Pick Strapi if you want to host the content store yourself on a SQL database and keep the Community Edition free. Pick Sanity if you accept a hosted data layer and want a customisable Studio with a clear draft model. Both leave the website, sitemaps, structured data and redirects to your front end.
The short version
Pick Strapi if your developers want to run the content store themselves. It is a Node.js application on a SQL database you control, and the Community Edition is MIT-licensed. Editors get drafts, roles and translation on the free tier, and the paid tiers add live preview, releases and, on Enterprise, staged review.
Pick Sanity if you are happy to rent the data layer and want a Studio shaped around your own content model. Its draft, version and release model is documented clearly, and GROQ lets a developer fetch exactly the fields a page needs. The cost is hosted data and per-seat pricing.
Neither is a website. Both are headless: they store and serve content by API, so the reader-facing site, SEO output and preview route are your developers’ work. This comparison rests on vendor documentation, not an install by us. The full profiles are Strapi and Sanity.
At a glance
| Feature | Strapi | Sanity |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | MIT Expat (Community Edition); code under ee/ has a separate Enterprise licence |
MIT (Studio repository); hosted Content Lake is a commercial service |
| Latest version | 5.57.0 (7 October 2026) | Studio 6.18.0 (6 October 2026) |
| Written in | Runs on Node.js (LTS v22, v24 or v26 per the docs) | Not documented on pages we cite |
| Hosting | Self-hosted on MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL or SQLite | Content hosted by Sanity; no self-hosted Content Lake found |
| Editorial roles/workflow | Author, Editor, Super Admin free; Review Workflows Enterprise only | Admin and Viewer on Free; Editor, Developer, Contributor from Growth; custom roles Enterprise |
| SEO & structured data | Not documented as built in | Not documented as built in |
| Multilingual | 500+ locales, one locale edited at a time | Field-level and document-level approaches |
| Headless/API | REST and GraphQL on all plans | GROQ queries; webhooks |
| Typical cost | Community free; Growth $45/month with 3 seats | Free $0; Growth $15 per seat per month |
| Best for | Teams that want self-hosted control | Teams that want a hosted, customisable Studio |
“Not documented” means the pages we read do not say. It does not mean the feature is absent.
Editorial workflow
Strapi ships three admin roles (Author, Editor, Super Admin) and role-based access control on every plan. Draft & Publish is free. Scheduling is the catch: you schedule by putting an entry in a Release, which needs Growth or Enterprise. Review Workflows, with four default stages and roles that control movement between them, are Enterprise-only, as are Audit Logs.
Sanity separates published, draft and version states, and says drafts and versions are not served to unauthenticated requests. Roles depend on the plan. Free has Admin and Viewer, Growth adds Editor, Developer and Contributor plus comments, tasks and scheduled drafts, and custom roles are Enterprise. Content Releases, which group and schedule changes across documents, are described as available on certain Enterprise plans.
On the free tier Strapi gives you more roles. On paid tiers Sanity gives you comments and tasks sooner. For enforced staged approval, both point you to their top plans.
What each leaves to the front end
Preview is the clearest example. Strapi needs a preview handler in /config/admin.ts and a preview route your developers build, and the free plan offers full-screen preview only. Sanity’s visual editing needs a draft-mode endpoint, stega encoding in the client, an overlay system, Live Content API integration and router integration.
The same applies to everything a reader or crawler sees: site templates, sitemaps, structured data, redirects, canonical tags, titles and feeds. The pages we read for both products describe none of these as built-in features.
Search, structured data and feeds
Treat SEO output as a front-end deliverable in both. Model author, dates, image and meta fields as content, then render Article or NewsArticle JSON-LD, sitemaps and redirects in your framework or CDN. For Google News coverage, read Google’s own documentation rather than a plugin vendor’s.
Sanity’s webhooks fire on create, update and delete and ignore drafts by default, so they suit rebuilds and cache revalidation. For Strapi, we have no verified equivalent to cite here, so confirm how you will trigger rebuilds.
Hosting, performance and security
With Strapi you own the stack: a supported Node.js LTS, a SQL database (no MongoDB, per the docs), file storage and backups. Uploads default to local disk, with Amazon S3 and Cloudinary as official providers. Patching and upgrades are your job.
With Sanity there is no database to run. Reads can use an opt-in API CDN across five regions, and image URLs handle resizing, focal-point crops and formats including WebP and AVIF. The documentation recommends the uncached API for static builds that need the freshest data. The trade is that your content sits with a vendor, so read its terms and export options.
Cost of ownership
Strapi’s Community Edition has no licence fee. The pricing page lists Growth at $45 per month with three seats and $15 per extra seat, and Enterprise at custom pricing. The currency is not stated beside the figures, so confirm it.
Sanity’s Free plan allows up to 20 seats, 2 public datasets and 10k documents. Growth is $15 per seat per month with 25k documents and overage charges. A large archive can pass the document limit, and a big newsroom pays per head. Both also need front-end development and hosting. See the cost guide and licence guide.
Migrating between them
We did not find an official Strapi-to-Sanity or Sanity-to-Strapi migration tool in the documentation we read. Expect a scripted export and import, with content types remodelled by hand and redirects preserved at the front end.
Which should you choose?
- In-house developers who want self-hosting and a free core: Strapi.
- Data must stay on servers you control: Strapi, because Sanity’s Content Lake is hosted.
- You want a heavily customised editing interface and expressive queries: Sanity.
- A large team where per-seat cost is a worry: compare Strapi’s three-seat Growth bundle with Sanity’s per-seat price at your headcount.
- Staged approval on a small budget: neither. Look at the comparison hub for traditional options.
See also Strapi vs Payload, Sanity vs Contentful and the CMS profiles.
Questions people ask
Is Strapi or Sanity easier for editors?
The documentation does not rank them, so we cannot say. Both give editors an admin interface and leave the public site to developers. The bigger difference is setup: Sanity's Studio is configured in code, while Strapi has an admin panel with built-in roles.
Can I self-host Sanity like Strapi?
Not as far as we could verify. Sanity's content lives in its hosted Content Lake, and the MIT-licensed repository is the Studio. Strapi's Community Edition is self-hosted on a SQL database that you run.
Which is cheaper, Strapi or Sanity?
Strapi Community has no licence fee, but you pay for hosting and a database. Sanity's Free plan is $0 with limits, and Growth is $15 per seat per month. Per-seat pricing grows with newsroom size, while Strapi's Growth plan is $45 per month with three seats.
Does either one include a news sitemap or structured data?
The documentation pages we read for both describe neither as a built-in feature. Your front end generates sitemaps, Article or NewsArticle JSON-LD and redirects from fields you model.
Which one has an approval workflow?
Strapi's Review Workflows are Enterprise-only. Sanity lists comments, tasks and scheduled drafts on Growth, with Content Releases on certain Enterprise plans. Neither gives a small paid team enforced multi-stage review without a higher tier.
Sources
- Strapi's Community Edition is provided under the MIT Expat licence; any component residing under an ee/ directory is the Enterprise Edition and is not licensed under MIT Expat. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- The latest Strapi release on GitHub is v5.57.0, published 7 October 2026. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- Strapi supports only Active LTS or Maintenance LTS Node.js versions, listed as v22, v24 and v26. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- Supported databases are MySQL (minimum 8.0), MariaDB (minimum 10.3), PostgreSQL (minimum 14.0) and SQLite 3; Strapi does not support MongoDB or other NoSQL databases. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- The self-hosted pricing page lists Community as free, Growth at $45 per month including 3 seats (+$15 per month per extra seat), and Enterprise at custom pricing. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- On the pricing page, Live Preview and Releases are marked for Growth and Enterprise, Content History is 14 days on Growth, and Review Workflows and Audit Logs are marked for Enterprise only; all plans include REST and GraphQL APIs and role-based access control. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- Review Workflows are available exclusively on the Enterprise plan; the default workflow has four stages (To do, In progress, Ready to review, Reviewed) and each stage has configurable roles allowed to move content into and out of it. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- Draft & Publish is a free feature; entries are Draft, Modified or Published, and scheduled publication is done by including an entry in a Release, which requires the Growth or Enterprise plan. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- Preview needs a preview handler configured in /config/admin.ts and a front-end preview route that the front-end developer builds; the free plan has full-screen preview only, while Live Preview with side-by-side and inline editing is on Growth and Enterprise. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- Strapi provides three built-in admin roles (Author, Editor, Super Admin) and role-based access control is a free feature. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- Strapi's internationalization is a free feature with a pre-created list of 500+ locales; content is managed one locale at a time, and AI translation needs the Growth or Enterprise plan. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- The Media Library is free and supports folders, alt text and captions, cropping with focal point, and responsive image generation; official upload providers are Local (default), Amazon S3 and Cloudinary, with a default maximum file size of 1GB. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- The sanity-io/sanity repository is licensed under the MIT Licence, held by Sanity.io, covering 2016-2026. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- The latest Sanity Studio release on GitHub is v6.18.0, published 6 October 2026. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- Sanity's pricing page lists a Free plan at $0 (up to 20 seats, 2 public datasets, 10k documents), Growth at $15 per seat per month (25k documents, private or public datasets, pay-as-you-go overages) and Enterprise at custom pricing. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- Per the pricing page, Free includes 2 permission roles (Admin, Viewer); Growth adds Editor, Developer and Contributor roles plus comments, task management and scheduled drafts; Enterprise adds SSO, audit trails, an SLA and custom roles. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- Sanity keeps Published, Draft (one per document, ID prefix drafts.) and Version (inside a content release, ID prefix versions.) states; neither drafts nor versions are served to unauthenticated requests, and queries choose a published or drafts perspective. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- Content Releases lets teams group changes across documents and schedule them (ASAP, At Time, Undecided), and the documentation says the feature is available on certain Enterprise plans. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- Visual editing needs front-end work: a draft-mode preview endpoint, stega encoding in the client, an overlay system, Live Content API integration and router integration for click-to-edit. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- Sanity webhooks fire on create, update and delete, ignore draft and version changes by default, and can trigger rebuilds or cache revalidation. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- The Sanity API CDN is an opt-in caching layer across five global regions; cached responses skip rate limiting, and the documentation recommends the uncached API for static builds that need the freshest data. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- Sanity image URLs support resizing, focal-point cropping and format conversion including JPEG, PNG, WebP and AVIF, with auto=format choosing a format by browser. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- Sanity documents two localisation approaches: field-level (one document, many languages, published together) and document-level (one document per language, linked by references, published independently), using plugins such as @sanity/document-internationalization. — source, checked 10 October 2026.
- GROQ is Sanity's query language for filtering, joining across references and returning only the fields requested. — source, checked 10 October 2026.