Since 2008, we've worked with hundreds of clients, creating, managing, and innovating with a handful of strong CMS options. We’ve learnt the hard way what each CMS excels at and where it could let you down.
We’re in an exciting period of rapid improvement for Headless CMS’, and it’s important to choose one that will keep delivering year after year, and that’s enjoyable to use.
Features like real-time multiplayer collaboration, visual editing, and live previews are now table stakes, and choosing or using a CMS that can’t do that is a massive detriment to your team and your organisation.
Getting straight to the point
We’re consistently blown away by SanityCMS, and passionately recommend it as the best-in-class CMS for almost all Headless use cases. And with its renewed vision to be your full Content Operating System, it has tools for all members of your org that sync seamlessly for a delightful experience.
What’s more, Sanity has been rated best headless CMS for Small Business, SME’s and Enterprise, several years in a row: https://www.g2.com/categories/headless-cms
Whether you’re a global organisation with marketing teams spread across the world; an e-commerce platform with multiple sales channels; a media and publishing organisation with numerous content channels; or a non-profit running campaigns requiring micro-sites, newsletters and socials; SanityCMS handles these with ease.
Find out more about how we work with it here: https://www.hexdigital.com/specialism/sanity-cms-agency
So how exactly did we get to this recommendation?
We’ve worked with so many CMS options—building from scratch, handling maintenance of, and in worst cases taking on recovery projects for them—so we know what a solid, stable, and enjoyable CMS looks like.
We’ve broken down our experience into several key feature sets and rated each CMS for their ability in these areas:
- Editorial Experience
- Developer Experience
- Governance
- Extensibility
- Community and Eco-system
- Security
- Cost
Editorial Experience
There’s a lot that goes into an editorial experience for a CMS. The very basic expectations are constantly growing as the sector innovates, and what you should expect as a minimum is far greater than before.
Table stakes for your CMS now include:
- A live preview that instantly updates as you type
- Click-to-edit, letting you navigate your website as usual, and click on whatever text, image, or content you want to change
- The freshest content served to all users immediately on publish, and the ability to schedule when that content goes live
- Concise and flexible SEO functionality to guide you to do everything you need to rank highly
- Content insights and pre-flight checks, letting you know if you have any broken links or other issues before publishing the content
- Internationalisation, Localisation, and Personalisation tools that are easy to use, without requiring a Frankenstein’s monster of plugins, and the maintenance that comes with it
Out of the box, Sanity provides one of the best editing experiences we’ve seen. Live-as-you-type previews and click-to-edit functionality is an absolute dream. The only CMS that comes close in this regard is Payload. So if you’re a global organisation with worldwide editorial teams, you couldn’t do much better than to help manage your content.
WordPress scored our lowest here, as the editing experience is clunky and dated, even with the block editor. Modern headless CMS have been designed from the ground-up without the bloat of having to support older versions of WordPress.
Developer Experience
While the Editorial Experience is for your editors, the Developer Experience covers both how much your design and development teams will enjoy working with the CMS, but also how fast and robust your website development can be.
A CMS that’s not built from the ground-up for Headless, or one with an API that’s challenging to use or lacking good documentation, will constantly slow you down. Conversely, we’ve seen people switch to a powerful Headless CMS and find their development cycles go from weeks to days. It really blows people away how much can get done quickly with a powerful CMS.
Lastly, we’re also looking at the ease of making websites performant. User’s want the freshest content, but development needs to ensure content is served quickly and at minimal bandwidth. How well the CMS can marry these two requirements together is important in our scoring.
With the Developer Experience, our scores considered:
- The ease of making standard additions and updates, like changing the content types
- The ability to modify content in bulk, such as migrating content to new fields or modify URLs across a whole content type
- The ease of integrating with the CMS, to use it on the Frontend, as well as the ability to utilise the more advanced functionality on your website, like click-to-edit and visual editing
- The quality of documentation provided by the CMS
- The ease to cache content, and surgically invalidate just what’s changed, immediately
- How easy it is to modify the CMS, and maintain those modifications across new versions
Sanity and Payload both get nearly top marks here, with intuitive customisation and development via code. They excel in their integrations with Frontends, having numerous examples of integrations and extensive documentation to cover all needs. Sanity also offers extremely powerful caching that can update immediately when content has changed.
WordPress’s API is more of a bolt-on than a first class citizen, and struggles to keep up with the modern standard for a Headless CMS. We see it lagging behind, having presentational styles baked in with content, causing a headache when serving content to multiple channels.
Governance
This category is particularly important for the Enterprise and non-profit organisations out there. We’re looking at tooling like Single Sign-On, audit logs, version history and control, as well as monitoring, logging, and the ability to manage the platform’s governance as a whole.
Both Sanity and Contentful score highly in this regard, having a suite of tools aimed at Enterprise users to ensure they can handle what is required. Prismic comes in the lowest, missing a small number of these crucial elements for Enterprise customers.
Extensibility
With closed-source CMS options—that is, where you can’t edit the underlying code yourself—you’re limited to the functionality and customisability provided by the CMS. Open source options allow you to create your own version, modifying the CMS based on what your editors, your developers, and your business need.
With extensibility, we’re looking at the ability to create new functionality or modify existing functionality, without putting in a support request that might one day be added to their backlog.
Examples include the ability to create custom integrations for importing or exporting localised content to a spreadsheet or other formats; creating new field types for your business based on your internal needs; or creating dashboards within the CMS that pull data about each article from an analytics platform to show while editing.
Sanity’s built on extensibility, boasting near infinite customisability. They have struck a solid balance between customisability and out-of-the-box features, providing a full, turn-key editing studio that can also be entirely replaced, and everything in-between.
As an open-source platform, this is also WordPress’ strength. All the code is available to your developers, allowing them to build anything. However, as we’ve seen from the Developer Experience, while it can be done it’s not exactly quick or easy.
As closed source applications, Contentful, Storyblok, and Prismic get low scores here, being locked into what is provided by the CMS platform itself, and minimal other customisations.
Community and Ecosystem
The web development industry has a super power that’s rarely seen outside this industry: altruistic collaboration on a global scale. The web is built using code that tens of thousands of developers write and publish for free, called open-source code. Without these libraries of code, building websites would cost 100x more, and be much less feature rich.
Each software has a pocket of community and its own ecosystem of open source code. It may also have a similar ecosystem of paid plugins, providing features to your website and CMS at a one-off or monthly cost.
When considering your CMS, this ecosystem should also be considered. Will you need to build all your features from scratch, or are there open- or closed-source add-ons and plugins that can manage some of this functionality for you.
Our scores reflect both the expanse and quality of the code ecosystem and the community that backs it.
WordPress is known for its wide community and expansive list of plugins, though do be prepared to pay several hundred pounds in yearly licenses for plugins that are mandatory for any good WordPress website (such as Advanced Custom Fields and Gravity Forms).
As expected, some of the closed-source options come in with lower scores here, as there is less available to use due to the nature of not being extensible.
Security
Security is a hot topic for all the CMS platforms, and should also be front of mind for any organisation or founder when choosing a platform.
Thankfully, all platforms boast exceptional security, with numerous certifications and standards that they meet.
Special care should be taken when using a CMS that is self-hosted, such as Payload, WordPress or Statamic—as you’ll be self-hosting this, you’ll be responsible for the actual security of your application and your server. When using these platforms, ensure your team is fully knowledgable and certified in securely hosting and managing web applications, to avoid any nasty surprises.
Cost
Lastly, we’ve got to look at the cost. An all-signing, all-dancing CMS that blows your socks off isn’t going to be any use if it will cripple your cashflow.
While WordPress is often thought of as “free”, you’ll still need to consider the costs of hosting, securing and maintaining the application, as well as the team to do that. It also requires paid versions of plugins to make it usable, which may be unexpected costs. These costs are similar for all self-hosted options, such as Statamic and Payload. Statamic also requires a paid license for the core platform.
Payload has the highest score here. It comes at no cost to use, but does require a team to setup hosting, secure it, and maintain it.
With the fully managed options, this cost is covered in your monthly license. And of all the fully managed options, Sanity comes out slightly cheaper.
And if you’re a non-profit, you’ll benefit from Sanity’s completely free non-profit plan, which would make Sanity the cheapest out of all the options!
---
Switching to SanityCMS is areimagining of what your CMS can be. If you're ready to embrace a modern CMS for your next Headless project, and unlock a new level of content management experience, then get in touch with Hex and see what we can do for you.