. The Sanity API is good at this, but since it is fully decoupled, it is also capable of a lot more (see note on the "mind shift" above): in this instance, we're using a GROQ query to return a set of content data that we then pipe to an RDF serializer to convert it into semantic web triples. These triples are then sent to a graph database that houses a taxonomy and other content data from the same broad project. By then querying this graph database as the UI is being built, we're able to use Sanity as a content source, and the graph database as a dynamic source of business logic. This allows us to prioritize and recommend content based on context, popularity, and the ever-evolving collection of content in which an individual resource is situated. Also: Sanity's support of webhooks means this process is fully automated: all the content creator has to do is author a new resource and hit "Publish."
there's a lot of options... it can be whatever you want it to be... but what it won't do is every let you down. it is never gonna to run around and desert you. it is never gonna make you cry. but seriously. it might make your developer cry for a second but not your content team. i can tell you how many times people on my team would have a terrible afternoon bc something they worked on directly in Shopify or started editing after they copy and pasted... was lost. something happened, page refreshed, browser crashed, they hit publish before they were ready, etc. Sanity provides all the guardrails you need and on top of that you can build the ones that will set your team up for success and function within the content creation machine you've designed.
it's great for things that Shopify would handle with metafields. but images and videos still require a bit of extra mechanic work in terms of figuring out what will work for your framework. would be cool to see more deep integrations for how things like product galleries and social videos between Sanity, Shopify, and super popular platforms for merchants such as Instagram and TikTok. words are super important in terms of content but images and video really sell the products.
Sanity is great for keeping a tab on all content but most importantly the details like micro copy. from an ecommerce perspective not all products are the same for a store... some have better margins... some are loss leaders... some require extra warnings to help the CX team handle inbound questions, etc. this is where Sanity really shines in terms of not just creating a custom space but tracking it. and in an era of supply chain and delivery issues... this allows you to really keep on top of messaging related to fulfillment and the overall customer experience. all those banners and visual violators and callouts that people love to add to stores look very stupid when they draw attention to themselves and the information is out of date or just wrong.
Sanity takes - if you'll pardon the expression - a *sane* approach to a headless CMS from a developer perspective. All hosted solutions are "building on rented land", so the provider's trustworthiness is crucial to any decision. Their decision to break down documents into addressable components mixes some of the ideals of XML databases with the past into a modern JSON-based approach. I'm not sure that Sanity qualifies as "low code". The schema-first approach is compelling. However, the lack of an editing UI on top of the schema builder means that you have to incorporate a bunch of libraries to create a genuinely useful application.
"There are no solutions, only trade-offs" - Thomas Sowell Sanity.io is a developer's tool. It is not a low-code solution. And while I'm very comfortable writing code and defining database schemas in graph databases, I was not in the market for that kind of tool, so I ended up noodling around and eventually going on to more low-code solutions to solve my use case. Unfortunately, many of those tools also have some glaring omissions and I've yet to find what I'm really looking for. I think a mashup between Coda.io or Fibery.io and Sanity.io with a touch of Notion and Click-Up mixed in would really satisfy all my nerdy desires.
We evaluated Sanity.io with several other headless CMS solutions for building a prototype of a B2B mobile "instacart"-style app that we are prototyping. We ended up purchasing a starter template that was based on React Native and Firebase, with integrations already coded for a "delivery" app. Unfortunately, I did not have time to explore Sanity's text block abstractions, intriguing as they are.
Ease of convenience of integrating databases with websites.
Lack of spreadsheet-like view to view entire databases at a glance.
Managing couple 1000s of product entries for my website. So far one of the best decision I've made for database management.
Where do I start? Overall functionality Sanity's schema structure is completely flexible leaving you open to model your studio to handle everything from standard blog posts, to building centralized area to handle your e commerce setup. I have used sanity to build restaurant menus, podcast listings, media management and more. Team Support Its considered completely normal for any member from the sanity team - including the CEO to chime in and help you through your problems. The community they have built around this product is one of the best I have ever been a part of. I feel inspired to contribute to use cases and examples, and to help out my fellow Sanity users because of this general positive attitude. If I need something, I know I can count on the Sanity team to deliver or point me in the correct direction Developer Experience Sanity is well documented, has multiple starters and use case examples on their site. It is easy to work on your studio locally and make all the changes you want before deploying it live. Sanity CLI lets you easily deploy your studio and your graph making it easy to tie into your CD pipeline. I think my favorite part is truly how flexible it is - you are not trying to jam a use case into an existing structure, you can come up with your own setup and truly make a good fit.
Some of the support around custom components and documentation is a bit lacking, but the sanity team is adding new docs daily. They recently opened up their UI component library use to build Sanity with - so I am excited to jump into that and take advantage.
The major problems I am solving with sanity stem around idea to execution speed and overall flexibility. Being a truly headless CMS - you can tie your data into any platform you want. You can make changes within hours - add to your schema, deploy and start adding new content. My clients have realized a 90% reduction in CMS cost (due to moving away from expensive hosting solutions and maintenance plans) as well as over 50% improvement in content workflows.
The flexibility that Sanity allows, the compatibility with React, it is what you make it!
media assets not being shared across datasets, security through obscurity for media assets
Having a unified platform for all content, sharing content across projects, adjusting our content model as needed
Structuring a new schema /post type/ as I want it in 5 min, it's mighty—also, the flexibility of the Sanity Studio for data visualization.
Maybe Sanity Studio needs to have more ease of using its richtext editor or even WYSIWYG editor, including basic typography styling, which the frontend will have. I want to be able to easily add and remove buttons from the editor with different essential functions like strong, italic, tables, etc.
Fast and easy adding new and new content types, with different fields required for the particular content type. Sanity saves time. I could compare it to fast food - When you are hungry, you grab one piece and go.
Customization of the studio; react-based and supports TS. The team is incredibly knowledgeable and helpful, and the broader community is growing rapidly. Frequent feature updates as well :)
Some of the documentation could have a little bit more content (eg parts).
Allowing non-technical people in the company to own the CMS data e2e.
Sanity is flexible, highly customizable, and intuitive. It's easy for developers to build and maintain, and for marketers to create the content they want to present. I have developed several sites using Sanity, and have recommended this product to anyone that has asked.
Sometimes the support is not exceptional. I have been able to work through most of the issues that I have had, but even on a paid plan, all you get is a Slack channel, and sometimes questions will go days without ever being answered.
Having a 'Source of Truth' for all of my content has been exceptional! I have created databases that components across my application all reference. The time, and the headaches that this has saved has been a game-changer!