Contentful is one of the oldest and most established headless CMS platforms. Launched in 2013, it pioneered the API-first CMS model that the broader industry has since adopted. It is a mature, well-documented platform with a large ecosystem of integrations, a capable editorial interface, and a content delivery infrastructure built for scale. For publishing teams evaluating headless CMS options, Contentful warrants serious consideration — with a clear-eyed understanding of where it excels and where its costs and complexity create friction.

Sanity is a headless CMS built around a principle it calls “structured content” — the idea that content should be modeled as data first, with presentation a separate concern. For publishers whose content is genuinely complex — articles with rich metadata, multiple content types with relationships, content repurposed across channels — Sanity’s approach delivers a level of flexibility that database-backed traditional CMSes struggle to match. It is not the simplest tool in the category, but for the use cases it is designed for, it is among the most capable.