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.
