Sanity is a headless CMS: it stores your content as structured data and hands it to whatever front end you build, instead of storing pages. That distinction sounds academic until the third time someone asks a developer to publish a blog post.
We run our own site on it, so what follows is from operating the thing rather than from a vendor deck.
Content as data, not as pages
A traditional CMS stores a page. The headline, the image, the three paragraphs and the layout live together in one record, and the only thing that record knows how to be is that page.
Sanity stores the pieces. A case study is a client, a challenge, an outcome and a set of figures. Where those pieces appear, and what they look like, is the front end's problem. That is the whole idea and everything else follows from it.
The practical consequence: the same client quote can appear on a case study, a service page and the homepage, written once. Change it in one place and it changes everywhere, because there was only ever one copy of it.
What a week looks like once it is in place
The pitch for a headless CMS is usually architectural. The reason teams actually like it is more ordinary: the list of things you have to ask someone else for gets shorter.
A page goes live the moment it is written
No ticket, no release, no waiting for someone else's deploy window. The person who wrote it publishes it.
A campaign is built, not requested
Landing pages come out of the same blocks the rest of the site uses, so marketing assembles one in an afternoon rather than briefing it.
Copy is written once and reused
A service description, a client quote, a set of figures: written in one place and pulled in wherever it is needed, so there is no third copy to go stale.
You see the real page while you type
Live preview against the actual front end, not an approximation of it, so nobody publishes to find out what it looks like.
Developers get their week back
Engineering stops being a content bottleneck and goes back to the things only engineering can do.
The model still makes sense in three years
Content shaped around what the business actually has rather than around the pages it happens to have today, so a redesign is a front-end job.
Sanity or WordPress
This is the question everyone actually arrives with, and the honest answer depends on one thing: whether your content has a shape. WordPress is very good at pages. Sanity is very good at everything that is not a page.
WordPress is the right answer when
You are publishing articles and pages, one website, one team, and the ecosystem is doing real work for you. A blog, a brochure site, a small shop on WooCommerce. Nothing about Sanity beats a well-run WordPress install at being a website.
Sanity is the right answer when
The same content has to appear in more than one place, or more than one channel, or in a shape that is not a page. Products, locations, events, case studies, anything with fields. The moment you are maintaining the same paragraph in three templates, the model is the problem and Sanity is the fix.
The migration between them
Most of our Sanity work starts as a move off WordPress. Plugin sprawl and page-builder markup get untangled into real content, URLs and SEO stay intact, and the migration is scripted so it can be run and re-run rather than hand-copied.
WordPress to Sanity migrations
What Sanity costs, and what a build costs
Sanity has a free plan that works for a small site, and a paid plan priced per seat. Past the seats, what moves the bill is usage: traffic to the API and CDN, bandwidth, and how much you store in assets. Sanity publishes its current pricing. The build is a separate number, quoted after a technical discovery.
So, is it a good CMS?
We run vonnda.com on it, which is the most honest endorsement we can offer. Here is what that is actually like.
The editing experience is the point
The studio is configurable to the point of being a small application. Done well, editors get fields that match their work. Done badly, they get a generic form and hate it. This is where the agency matters more than the platform.
The model is the whole ballgame
Almost every complaint about a CMS traces back to a content model designed page by page. Sanity does not save you from that. It makes a good model pay off more.
It expects a front end
There is no theme to install. You are building a front end, usually in Next.js. A feature if you wanted control, a cost if you wanted to be live on Friday.
Tell us what you are on now and what is breaking. We will tell you what it takes to fix it.