Payload CMS vs Sanity

Compare Payload CMS and Sanity for your content needs. Find out what actual users are saying about each product and which one is best suited for you!

Payload CMS
Payload CMS
Payload is an open-source headless CMS and application framework that emphasizes flexibility, customization, and a developer-friendly environment. Provides powerful APIs, a clean UI, and robust support for various integrations.
Sanity
Sanity
Sanity is a modern content platform that empowers teams to manage, collaborate, and deliver rich digital experiences with real-time editing and API-driven architecture.

What Users Say

See what users who have used Payload CMS and Sanity have to say about their overall experience with the product.

Payload CMS's Key Strengths

Read what users love about Payload CMS.

Sanity's Key Strengths

Read what users love about Sanity.

Payload CMS's Key Issues

Read what issues users have with Payload CMS.

Sanity's Key Issues

Read what issues users have with Sanity.

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What Marketers & Content Creators Say

Hear from the users who uses Payload CMS and Sanity daily about their experience with the editors.

Payload CMS's Editorial Experience Highlights

What marketers love about Payload CMS's editor.

Sanity's Editorial Experience Highlights

What marketers love about Sanity's editor.

Payload CMS's Editorial Experience Issues

What marketers dislike about Payload CMS's editor.

Sanity's Editorial Experience Issues

What marketers dislike about Sanity's editor.

Mobile Editing

Find out how the platforms handle the mobile-first experience for the new generation of workforce on the move.

Payload CMS:
Mobile-First Experience

Payload CMS supports mobile-first experiences, allowing content creation on mobile devices seamlessly.

"It works seamlessly on desktop and mobile (still can't believe most headless CMS admin panels aren't responsive in 2022)."
Source
"Payload will give you backend superpowers... even non-technical users can independently make use of its Admin Panel to manage whatever they need to without having to know code."
Source
"Users in the Admin Panel have the ability to choose between light mode and dark mode for their editing experience."
Source
Sanity:
Mobile-First Experience

Sanity CMS offers a robust mobile editing experience, allowing creators to manage content flexibly across devices.

"With Sanity Studio, the editing experience can be tailored to match however your team works. Plus, Studio comes with tons of out-of-the-box features to instantly unlock your creativity and help you launch content faster across all the channels, devices, and geographies you cover."
Source
"Sanity supports content reuse and instant publishing across all your apps. Phones, watches, cars, game consoles. Sanity handles it all."
Source
"Sanity CMS allows developers to create a tailored editing experience for content creators, ensuring that the CMS aligns with the needs of their project and team."
Source

Automatic Content Linking

Find out if the platform supports automatic linking of related content to help user discover more content without additional manual effort from the marketer. This automatically create topical clusters of content and is essential for SEO.

Payload CMS:
No Automatic Content Linking

Payload CMS requires manual linking using the Relationship field; automated linking for SEO is not available.

"One of the most straightforward ways to manage related content in Payload CMS is through the Relationship field. This feature allows you to link different documents together."
Source
"By leveraging these relationship types, Payload CMS enables users to build complex content architectures that cater to a wide range of applications, from e-commerce sites to blogs with related posts."
Source
"The Rich Text field features a Link element which allows for users to automatically reference related documents within their rich text."
Source
Sanity:
No Automatic Content Linking

Sanity CMS does not support automatic linking of blog posts based on content similarity; users must manually define related posts.

"Wisp CMS leverages AI to suggest related articles automatically."
Source
"Sanity's internal linking requires manual linking of blog posts."
Source

Automatic CTA Linking

Find out if the platform supports automatic display of Call-to-Actions using AI to help users take actions that are relevant to the content they are reading.

Payload CMS:
Manual CTA Linking

Supports custom components but lacks dedicated automatic CTA linking functionality.

"All Custom Components in Payload are React Server Components by default. This enables the use of the Local API directly on the front-end."
Source
"You can design and build your own Slate elements and leaves to extend the editor with your own functionality."
Source
"You can use Relationships to link to existing documents within the Rich Text field."
Source
Sanity:
Manual CTA Linking

Sanity CMS supports advanced linking features but lacks explicit support for automatic CTA linking.

"Visual Editing streamlines everyday content management with an intuitive, one-click path from website preview content to Studio."
Source
"Creating Studio edit intent links for all the string values in your query result."
Source
"Sanity assists with built-in AI tools and flexible editing but doesn't explicitly mention automatic CTA linking."
Source

Comments

Find out if the platform supports comments from your users to improve user engagement. This is often a great way to collect feedback and user emails.

Payload CMS:
Comments Supported

Payload CMS supports commenting via a dedicated plugin with features like comment approval and email alerts.

"A fully-customizable plugin for Payload CMS to create a collection for comments, reviews, or other user-submitted feedback."
Source
"Implement a comment functionality where everyone can comment without logging in."
Source
"The community discusses challenges and features of Payload, including the need for custom implementations."
Source
Sanity:
Comments Supported

Sanity CMS supports commenting with approval workflows and email notifications for comments. Available on paid plans only.

"Comments for Sanity Studio enables effective collaboration workflows right where the work is done."
Source
"Comments are enabled by default for all paid plans. To enable comments only for specific document types."
Source
"In the end, Sanity is a content platform with a strong API and a configurable CMS that allows for the customization we need to tie these things together."
Source

Multi-tenancy

Find out if the platform supports managing multiple clients or projects within a single account. This is useful for agencies, multi-client or multi-project scenarios.

Payload CMS:
Multi-tenancy Supported

Payload CMS offers multi-tenancy via a plugin that enables hierarchical tenant management, domain mapping, and isolation.

"This plugin sets up multi-tenancy for your application from within your Admin Panel. It adds a `tenant` field to all specified collections."
Source
"This plugin allows multiple tenants to access different resources in the same instance of Payload CMS."
Source
"Payload's Access Control facilitated a multi-tenant, "subsite"-based system."
Source
Sanity:
Multi-tenancy Supported

Sanity supports multi-tenancy allowing multiple authors to manage content across distinct setups.

"Sanity leverages the concept of multi-tenancy to offer a powerful and flexible platform for managing content across multiple projects or 'tenants'."
Source
"Multi-tenancy is a software architecture enabling one application instance to serve multiple customers or 'tenants', offering cost savings and efficient resource usage."
Source

What Developers Say

Hear from developers who've integrated and built on Payload CMS and Sanity about their experiences.

Ease of Integrating Payload CMS:
Medium
Users find Payload CMS has a moderate integration complexity, with some issues noted in documentation and support.
Ease of Integrating Sanity:
Medium
Integrating Sanity CMS can be technical, with some users finding setup slightly complex.

Payload CMS's DX Highlights

What developers love about building with Payload CMS.

Sanity's DX Highlights

What developers love about building with Sanity.

Payload CMS's DX Issues

What developers dislike about building with Payload CMS.

Sanity's DX Issues

What developers dislike about building with Sanity.

Content Modelling

Find out how developers model and manage their content with the platform with key highlights and limitations.

Payload CMS:
Customisable Content Types

Payload CMS supports content modeling with various field types including relationships, arrays, and blocks.

"Payload provides a wide variety of built-in Field Types, each with its own unique properties and behaviors."
Source
"Payload allows parent/child content modelling using a nested docs plugin for hierarchical content."
Source
"Each Collection can have its own unique Access Control, Hooks, Admin Options, and more."
Source
Sanity:
Customisable Content Types

Sanity CMS supports content modeling with flexible data structures and modular attributes.

"Content modeling enables teams to create a flexible content foundation."
Source
"Content modeling is the process of defining the types of content you need, the attributes of each one, and the relationships between them."
Source
"Sanity's schemaless database on Google Cloud offers flexibility in structuring content."
Source

Custom React Components

Find out if the platform supports custom React components to go beyond the basic HTML components for content.

Payload CMS:
Custom React Components Supported

Payload CMS supports custom React components through its admin panel, allowing rich interactive content.

"Payload provides a pattern for you to supply your own React components through your Payload Config."
Source
"You can build completely custom field types in Payload by swapping in your own React components for any field in your app."
Source
Sanity:
Custom React Components Supported

Sanity CMS supports custom React components through its Studio and Component API, allowing rich content creation.

"The Component API lets you customize your editorial experience by overriding different parts of the Sanity Studio with your own components written in React."
Source
"We can do this by leveraging Studio's custom input components, which essentially enables us to visually represent our data structure through React components."
Source
"The tooling for custom input components has been a key focus in the v3 update to Sanity Studio."
Source
"The studio components API allows you to customize the UI of your Sanity Studio."
Source

Full Text Search

Find out if the platform supports full text search across multiple fields to help users find content quickly.

Payload CMS:
Full Text Search Supported

Payload CMS supports full text search through the @payloadcms/plugin-search, enabling advanced search across various fields.

"This plugin generates records of your documents that are extremely fast to search on."
Source
"I would like to create a fulltext search endpoint for one of my collections."
Source
"A plugin for Payload to generate records of your documents that are extremely fast to search on."
Source
Sanity:
Limited Search

Sanity supports basic full text search using GROQ but lacks advanced features like ranked search and wildcard matching.

"Many solutions developed with Sanity require full text search of some sort. Seeing as Sanity is using Elasticsearch under the hood..."
Source
"This post describes a way to use groq to search Sanity for content. This includes searching simple strings and portable text fields..."
Source
"The match operator works on a string field of any length. The function exists within the pt namespace and must be prefixed with pt::."
Source

Starter Kits

Discover starter kits and templates to help you get started with the platform.

Payload CMS:
Available

Payload CMS offers several starter kits, including an Ecommerce and a SvelteKit template.

(Expand section to see a list of Payload CMS templates and starter kits.)

Sanity:
Available

Multiple starter kits and templates for various use cases available.

(Expand section to see a list of Sanity templates and starter kits.)

Pricing & Plans

Compare the prices of Payload CMS and Sanity.

Payload CMS's Pricing
Free
$0 / lifetime
- Completely open source
- Self-hosted
Standard
$35 / month
- MongoDB Atlas serverless DB
- 3GB database storage
- 30GB S3 file storage
- 40GB bandwidth /mo
- 512MB RAM, 1 vCPU
- 50 million serverless RPUs /mo
- One custom domain
- On-demand backup
- Payload-branded email service
Pro
$199 / month
- Dedicated M10 Atlas cluster
- 30GB database storage
- 150GB file storage
- 100GB bandwidth /mo
- 1GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 2 instances
- High-availability compute
- Up to 3 custom domains
- Automatic backups
- White-labeled email service
Custom
$0 / custom
- Any size Atlas database
- Unlimited database storage
- Unlimited file storage
- Unlimited bandwidth
- RAM and CPU scaled to needs
- High-availability compute
- Unlimited custom domains
- White-labeled email service
- Single Sign-On (SSO)
- Enterprise plugins
- 99.9% uptime SLA
Sanity's Pricing
Free
$0 / month
- Up to 20 user seats
- 2 permission roles
- 2 datasets (public only)
- Unlimited content types and locales
- Customizable content workspaces
- Hosted, real-time content database
- Live previews and visual editing tools
Growth
$15 / month
- Up to 50 user seats
- 5 permission roles
- 2 datasets (private or public)
- Pay-as-you-go for higher usage
- Comments and Tasks
- Scheduled publishing
- AI Assist
Enterprise
$0 / month
- Custom # user seats
- Custom roles and access control
- Custom # datasets
- Single sign-on with SAML
- Dedicated support and uptime SLA
- Onboarding program
- Custom historical retention
- Custom usage quota

Compare with other technologies

Looking for a better alternative to Payload CMS & Sanity? Try Wisp.
Wisp is the best solution for blogging. Try it free today!