When to choose DatoCMS vs Sanity?

Designed for tech teams that want to move to headless with a CMS that gets out of the way, so they can get straight to the good part - building.

Built for tech teams that don't mind trading some velocity for the luxury of getting full control over every aspect of their CMS.

Built for rapid deployments, so your team can hit the ground running with an optimal setup ASAP.

Every aspect of the CMS can be tweaked, but needs a certain ramp-up time to get everything setup.

Updates and improvements happen automatically, unless they might cause breaking changes - in that case, it's your call.

Needs manual work to upgrade to new versions.

Lay down the perfect groundwork with ease, thanks to the native GraphQL API.

Its native query language, GROQ, is powerful but proprietary and you'll need to learn it. GraphQL is offered only as an alternate option.

Native video streaming that's easy on the wallet, with adaptive outputs for any device.

You'll have to build video streaming from scratch, or wrangle by integrating a 3rd-party provider.

Visual content modeling lets you quickly assemble and fine-tune models without unnecessary complexity.

You'll have to code your schemas from scratch. They're totally customizable, but be ready for the extra developer work that comes with that flexibility.

40+ built-in field validations to keep your data in check and make editing a breeze, no setup neeed.

Expect to put together your own validations using Sanity's building blocks. These checks are only client-side, which might compromise your data integrity.

Validates all existing records with schema changes during migrations, ensuring compliance with the new structure and the validation rules.

Doesn’t enforce validation rules for each field during migrations, resulting in breaking changes if a record is not compliant.

Clean and approachable editing interface, where every role can get involved and be productive from the very first day.

Comes with a stripped-down editing UI within Content Studio that won't meet all your needs, unless you're willing to put in significant development effort for customization.

Set up an intuitive Landing Page Builder with repeatable Blocks, providing editors with a flexible way to mix and match page elements.

Building landing pages is doable with the provided object-types, but the excessive usage of modals limits authors from seeing a full-page view at any time.

Handle localization with ease thanks to native capabilities like per-field localization settings, locale-based publishing, and translator roles.

Lacks built-in localization features - even basic tasks like adding a new locale or localizing a field could disrupt your project.

Connect to external systems and databases using native plugins, or by developing custom plugins to suit specific needs.

Focused on business-wide content centralization through their 'Content Lake' which can be used with sources like ERPs, e-commerce platforms, etc.