Choosing a headless CMS without regret

The tools are all fine. That is the honest starting point. The interesting question is which one your team will still love in eighteen months.

Sanity

Best for editorially rich content, custom studios, and teams who want the model to feel like a product. The tradeoff is that the studio is code, and someone has to own it.

Contentful

Best for teams who want an editor experience that just works and are willing to work within its content model. Scales well, integrates easily, opinionated where it needs to be.

Payload

Best when you want to self-host and keep the CMS close to the app. The model is code, the admin is generated, and you get to keep your database.

A CMS is a promise to the future editor. Do not pick it for the developer alone.

How we decide

We look at who is going to use it every day. If the answer is a marketing team who will not touch the schema, Contentful. If it is a product team who wants the model to grow with them, Sanity or Payload. If uncertain, Sanity, because escaping it later is the least painful.