Best Sanity Alternative for UK Businesses

Sanity has built a strong reputation among developers for good reason. Its GROQ query language, real-time collaborative editing, and deeply customisable Studio interface set it apart from most CMS platforms. The free tier is genuinely usable for small projects, and the developer experience — particularly for teams building with Next.js or SvelteKit — is among the best available. For content-heavy digital products with active editorial teams, Sanity is a serious contender.

The challenge for many UK businesses is that Sanity’s strengths are most fully realised when you have a developer who can write custom Studio components, configure GROQ queries, and manage the schema in code. Without that investment, you end up with a powerful tool used superficially — paying for sophistication you’re not leveraging. Depending on your content model and team structure, alternatives like Strapi, Directus, or even a traditional CMS like WordPress or Craft CMS may deliver more practical value for the money. Xpose, based in Norwich, helps businesses across the UK choose the right CMS for their specific situation rather than defaulting to whichever platform is currently fashionable.

What Sanity does particularly well

The Sanity Studio is genuinely impressive. Unlike most CMS editorial interfaces, the Studio is a React application that developers configure and customise in code. Input components, desk structure, validation rules, and custom workflows can all be tailored to match your team’s exact process. For organisations with complex content relationships — structured documents that reference each other, multi-author approval chains, or rich inline annotations — the Studio can be shaped to fit those requirements rather than forcing your team to adapt to a generic interface.

Real-time collaboration is another standout feature. Multiple editors can work on the same document simultaneously, with changes appearing live, much like Google Docs. For editorial teams producing high-volume content on tight deadlines, this can meaningfully reduce friction. The GROQ query language is also worth mentioning: once developers are comfortable with it, it allows remarkably precise content queries that GraphQL can sometimes make cumbersome.

Where Sanity falls short

Cost is the most common concern. Sanity’s free tier is limited to three users and 10 GB of hosted assets. The Growth plan starts at around $99 per month, and the price scales with the number of users and API requests. For a small UK business with a modest editorial team, those costs accumulate quickly — particularly when comparable functionality is available in self-hosted alternatives for little more than the cost of a VPS.

The developer dependency is a related issue. Because the Studio is configured in code, any change to the content schema or editorial interface requires a developer. Non-technical teams cannot add a new field or restructure a content type without raising a ticket and waiting for development capacity. Self-hosted alternatives like Strapi and Directus provide admin UIs that let non-technical users manage content models directly, which reduces this bottleneck considerably.

When a traditional CMS like WordPress or Craft CMS is the better choice

Headless architecture is not always the right answer. If your website is primarily a marketing site with a blog, a team already comfortable with a traditional CMS, and no requirement to deliver content across multiple channels, a traditional CMS will almost certainly serve you better. WordPress remains the most widely deployed CMS in the world for a reason: it is flexible, well-supported, and has a deep ecosystem of themes, plugins, and developers. Its block editor has matured considerably and is capable of producing sophisticated layouts without custom development.

Craft CMS is worth mentioning for businesses that find WordPress too permissive or too plugin-dependent. Craft is a professionally built, PHP-based CMS with a first-class content modelling system, a polished control panel, and a licensing model that makes it affordable for single-site deployments. Many of the benefits attributed to headless CMSes — structured content, clean APIs, flexible templates — are available in Craft without the overhead of managing a decoupled front-end. Xpose has delivered projects on both platforms and can advise on which fits your team’s workflow and technical capacity.

Our view on Sanity

We are a Norwich agency established in 2015, and we have worked with businesses on both sides of this comparison over the years. Our honest view: the right choice depends on your business, your team and where you want to be in two years — not on which platform is currently the most talked-about.

If you would like a straight opinion on which makes more sense for you — or whether you should leave the decision alone entirely and focus on something that will move the needle more — a free, no-pressure conversation is always available.