After building 100+ projects across every major headless CMS, we have strong opinions on when to use each platform. Here's our honest, experience-based comparison of the three most popular options in 2026.
Sanity stands out for developer experience and flexibility. Its GROQ query language is incredibly powerful, the real-time collaboration features are unmatched, and the customizable Studio gives content teams exactly the editing interface they need.
Sanity pricing: generous free tier (500K API requests/month), scales predictably. The pricing model changed in 2025 and is now based on API requests rather than users, making it more affordable for content-heavy sites.
Strapi is the go-to for teams who want full control. As an open-source, self-hosted solution, you own your data and infrastructure entirely. The plugin ecosystem is growing, and the admin panel is intuitive for non-technical content editors.
Strapi's strength is also its weakness: self-hosting means you manage servers, backups, and scaling. For teams with DevOps capabilities, this is fine. For small teams without infrastructure expertise, it adds operational burden.
Contentful is the enterprise choice. It's the most mature platform with the strongest ecosystem of integrations, agencies, and enterprise features (workflows, roles, localization). If you're a large organization with complex content operations, Contentful is battle-tested.
Contentful pricing is the main complaint. It's significantly more expensive than alternatives, especially at scale. The per-user pricing model can balloon costs for large content teams.
Our recommendation matrix: Choose Sanity for custom editorial experiences, real-time collaboration, and developer-friendly projects. Choose Strapi for full data ownership, open-source requirements, and budget-conscious projects. Choose Contentful for enterprise-scale operations with complex workflows.
Regardless of which CMS you choose, the headless approach itself is the right architecture for modern websites. Decoupling content from presentation gives you the flexibility to serve content to websites, apps, digital signage, and future channels from a single source of truth.