Sanity vs Strapi comes up on almost every project where a client wants either full data ownership or a managed content lake — and the right answer genuinely depends on which constraint matters more. I've shipped production projects on both, and in 2026 the two platforms have diverged further rather than converged.

What each platform actually is

Sanity is a hosted content platform. Your documents live in Sanity's Content Lake, queries run over GROQ via a CDN-backed API, and the editing UI (Sanity Studio) is a React app you embed in your own repo or host on sanity.io. You get real-time collaboration, a managed asset pipeline with on-the-fly image transforms, and zero infrastructure to run.

Strapi is an open-source headless CMS you self-host. Content sits in a SQL database you control (PostgreSQL in production, SQLite for local dev). The admin UI is built into the server process. You query via REST or GraphQL. The company monetises through Strapi Cloud (managed hosting) and an enterprise licence, but the core is MIT-licensed and you can run it anywhere.

These are genuinely different bets, not just feature-list variations.

Editor UX: Sanity Studio vs Strapi admin

Sanity Studio is configurable at the code level. You write schema in TypeScript, wire in custom input components, build structure views, and embed live preview via the Presentation plugin. Editors get real-time presence indicators, document history, and hotspot cropping in the browser. The learning curve for non-technical editors is low — it feels closer to Notion than a traditional CMS admin.

Strapi's admin is auto-generated from your content types. It works well for straightforward field-and-collection models, but customising the UI means writing custom admin plugins in React against an internal API that has historically changed between major versions. In 2026 Strapi 5 stabilised a lot of that, but the plugin authoring experience is still more friction than writing a Sanity custom input.

For agencies handing off to marketing teams, Sanity Studio wins on first-day UX. For internal teams who want a predictable CRUD admin without custom code, Strapi's auto-generated forms are fine.

Querying: GROQ vs REST/GraphQL

GROQ is Sanity's query language. It lets you shape the response on the query side — dereference references, project only the fields you need, filter on deeply nested conditions — without round-trips. Once you're used to it, going back to REST feels like writing SQL with no JOIN syntax.

// Fetch a page with its author name and only the image fields needed for next/image
*[_type == "post" && slug.current == $slug][0] {
  title,
  publishedAt,
  "author": author->{ name, "avatarUrl": avatar.asset->url },
  mainImage {
    asset->{ url, metadata { lqip, dimensions } },
    hotspot,
    alt
  }
}

Strapi gives you REST endpoints auto-generated per content type, with a populate query param for relations, and an optional GraphQL plugin. The REST API is approachable for simple models. For deeply nested or cross-referenced content it becomes verbose, and populate=deep on large models is a known performance problem that teams work around with custom controllers.

If your Next.js app has complex content graphs, GROQ's projection model will save you a lot of over-fetching. If your content model is flat collections with simple relations, Strapi's REST is perfectly adequate.

Image pipeline

Sanity's asset pipeline transforms images at the CDN edge. You append ?w=800&fm=webp&auto=format to any image URL and the CDN handles encoding, caching, and serving from the correct edge node. Paired with next/image and a custom Sanity loader, you get WebP/AVIF, responsive sizes, and LQIP blur hashes without running any image processing yourself.

Strapi stores uploads in whatever provider you configure — local disk, S3, Cloudinary, or similar. There's no built-in transform pipeline. If you want on-the-fly resizes you wire in Cloudinary or imgix as a provider plugin, which adds a dependency and a pricing surface. For projects where the client already pays for Cloudinary, this is fine. For greenfield work, it's an extra thing to manage.

Edge: Sanity for image delivery with no extra configuration.

Pricing and lock-in

Sanity's lock-in is real but often overstated. Your content is exportable as NDJSON at any time via sanity dataset export. The actual switching cost is rewriting your queries and remapping your schema — painful but not impossible. The Content Lake does mean you're trusting Sanity's uptime for production reads unless you cache aggressively.

Strapi's self-hosted path gives you complete data sovereignty. You own the Postgres cluster, you control backups, you can read the database directly if the API misbehaves. That matters in regulated industries, for clients with strict data residency requirements, or for teams that have been burned by SaaS price hikes. The trade-off is that you run the infra — patching, scaling, SSL, backups — unless you pay for Strapi Cloud.

When I reach for each one

I default to Sanity when the project has a non-technical editorial team, a rich media-heavy content model, or when the client's budget doesn't include DevOps overhead. The managed pipeline and Studio UX consistently reduce support requests from editors.

I recommend Strapi when the client has an internal DevOps team, a hard requirement to keep content data in their own infrastructure (GDPR jurisdiction, enterprise data policies), or when the content model is simple enough that GROQ's learning curve isn't worth it for a two-week engagement.

Strapi Cloud has improved Strapi's managed story considerably in 2025–2026, but it's still a younger managed offering than Sanity's, and the platform has less headroom for the kind of Studio customisation that agency projects often need at handoff.

Neither platform is universally better. The decision almost always comes down to: who operates the infrastructure, and how complex is your content graph.