Substack vs Sanity

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

Substack
Substack
Substack is a user-friendly publishing platform for writers, enabling them to create newsletters and build a subscriber base while retaining full ownership of their content and mailing lists.
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.

At a Glance

Quick overview of key features differences between Substack and Sanity. Click on any feature to read more details.

FeatureSubstackSanity
Basic Features
Hosting Option
Cloud & Self-hosted
Cloud & Self-hosted
Content Modeling
Blog on Subdomain
Blog on Subdirectory
Marketer Experience
Mobile-first Experience
Automatic Content Linking
Automatic CTA Linking
Limited
Engage with Comments
Multi-tenancy
Read all reviews from marketers
Developer Experience
Ease of Integration
Medium
Medium
Custom React Components
Full Text Search
Limited
Starter Kits
(5 kits)
(3 kits)
Read all reviews from developers
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What Users Say

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

Substack's Key Strengths

Read what users love about Substack.

Sanity's Key Strengths

Read what users love about Sanity.

Substack's Key Issues

Read what issues users have with Substack.

Sanity's Key Issues

Read what issues users have with Sanity.

What Marketers & Content Creators Say

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

Substack's Editorial Experience Highlights

What marketers love about Substack's editor.

Sanity's Editorial Experience Highlights

What marketers love about Sanity's editor.

Substack's Editorial Experience Issues

What marketers dislike about Substack'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.

Substack:
Mobile-First Experience

Substack has launched a mobile editor for creating posts directly on iOS and Android devices, offering essential functionalities.

"Today we’re launching a new mobile editor, which allows you to write and publish posts directly from the Substack app for iOS."
Source
"Publishing a new post is available on the Substack iOS and Android apps."
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.

Substack:
No Automatic Content Linking

Substack does not support automatic related blog linking features; manual linking is required.

"If you'd like to share certain parts of a post or allow readers to jump to a specific section of a long post, try adding anchor links."
Source
"Recommendations are a Substack super ... However, I couldn't find evidence of automatic related content linking."
Source
"I was wondering if it is a good idea to create a substack and post my content on there as well and even link the substack post back to my main blog."
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.

Substack:
No Automatic CTA Linking

Substack lacks built-in automatic CTA linking; users rely on external tools for automation features.

"Substack provides no automation tools at all; the author notes this is a primary reason users leave for competitors."
Source
"Substack lacks several critical features needed for effective email marketing, including automated email sequences."
Source
"Users discuss the absence of integrated automation features in Substack, noting their reliance on external tools."
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.

Substack:
Comments Supported

Substack supports commenting on posts from both subscribers and non-subscribers, with moderation options available.

"Navigate to your publication's Settings and click on Community. Slide the toggle to enable comments."
Source
"You can now enable comments on your posts for anyone on your mailing list, even if they’re not a paid subscriber."
Source
"Writers can choose whether to allow comments from everyone or only paid subscribers."
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.

Substack:
No Multi-tenancy

Substack does not support multi-tenancy, focusing primarily on individual writers and content monetization.

"Substack is designed for independent writers and does not offer multi-tenancy features."
Source
"Substack emphasizes individual monetization and audience ownership, lacking multi-tenant capabilities."
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 Substack and Sanity about their experiences.

Ease of Integrating Substack:
Medium
Integration with Substack is feasible but lacks robust features and direct integrations, leading to some workarounds.
Ease of Integrating Sanity:
Medium
Integrating Sanity CMS can be technical, with some users finding setup slightly complex.

Substack's DX Highlights

What developers love about building with Substack.

Sanity's DX Highlights

What developers love about building with Sanity.

Substack's DX Issues

What developers dislike about building with Substack.

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.

Substack:
No Customisable Content Types

Substack does not offer built-in content modelling features or custom content types.

"Substack offers limited customization, focusing more on content rather than design."
Source
"Directus allows you to create custom schemas, manage data, define roles & permissions for your organization."
Source
"Substack doesn’t allow customization for its newsletter formats, thus limiting content modelling."
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.

Substack:
No Custom React Components Supported

Substack does not support custom React components directly in the content editor.

"Over the years, I’ve written and reviewed hundreds of React components for a $1.7B GenAI startup."
Source
"I wanted to display my Substack posts on my website instead of a subscribe link, so I created my own Substack feed component!"
Source
"A customizable React component renders the login page based on the user's UI settings."
Source
"The new components are both fully customizable AND robust."
Source
"I have used substackapi to achieve this Custom Embed Substack Signup Form."
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
Substack:
No Full Text Search

Substack's search functionality is weak, lacking full text search across all content and authors.

"From the Substack web inbox, readers can search keywords to find posts, publications, and people."
Source
"Substack search can’t find posts even when I know the exact title or URL. Search often can’t find people."
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.

Substack:
Available

Substack offers various starter kits and templates for creators.

(Expand section to see a list of Substack 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 Substack and Sanity.

Substack's Pricing
Monthly Subscription
$5 / month
- Includes all posts for paid subscribers only
- Recurring payments processed via Stripe
- 10% platform fee
- 2.9% + $0.30 transaction fees on Stripe
Annual Subscription
$50 / year
- Includes all posts for paid subscribers only
- Recurring payments processed via Stripe
- 10% platform fee
- 2.9% + $0.30 transaction fees on Stripe
Founding Member Plan
$20 / month
- Optional tier for additional support
- All posts for paid subscribers
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 Substack & Sanity? Try Wisp.
Wisp is the best solution for blogging. Try it free today!