Three Arguments That Don't Apply Here

Sanity is a serious, developer-respected product, and most of the usual comparison angles fall flat against it. Let's drop them up front.

Sanity is code-first. Schemas are TypeScript in your repo, and the Studio itself is configured in code and deploys from your project. That has been true for years - it is arguably where the idea came from. So "we define schemas in code and they don't" is not an argument we get to make.

Sanity has visual editing. The Presentation tool bridges Studio and your live front end using content source maps and stega encoding, so editors click an element on the real page and edit it. It works across Next.js, Remix, Nuxt and Astro.

Sanity does not meter your languages. Locales are unlimited on the free plan and up, bounded only by attribute limits. If you came here hoping we would beat them on multilingual pricing, we won't - that argument works against Storyblok and Contentful, not against Sanity.

What is left is a genuine difference in shape, and one in billing.

The Real Difference: What Editors Do

Sanity is structured content first. The mental model is documents and fields. An editor opens a document in Studio, fills in fields, and the front end decides how to render them. Presentation makes that loop visual - click the element, edit the field in place - but the unit of work is still the field. Building the page is a developer's job in code.

Cmssy is page composition first. The unit of work is the block. An editor opens a page in the editor, drags a testimonial section above the pricing section, edits its copy on the live page, and publishes. Nobody touches the repo. The blocks themselves are still developer-owned React with a typed schema - but assembling them into a page is the editor's job, not a deploy.

That is the whole comparison in one line: Sanity gives editors better fields, Cmssy gives editors the page.

Which is right depends on what your team actually does. If your content is a product catalogue, a documentation set or an article archive feeding several surfaces, structured content is the correct model and Sanity is excellent at it. If your marketing team wants to build and rearrange landing pages this afternoon, a field editor is not what they are asking for.

Pricing

This is the other axis, and it bites at a specific point.

Sanity: Free at $0 (up to 20 seats, 2 datasets, 250K API requests and 1M CDN requests per month), Growth at $15 per seat per month (up to 50 seats, comments and tasks, private datasets), Enterprise on request. Additional datasets on Growth are $999 per dataset per month. SSO, custom roles, content releases and audit trail are Enterprise only.

Cmssy: Hobby free (1 workspace, 5 pages, 3 custom blocks), Pro at $19/month flat (5 workspaces, unlimited pages, 25 custom blocks, AI and MCP), Enterprise on request.

Per-seat versus flat is the thing to model. One editor on Sanity Growth is $15 and we are $19 - we lose. Five editors is $75 against our $19. Twelve editors is $180 against our $19. The crossover happens almost immediately, and it happens exactly when a CMS starts being useful, which is when more than one person touches it.

The $999 per additional dataset is worth knowing about before you architect around datasets - if your instinct is one dataset per brand or per environment, price that first.

Sanity figures checked 27 July 2026 - verify before you decide.

Where Sanity's Free Tier Beats Ours

Plainly: Sanity's free plan is far more generous than ours. Twenty seats, two datasets, a real API quota. Our Hobby plan is one workspace, five pages and three custom blocks - it is a trial, not a home. If your project is small, unfunded and staying that way, Sanity's free tier is the better deal and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Querying

Sanity uses GROQ, its own query language. It is genuinely powerful - projections, joins and filtering that would be awkward in GraphQL - and it is a real reason developers stay. The cost is that it is one more language your team learns, and it is Sanity-specific.

Cmssy is GraphQL on every plan, with codegen producing typed documents. Less expressive than GROQ at the extremes, but nothing new to learn and the tooling already exists.

Verdict: a real trade, not a win. Take GROQ if you query deeply; take GraphQL if you would rather not introduce a language.

AI

Cmssy exposes the workspace over an MCP server, so an agent like Claude creates pages, writes copy, fills translations and sets SEO through the same API the editor uses - on content, never on your code. Because Cmssy's unit is the page, an agent can be told "add a pricing page with three tiers" and actually produce one. That instruction has no clean equivalent in a fields-and-documents model where page structure lives in the repo.

Winner: Cmssy - and note this advantage is downstream of the page-composition model, not a separate feature.

Where Sanity Wins

• Studio customisation - the Studio is your React app. Custom input components, structure builder, bespoke workflows. Our editor is far more opinionated.
• Real-time collaboration - multiple editors in a document at once, with presence. Mature and well built.
• GROQ and Portable Text - two genuinely good pieces of design, especially Portable Text for rich content that must render on non-web surfaces.
• Free tier - twenty seats, as above.
• Maturity and community - years of production use, a large plugin ecosystem, deep documentation.
• Framework breadth - visual editing across Next.js, Remix, Nuxt and Astro. We are focused on React and Next.js.
• Omnichannel - if content feeds apps and other surfaces, structured content is the right model and page composition is the wrong one.

Comparison

The Verdict

Choose Sanity if your content is structured data serving several surfaces, if you want to shape the authoring tool itself, if GROQ and Portable Text appeal, or if you are small enough that twenty free seats settles it.

Choose Cmssy if the job is websites and the people doing the job are marketers who want to build pages without a developer, if you have more than two or three editors and per-seat billing is about to hurt, or if you want an AI agent that can create a whole page rather than fill a field.

The honest one-liner: Sanity is the better content backend, Cmssy is the better website CMS. They are not really competing for the same afternoon.

Next Steps

• Follow the installation guide to wire @cmssy/react and @cmssy/next into a Next.js app
• See how blocks are defined in code
• Read about the MCP server
• Compare Cmssy and Contentful or Cmssy and Storyblok