Three platforms, three philosophies
The headless CMS market has consolidated. Sanity, Contentful and Storyblok are the three we end up recommending on serious builds, and each approaches the same problem from a different angle. This is the breakdown we give clients when they ask which one fits their team.
Editor experience
This is the first thing we look at, because it is the bit the client lives in every day. A technically perfect CMS that editors hate gets abandoned.
Storyblok
Storyblok leads on editor UX because of its visual editor. Editors see the live site in an iframe and click directly on the element they want to change. For marketing teams and non-technical editors, it is closest to the Squarespace experience they already know, but with real content modelling underneath. The trade-off is that the visual editor expects careful front-end setup to work well.
Sanity
Sanity Studio is a customisable editor that runs on your infrastructure. Out of the box it is a clean, structured-content interface. With investment, it becomes a tailored editing experience, including live previews, custom input components and real-time collaboration that works. Sanity is the best platform we have used for teams who want editorial workflows that feel bespoke.
Contentful
Contentful's web app is the most conservative of the three. It is a clean, reliable, predictable content interface. Editors who have used any enterprise CMS will recognise it immediately. There is no visual editing out of the box, though there is a live preview product. For editors who want structure and clarity rather than magic, this is a feature.
Developer experience
Sanity and GROQ
Sanity uses GROQ, its own query language. It looks odd for about an hour and then feels better than GraphQL for this job. GROQ queries are concise, co-located with their usage, and handle projections naturally.
*[_type == "article" && slug.current == $slug][0]{
title,
"author": author->name,
body
}
Sanity also has a GraphQL API if you prefer. The content lake, real-time listeners and Studio extensibility make it the most flexible of the three from a developer standpoint.
Contentful and GraphQL
Contentful's GraphQL and REST APIs are mature, well-documented and reliable. Rate limits exist and matter at scale, but the SDKs handle most of the sharp edges. It is the most boring of the three to build on, which is not a criticism.
Storyblok and REST
Storyblok is primarily a REST API with a GraphQL layer on top. The Content Delivery API is fast and globally cached. The Management API handles everything that is not a read. Storyblok's SDKs for the major frameworks are solid, and the visual editor story is tightly integrated with their bridge script.
For a React or Next.js project, all three are straightforward. We have no strong DX preference between them on the plumbing side. The difference is in the query language and the modelling philosophy.
Content modelling philosophy
Sanity: structured
Sanity pushes you toward highly structured content and portable rich text. If your content will be reused across web, mobile, email and emerging surfaces, Sanity's model pays off. If you try to treat it like a page builder, you will fight it.
Contentful: structured with content types
Contentful is also structured-first, but with a more rigid content-type model. Reference fields, validations and workflows are strong. Large enterprises with governance requirements tend to land here.
Storyblok: blocks and pages
Storyblok leans into a blocks-on-pages model that is close to how marketing teams think. Nestable components, clear page structures, a CMS where "build a landing page from blocks" is a first-class workflow. This is why Storyblok wins marketing-heavy briefs.
Pricing gotchas at scale
All three have free tiers generous enough for side projects and misleading enough to hide the real cost later. We model the AUD cost over 12 months at expected traffic before signing anyone up.
- Contentful charges per seat and per API call, and the jumps between tiers are significant. The mid-tier gets expensive quickly once you have a few editors and some traffic. Content roles and spaces are where the real negotiation happens.
- Sanity is usage-based on API calls and bandwidth. It scales more gently, but high-traffic sites should keep an eye on bandwidth on the Content Lake. The free tier covers a lot of small projects comfortably.
- Storyblok charges per plan based on features and traffic, with extra costs for component limits and workspaces. The visual editor is the hook. The plan you actually need for a real marketing site is a step or two up.
CMS pricing is the easiest place to get caught out.
Localisation
If you need true multilingual content, all three handle it, but not equally.
- Storyblok has the cleanest localisation story for marketing sites. Per-field translation, fallbacks, clear editor UX.
- Contentful handles locales at the space level with a mature but more heavyweight model. Good for enterprises with strict governance.
- Sanity handles localisation well but you make more modelling decisions yourself. That flexibility helps when your localisation rules are unusual.
How we decide
A rough decision tree we use in conversations:
- Small team, highly visual marketing site, non-technical editors: Storyblok.
- Editorial team that wants bespoke workflows, structured content reused across channels, and is comfortable with a touch more setup: Sanity.
- Enterprise-ish team, heavy governance, predictable workflows, stakeholders who want to see a familiar-looking CMS: Contentful.
- Greenfield project with strong dev team and uncertainty about future needs: Sanity, because it bends furthest without breaking.
None of these are wrong answers for any of the others. We have shipped happy projects on all three.
What we would not do
We would not pick a headless CMS based only on a free-tier comparison, we would not pick Contentful expecting a visual editor, and we would not pick Storyblok expecting highly structured content reuse across non-web channels without extra work.
If you are evaluating a CMS for a new build or considering a migration, we are happy to compare the three against your specific editors, traffic profile and localisation needs.
