Choosing between Sanity, Strapi, and Payload is one of the questions I get most often from teams starting a greenfield Next.js project. All three are legitimate headless CMS options in 2026, but they solve meaningfully different problems. This post is a direct comparison across the dimensions that actually matter in production: pricing, developer experience, schema modelling, image handling, and how hard it is to leave.
Pricing and hosting model
This is the sharpest difference between the three.
Sanity is fully managed SaaS. You pay per seat on the Growth plan (around $15/editor/month at the time of writing) once you exceed the free tier. The CDN, the Studio, the asset pipeline — all hosted by Sanity. There's no infrastructure to run.
Strapi is open-source and self-hosted by default. You run it on a VPS, Railway, Render, or your own Kubernetes cluster. The Community edition is free forever. Strapi Cloud exists and gives you a managed option, but most teams I've seen pick Strapi specifically because they want control over where data lives — data-residency requirements, GDPR, or just cost certainty at scale. If you have 50 editors, Strapi won't invoice you $750/month for seats.
