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.

What each free tier actually covers

Both platforms let you run a real project without paying, which is unusual in this category and worth taking seriously while you evaluate. Sanity's free plan includes 20 seats, 10,000 documents, 100GB of assets and 100GB of bandwidth, with 250,000 API requests and 1 million CDN requests a month (Sanity pricing, checked August 2026). For a B2B site of a few hundred pages, none of those is the limit you hit first.

The limit you do hit is datasets. The free plan gives you two, and both are public. A public dataset is readable by anyone who knows the project ID, which is fine for marketing content that's published anyway and not fine if you're drafting an acquisition announcement or storing anything customer-specific. Moving to Growth at $15 per seat is what buys private datasets, along with 25,000 documents and room for up to 50 seats.

Contentful also offers a usable free tier. Confirm its current limits on their pricing page before you plan around them.

What changes when enterprise review gets involved

The $15 versus $300 comparison holds right up until IT asks about single sign-on, and then it stops holding. Sanity lists SAML single sign-on and its full audit trail on the Enterprise plan, which is custom-priced (Sanity pricing, checked August 2026). Growth, the $15-per-seat tier, includes neither.

So the moment a security review requires SAML, or a compliance obligation means you need a record of who changed what and when, you're asking Sanity for a quote. At that point you're comparing two custom quotes rather than a list price against a list price, and the cost argument that made Sanity the obvious pick isn't the argument you're having any more.

Most comparisons skip this, and it's usually what decides an enterprise purchase. If SSO, audit logging and a signed data processing agreement are on your requirements list, price both platforms as Enterprise from the start. If they aren't, Sanity's per-seat pricing really is much cheaper, and the rest of this page applies.

Localization and multi-region

If you sell in more than one language, localization is usually the dimension that settles this. It helps to separate two things that get conflated: storing translations, and running a translation process.

Contentful handles localization at the field level out of the box, and the roles and workflow around it are more mature. That's the practical case for it. A marketing team working across three regions can share one space, with permissions deciding who publishes what, and you don't have to design that system yourself.

Sanity does multi-language well, but more of the structure is a decision you make. You choose whether locales live as fields on a single document or as separate documents per locale, and each choice changes how editors work and how the front end resolves a missing translation. Done deliberately it's clean and flexible. Done casually it becomes the thing your team complains about two years later.

The cost that surprises people on either platform isn't the license. It's that every localized field multiplies the editorial work, and somebody has to own translation quality. Decide who owns translations first, then pick the platform.

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.