Sanity vs. Contentful: which headless CMS for B2B?

Sanity and Contentful are the two names that come up most when an established B2B or industrial company shortlists a headless CMS. Both are mature, API-first platforms that decouple your content from your front end, and both can run a serious B2B site. The real difference is who they are built for. If the architecture itself is still open, headless vs. traditional CMS is the prior question.

Sanity leans toward developers and the agencies that build on it: a fully code-defined content model, real-time collaboration, and low per-seat pricing. Contentful leans toward the enterprise: deep roles and permissions, localization, and procurement-friendly contracts, at a price that steps up quickly. Here is how they compare and how to decide.

At a glance

Where Sanity wins

Sanity's advantage is flexibility at a predictable, low cost. The free tier covers 20 seats and real projects, and the paid Growth tier is $15 per seat per month, so a small B2B team or an agency can build and run a serious site without an enterprise contract. Because the content model is defined in code (Portable Text), a developer can shape it to almost any structure, and real-time collaboration lets multiple people work in the same document at once.

That flexibility is why developers and agencies reach for it. The trade-off is that the Studio is configured, not turnkey, so a non-technical team depends on whoever set it up to make it easy to use.

Where Contentful wins

Contentful is the safer choice when governance is the priority. It ships with deep roles and permissions, mature localization, and the kind of audit and access controls a large organization with several content teams needs. It is also the more familiar name in enterprise procurement, which matters when a purchase has to clear security and legal review.

The cost of that maturity is the price curve. The jump from the free tier to the $300-per-month Lite plan is steep, and the features that make Contentful worth it at scale, advanced roles and higher limits, sit in custom-priced Enterprise tiers.

What they actually cost at B2B scale

Both platforms start free, and both free tiers are usable for a real project rather than a toy. The divergence starts at the first paid step. Sanity's Growth plan is $15 per seat per month, so a five-person marketing team lands around $75 a month. Contentful's first paid tier, Lite, is $300 a month regardless of how few people touch it.

That gap narrows as you grow. Per-seat pricing scales linearly, so a 30-seat Sanity deployment costs roughly $450 a month, while Contentful Lite stays flat until you hit its limits and move to custom Enterprise pricing. The crossover point depends less on headcount than on which features you need: if you require the roles, permissions, and localization that live in Contentful's upper tiers, you are comparing against a quote, not a list price.

The number most teams forget is implementation. A headless CMS is a build either way, and the cost of modeling your content, wiring the front end, and migrating existing pages typically dwarfs the first year of licensing on both platforms. Weigh the license, then weigh the build.

Migration and lock-in

Both are API-first, which is the thing that actually protects you. Content lives behind a documented API rather than inside a proprietary page builder, so an export and re-import is a real path in either direction rather than a rewrite.

The friction is in the modeling, not the data. Sanity's schema is defined in code, so moving to it means expressing your content types as code a developer maintains. Contentful's model is configured in its UI, which is easier to set up initially and slightly harder to version and review. Whichever you leave, the work is remapping fields and rebuilding the front-end queries, and that effort scales with how much custom structure and how many locales you built.

Practical advice: whichever you pick, keep the content model as plain as the site allows. The teams that struggle to migrate are the ones that encoded layout decisions into the content model, not the ones with a lot of content.

How to choose

The decision usually comes down to team shape and budget. If you work with a developer or agency, want to control cost, and value a content model you can bend to your needs, Sanity is the stronger fit. If you are a larger organization with multiple content teams, formal governance requirements, and an enterprise procurement process, Contentful earns its higher price.

One honest caveat: neither is the most approachable option for a marketing team that wants to edit visually without developer help. If that is the binding constraint, weigh both against Storyblok before deciding.

For a fuller picture of both against the rest of the field, see our ranking of the best headless CMS for B2B.

The same content update, on each platform

A product manager needs to add a new spec table to twelve product pages. The work is identical; where it happens is not.