Sanity vs Content.One

Let's be fair to Sanity first, because it earns its reputation. It's been rated the #1 headless CMS on G2 for four years running, sits around 4.7 across 900+ reviews, and the developer experience is about as good as the category gets. Schema is defined in TypeScript, GROQ handles complex queries in a single request, real-time collaboration is built in, and Sanity Studio is an open-source React app you can shape into whatever your editors need. For a product team with engineers, that's a strong hand.

The thing to understand is who does the work. Sanity is developer-first by design, and the same flexibility that product teams love is the part a marketing team feels as friction. You define the model in code, you query it with GROQ, and you still build and host your own frontend. Sanity is the content backend and the Content Lake. The frontend, the hosting, and the devops to keep it running are on you. That's normal for headless. It's also a cost and a dependency that never shows up on the pricing page.

Then there's how spend grows. Sanity CMS pricing starts free, moves to Growth at $15 per seat a month, and meters usage on top, API requests, documents, and bandwidth, with overages once you cross the included amounts (Sanity's pricing page has the current numbers). The part that catches enterprise buyers is governance. SSO and SAML, custom roles, and audit logs live on the Enterprise tier. If you want SAML without going full Enterprise, the Growth add-on runs roughly $1,399 a month on its own (per an April 2026 pricing breakdown). For a single marketing site, none of that bites. For a brand running dozens of sites with real access-control needs, it adds up fast.

This is where Content.One is built differently, and it's worth being specific. Content.One includes hosting and global CDN delivery, so there's no separate host to manage or patch. It's designed around federated multisite, so one team runs many sites and brands from a single platform instead of wiring datasets and projects together. It leans on visual editing, generative AI, and a native MCP server, so a marketer can publish a page without filing a developer ticket. And SSO, custom roles, and audit logs sit in the standard product, not behind an Enterprise contract.

Reviews reflect the split. Content.One's reviews currently sit under its former name, Zesty.io, on G2 and Capterra, since the rebrand is still rolling out. On Capterra the recurring themes are ease of use for non-developers and hands-on support, with one customer saying the team "goes above and beyond." On the Sanity side, the praise is consistent on developer experience and collaboration, and the most common caveat is just as consistent: you need a developer to get the most out of it, and GROQ has a learning curve.

None of this makes Sanity the wrong call. If your team is engineering-led and you want the most flexible content model in the category, Sanity is a genuinely excellent choice, and its AI direction with Content Agent and the MCP server is ahead of most of the field. The honest decision is about who's publishing. If it's developers shipping through APIs, Sanity fits. If it's marketers running a lot of sites without waiting on engineering, the included hosting, federated multisite, and no-ticket publishing in Content.One tend to matter more. (Weighing the other big headless name too? Here's Contentful vs Content.One.)