Sanity Reviews & Product Details

There are so many features of Sanity I like it's hard to summarize it, but here goes. The overall developer experience is great, it's a very "developer centric" service. They offer a place to spin up a quick example site. Sanity's Studio (CMS) is extendable, so you can tweak it to meet your needs. There's also a nice number of plugins created by community members you can use. Sanity has a generous free tier. They have a slack channel where they offer support and it also has a large active community of very talented developers and members that are willing to help. They offer a place to promote their community members and contributions and projects. I also enjoy how they host open houses and meetups where they debut new features and highlight community member's work and experiences with Sanity. It's also been exciting to see how much the company has grown over the years with funding, new team members and expanding offices into the States. I highly recommend checking out Sanity! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sanity’s Growth tier plan costs $15 per seat per month, and I’m not a fan of the per-seat pricing model. A flat-rate option—say, $15–$35 per month for up to 50 users—would be far more appealing. Per-seat pricing adds up quickly, often leading teams to share logins to cut costs, which isn’t great for security. While the Growth plan offers a lot of valuable features, the pricing structure feels restrictive for teams that need multiple users but don’t necessarily scale revenue at the same rate. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sanity is an incredible combination of technical innovation, flexibility and community. Portable text and the GROQ query language are both fantastic innovations. The ability to describe a content model as a schema allows total flexibility. The responsive and friendly user community is always on hand to help should the need arise. All of the above, combined with a very generous pricing model, makes Sanity stand out head and shoulders from the rest of the field. Sanity particularly shines as an alternative for people coming from traditional, monolithic systems such as WordPress. It even features a robust media library and CDN. Recent additions like the visual editor just take it all to the next level. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I don't 'dislike' this, but a learning curve needs climbing at first. The community makes this process fun and engaging. I have found the Sanity Slack to be really very helpful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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.

Update 2024-03-02: After working with Sanity with an enterprise client for going on three years now, I can also confidently report that the Sanity team's dedication to supporting and improving the product and service is outstanding. They regularly make improvements to the core set of tools that make them more reliable, more robust, and more adaptable. They are also actively engaged in offering new features, including those built around emerging technologies like LLMs. Mercifully, these are all "opt-in"—some fit my clients' use cases; some do not. They also, from the looks of things, appear to be moving into new spaces thoughtfully and deliberately. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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.) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sanity has a number of templates that you can use to get you started instantly with everything you need for a fully functional site. But you are never locked into anything because you can customise EVERYTHING that you need to. And on top of all of that, the generous free tier means you can easily start any hobby projects at no cost at all. You'd be silly not to give it a go! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While you can host the editor (Sanity Studio) yourself, there is no option for hosting the backend yourself. So you do need to consider how your project may grow to determine if the paid-tier is viable for you. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What we like best about Sanity is the unmatched flexibility and development speed it offers. It’s a crucial building block in our tech stack, seamlessly fitting into our composable architecture approach. By combining Sanity with other cutting-edge tools, we’re able to build sophisticated digital experiences faster and with greater ease. This flexibility empowers us to push creative boundaries while maintaining efficiency and scalability. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One downside of using Sanity, and the headless approach in general, is the cost involved. While Sanity offers great flexibility and there’s a vibrant community with many extensions available, each new feature still needs to be developed from scratch. This makes the process more resource-intensive compared to using all-in-one platforms that come with built-in functionalities. As a result, the cost of building and maintaining products with Sanity can be higher, which may not be ideal for startups or smaller companies with limited budgets. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The features are great and have enough, and more options with the best in class react as the base for developing a CMS. With the new plans, there are options on how to publish content sequentially and better control of access/writing controls when working with a team.

I love the plugins created officially and by the community. They are so useful and do exactly what they are expected to do. Most of these are now up to date and meet the needs of any developer.

The script is much easier to handle than before and the documents online are very easy and helpful. With the dashboard and structure being customizable, this makes it very user friendly for the final user to systematically work on the designed arrangement of tabs making it feel like folders and subfolders. All my users have thanked me for organizing their data.

With the new 'perspective' feature, one can decide to use 'draft' content or the 'published' content based on their development or production environment. This helps in checking the content draft visual feel on the frontend site before it gets published.

GROQ as a languages is very easy to learn and definitely the documentation to support it is massive. The APIs too have versioning available so that one can decide which version can be used in the query language.

There is a whole community of people on Slack who are just willing to help people get around the code, showcase their works and make things happen. The most useful channel to me the 'i-made-this' channel. It shows how vibrant the community is and what are the possibilities of using Sanity as your preferred Content Management Database/Tool. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sanity as a CMS builder still needs you to learn how to code. There was a little learning curve for me as a non-developer.

Like any other new system, it took me some time. Thankfully, in about 1-2 hours to settle in but it eventually happened. Nothing to dislike about Sanity frankly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the amount of control given to developers to design and edit the content structure and user interface. The GROK format for parsing data is similar to GraphQL but slightly more efficient when working with Sanity. I work with a few non-profits, and I love that Sanity has a payment tier specific to non-profits. I also like that there is some image editing directly within the content editing interface. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I can't think of too many things that I dislike about it. The setup is pretty straightforward. I guess one thing that I had difficulty with at first was understanding how to setup the rich text system which they call "Portable Text". I got it eventually but it seemed sort of finicky at first. At times the documentation can be confusing but they are actively updating that part of their site and it seems to be getting better. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pretty much a perfect solution to admin your data. Having ability to tweak and customize studio without any issue is a huge plus. Most importantly is a groq language which is so convenient and easy to use that I hardly want to go back to my old setup. Using Sanity with Next JS and so far so good.

Update:

It's just incredible to see how sanity supports their code. New features and perks come almost every week. And it makes the product more useful than ever. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not good performance of the studio. It's understandable that studio data loads all content every time you open it page, but it takes 2-3 seconds each transition which can be annoying. And the most frustrating thing is manual dereferencing each asset and document. You requested a data? You probably need a data right? No, we have something better! Here is a reference to what you need :( Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The generous free-tier is an excellent starting point for building a headless website or application. The documentation and available libraries made integrating into my tech stack extremely easy.

The developer experience is excellent, but the dashboard can also be customized to have an amazing 'author experience' for non-developers to maintain and publish content.

I am confident that the investment in learning and building with Sanity will continue to be worth it for years, because I see the company continuing to add features, build community, and win a large enterprise customer base. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

For simple projects that I want to just launch quickly, I would love to see some kind of UI-based schema builder. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sanity has superb documentation & an engaged Slack community. Being able to create data schemas as simple JSON objects is particularly awesome.

The customisation potential within the Studio is excellent, custom workflows, custom content templates, fully brandable, and my favourite part, custom components for fields means you can produce an excellent content authoring experience whatever the schema/data may be. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only negative is how quickly the pricing tiers jump in price, it would be nice to have a tier in between Team & Business tiers.

The recent addition of the "Growth" product tier provides a better option for smaller agencies/teams - although the restrictions on available roles is a little lacklustre. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.