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08.09.2023

The Best Headless CMS in 2023: Why We Love Sanity.io

Tooling

Sanity Solves All of Our Content Problems

We spend a lot of time extolling the virtues of our CMS-of-choice, Sanity, to clients and potential clients, and nearly equal amounts of time listening to the oohs, ahhs, and “thank you for showing us this!” in the opposite direction.

When we pair with designers, agencies, and companies to bring their brands and products to the web, it’s often that they are unopinionated about tool choices like CMS, web framework, etc. And though we are technology-agnostic as a principle, Sanity is a staple in our recommended toolbox in almost all situations.

We’re now in year 5 of building great sites on Sanity with no end in sight, so rather than continuing to wax on about it in Zoom calls, we wanted to put pen to paper to make the case.

Sanity's Headless Architecture

The long march of technology is relentless – we’ve been at this web development thing for nearly a decade now and in that time the development landscape has shifted countless times in different, unexpected directions.

Over time, it’s proven wise to bet on modular, loosely coupled tools that don’t become useless if an accompanying tool falls out of favor or shuts down. The idea of a headless CMS has been around for a while, allowing developers to pick their own optimal toolkit when working with content. After all, just because Wordpress is chosen as content management system by the client, why should the development team be stuck writing PHP for the foreseeable future? Tools evolve, and headless tools aid in future-proofing your site from future improvements and paradigm changes.

Flexibility in Sanity Structured Content

We’ve all been there, boxed in by our rigid content structure and adding hack on top of hack to get our content to appear just right on the frontend.

Sanity provides an incredible of surface area for developers to customize the CMS to any need the client might have, whether building plugins, custom content inputs, or API integrations.

In our years of working with Sanity, we’ve rarely seen a sticky situation or content structure we couldn’t code our way out of, and we’ve been able to build custom solutions for clients that would never be possible in other CMS environments. Sanity makes building future-proofed solutions for our clients a matter of fact.

In our years of working with Sanity, we’ve rarely seen a sticky situation or content structure we couldn’t code our way out of, and we’ve been able to build custom solutions for clients that would never be possible in other CMS environments.

Asset Management in Sanity

Along with powerful tools to handle text, Sanity makes managing image and video assets a cinch for clients, and offers best in class video capabilities with its tight integration with video platform Mux.

They also offer powerful tools to optimize and performantly load images on the frontend, making it easy for developers to tune site performance to the highest degree for optimal user experience.

Sanity Pricing

It’s understandably difficult to get excited about SaaS pricing, but Sanity continues to provide a ridiculous amount of value for our clients, no matter if they are a small business or large enterprise. Their free tier is legitimately generous, and their pay-as-you-go pricing means that you’re only ever getting charged for the things you use.

We often describe Sanity as “the CMS Built for 2023 and Beyond”, because we believe strongly in their commitment to building the all-in-one content platform of the future.

Sanity Developer Community

Even the best tools can be frustrating to work with if there’s nowhere to turn when you get stuck. Sanity understands this, and along with a robust system of documentation, they foster an impressively active and helpful community on Slack, with a regular cast of support engineers chiming in for developers in a pickle.

Sanity is the Right Fit for Both Editors and Developers

It’s no secret we love working with Sanity, and our clients feel the same way. We often describe Sanity as “the CMS Built for 2023 and Beyond”, because we believe strongly in their commitment to building the all-in-one content platform of the future. With equal attention paid to their indie developers and small businesses as their large enterprise clients, and in creating an open platform, they ensure that everyone in their community is poised to reap the benefits.

Questions or comments? Reach out via email or get in touch.