Sanity or WordPress?

For the people who keep a business site up to date. What your team sees when they log in, what can break when they edit, what each costs to run, and how you leave either one.

The short answer

For a new website, Sanity with a custom front end is the better place to edit: content goes into fields that cannot break the design, with live preview and no plugins to update. It is free for up to 20 seats; the Growth plan costs $15 per seat a month and adds Editor and Contributor roles. WordPress is the admin most people already know, on 40.1% of all websites, but 91% of its new vulnerabilities in 2025 were in plugins someone has to keep updated. If your WordPress site works, keep it maintained and plan the move for your next rebuild. We build on Sanity, so weigh that.

By Yannis Spanenburg, founder of Proof of Pixel. Facts checked on 7 October 2026.

Side by side

	Sanity	WordPress
Editing screen	Sanity Studio: forms shaped around your content, such as treatments, team members and FAQs. Real-time co-editing on every plan	The dashboard and block editor most people already know. WordPress runs 40.1% of all websites
Live preview	Live preview and click-to-edit on every plan, once the developer connects the front end	Built in: the editor shows the page close to how it will look, plus a Preview button
Roles	Free: Administrator and Viewer only. Growth adds Editor, Developer and Contributor, who writes drafts but cannot publish	Six built-in roles at no cost, from Administrator to Contributor, who writes but cannot publish
What an editor can break	Content only: design and features live in code, and fields can be required or length-limited	Administrators can install, update and delete plugins and switch the theme from the dashboard
Undo	Earlier versions restorable for 3 days on Free, 90 days on Growth	Every revision kept by default for title, content, excerpt and author; plugin and theme changes are not revisions
Updates	The content platform is run by Sanity, and a Studio it hosts can update itself. Front-end code is updated by your developer	Minor core releases install automatically; plugin and theme auto-updates are opt-in, one by one. Three core security releases between 17 September and 6 October 2026
Security record	SOC 2 Type 2 certified. No published security advisories for its open-source Studio on GitHub	11,334 new vulnerabilities in 2025: 91% in plugins, 9% in themes, 6 in core (Patchstack)
Hosting	Content hosted by Sanity on Google Cloud; the Studio hosted free by Sanity or anywhere; the front end on a static or edge host	A host that runs PHP 8.3 with MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.11, and HTTPS
Cost	Free for up to 20 seats. Growth $15 per seat a month in US dollars, viewers free, no minimum term	The software is free. Hosting from $4 a month on WordPress.com billed yearly, plus premium plugins and upkeep
Speed, real visitors	51.4% of Sanity sites pass Core Web Vitals on mobile (HTTP Archive, August 2026)	48.7% of WordPress sites pass; 36.8% of sites built with the Elementor page builder
Getting content out	One command exports every document, image and file. Managed daily backups are Enterprise only, and the database itself is Sanity's service	The Export screen gives an XML file of posts, pages, comments, fields, categories and users; page-builder layouts depend on their plugin
Languages	Unlimited languages on every plan at no extra charge; AI translation with AI Assist on Growth	Not built in. Plugins such as WPML: its Multilingual CMS plan is €99 with a year of updates
AI features	Content Agent on every plan, with 1,000 AI credits a month: finds, rewrites and translates, and changes nothing until approved	WordPress 7.0 added an AI client: connect a provider, and the AI plugin writes titles and excerpts, makes images and suggests alt text

Checked on 7 October 2026 against Sanity's pricing page and documentation, wordpress.org, WordPress.com and WPML pricing, W3Techs, Patchstack's 2026 report and the HTTP Archive technology report (August 2026 data). Sanity's prices are in US dollars, as its pricing page shows them. Sanity is on far fewer sites, so its speed figure covers 10,075 sites tested on mobile against 2.75 million for WordPress.

Who should pick which

Pick Sanity if

You are building a new site, or rebuilding an old one
Several people edit, and drafts should wait for someone to approve them
Nobody on the team should be able to install a plugin or break a layout
You publish in more than one language

Keep WordPress if

Your current WordPress site works and brings in enquiries
Someone updates core, the theme and every plugin, every month
Your bookings or memberships depend on a plugin with no simple replacement
A rebuild is not due yet: plan it rather than rush it

What your team sees when they log in

WordPress's strength is familiarity. It runs 40.1% of all websites, according to W3Techs, so a new receptionist or marketing assistant has often used the dashboard before, and over 74,000 free plugins in the official directory cover almost any feature. Sanity is on under 0.1% of the sites whose content system W3Techs can identify; most people meet it for the first time on your site.

Sanity Studio is set up for the business it serves. For a dental clinic that means treatments, dentists, opening hours and FAQs, each a form with the right fields; for a law firm, practice areas and lawyers; for an estate agent, listings. Editors fill in content and the front end decides how it looks, so nobody pushes a layout out of shape. Several people can work in the same document and see each other's changes as they type.

The catch: Sanity is only as easy as whoever set it up. A Studio left with raw field names and no preview sends people back to emailing the developer. Ask to try the Studio with your own content before a build is signed off.

Preview, roles and what can break

Sanity's visual editing shows draft changes on the real page as people type, and a click on any text jumps to its field. It is included on every plan, but the developer has to connect it to the front end, so put it in the brief. WordPress previews out of the box.

Roles are where WordPress gives more for free: six built-in roles, including Editor, and Contributor, who can write but not publish. Sanity's Free plan has only Administrator and Viewer, so everyone who edits is an administrator. The Growth plan, at $15 per seat a month, adds Editor, Developer and Contributor, and viewers are free on every plan.

What can break is the bigger difference. A WordPress administrator can install, update or delete plugins and switch the theme from the dashboard, and a revision brings back a post's text but not a plugin or theme change. In Sanity, editors change content only: design and features live in code, fields can be required or limited in length, and earlier versions can be restored for 3 days on Free or 90 days on Growth.

Updates and security

WordPress core is well run and quick to patch. Between 17 September and 6 October 2026 it shipped three security releases: 7.1.1 with 11 security fixes, 7.1.2 for a critical flaw that, under certain server and theme conditions, could let an attacker run code on the server, and 7.1.3 with 7 more. Minor releases like these install automatically by default; plugins and themes update themselves only if someone switches that on, one by one.

The larger exposure is the plugin layer. Patchstack counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, 91% in plugins and only 6 in core. Premium plugins, the paid ones many sites add, had three times as many known exploited vulnerabilities as free ones, and in Patchstack's test of popular hosting companies only 26% of attacks were blocked. Our WordPress vs custom comparison has the rest of the numbers.

Sanity's platform is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and runs on Google Cloud, and its open-source Studio had no published security advisories on GitHub on 7 October 2026. That record comes with far less scrutiny, from a far smaller install base, and a custom front end still has code dependencies your developer keeps current. What it removes is the plugin layer and the database on the server that hosts your site.

What each costs to run

Sanity's Free plan costs nothing for up to 20 seats and 10,000 documents, enough for most clinic, firm or studio sites; its datasets are public, so anything published can also be read through Sanity's API. Growth costs $15 per seat a month in US dollars, billed monthly with no minimum term, so three editors cost $45 a month. It raises the limit to 25,000 documents and adds private datasets, scheduled drafts, comments and AI Assist. A static front end can sit on Cloudflare Pages, where requests to static files are free and unlimited.

WordPress itself is free under the GPL. Hosting starts at $4 a month on WordPress.com billed yearly, and the running costs sit in premium plugins and upkeep. WPML, a common multilingual plugin, costs €99 for its Multilingual CMS plan with a year of updates, and WPML says a site that stops renewing can no longer update it, which puts the site at risk. Add the hours someone spends applying and checking updates every month.

Speed

The content system barely decides speed; the front end does. In the HTTP Archive's August 2026 data, 51.4% of the sites detected as using Sanity passed all three Core Web Vitals on mobile, against 48.7% of WordPress sites. Sites built with the Elementor page builder passed 36.8% of the time. How the front end is built moves the number most, which our WordPress vs custom comparison covers framework by framework.

Getting your content out

Sanity's command line exports a whole dataset as one archive: every document as structured data, with images and files in their own folders. The Studio code is open source under the MIT licence and belongs in your repository. What you cannot take with you is the database: content lives in Sanity's hosted Content Lake, so leaving means importing that export into another system and rewriting the front end's queries. Managed daily backups are an Enterprise feature; on other plans, schedule your own exports.

WordPress's Export screen produces an XML file with posts, pages, custom post types, comments, custom fields, categories, tags and users, and another WordPress site can import it. The lock-in sits in plugins: a page built with a page builder depends on that builder to display, and the settings for forms, SEO and bookings live inside each plugin.

Moving from WordPress to Sanity is routine work. Sanity's own course pulls users, posts, pages, categories, tags and images through WordPress's built-in REST API and converts the HTML into structured content. Keep every old address working with permanent redirects, as our WordPress vs custom page explains.

Languages and AI

WordPress does not support multilingual sites out of the box; its own handbook points to plugins. Sanity charges nothing per language on any plan: a page can exist once per language, or one document can hold every language field by field, and AI Assist on Growth translates whole documents or single fields.

Both now ship AI. Sanity's Content Agent, on every plan with 1,000 AI credits a month, finds content on request (which service pages have no meta description?), rewrites and translates across many documents, and changes nothing until someone approves it. A question costs 4 credits and each action 2. WordPress 7.0, released on 20 May 2026, added an AI client to core: you connect an AI provider, and WordPress's AI plugin writes titles and excerpts, makes and edits images and suggests alt text.

Where we stand

We build new sites on Sanity with a hand-built front end, and we take on existing WordPress sites for rescues and rebuilds. We have no partner link or commission from Sanity, and every figure on this page comes from the sources below.

For a new site, we would put the content in Sanity. For a WordPress site that works, keep it updated with as few plugins as possible, and plan the move for your next redesign rather than rushing it.

Questions about Sanity vs WordPress

Is Sanity easy for clients to edit?

Yes, when it is set up for the business: each kind of content, such as treatments, team members or listings, gets its own form, with live preview on the page. Editors change content, not the layout. A Studio left with raw field names is hard work, so ask to try it with your own content before launch.

Is Sanity CMS free?

For a small site, yes. The Free plan covers up to 20 seats and 10,000 documents with live preview, but only Administrator and Viewer roles, public datasets and 3 days of history. Growth costs $15 per seat a month in US dollars, viewers free, and adds Editor and Contributor roles, 90 days of history and AI Assist.

Is Sanity open source, and can it be self-hosted?

Partly. Sanity Studio, the editor, is open source under the MIT licence and can run on Sanity's free hosting or any host that serves a single-page app. The content itself lives in Sanity's hosted Content Lake on Google Cloud, which you cannot run yourself. WordPress is open source end to end.

Should I move my WordPress site to Sanity?

Not just to switch. If your WordPress site works, is updated every month and brings in enquiries, keep it. Plan the move when a redesign is due, plugins keep breaking, or several people need safer editing. Then rebuild on Sanity with a custom front end and redirect every old URL.

Can I move my WordPress content to Sanity?

Yes. Posts, pages, categories, tags, users and images can be pulled through WordPress's built-in REST API and converted into structured content; Sanity publishes a course on exactly this. Layouts made with a page builder do not carry over and are rebuilt in the new front end.

What happens to my content if I leave Sanity?

You export it. One command downloads every document as structured data with all images and files, and the Studio code stays yours. Because the content database is Sanity's hosted service, a move means importing that export into the new system and rewriting the queries in the front end.

Is Sanity more secure than WordPress?

It has fewer places to attack: no plugins and no database on the server that hosts your site, and the platform is SOC 2 Type 2 certified. WordPress's risk sits in plugins, 91% of the 11,334 new vulnerabilities Patchstack counted in 2025. Sanity gets far less scrutiny, so have every editor sign in with two-factor authentication.

Does Sanity handle several languages?

Yes, with no charge per language on any plan. Pages can exist once per language, or one document can hold every language, and AI Assist on the Growth plan translates documents or fields. WordPress has no multilingual support out of the box and relies on plugins such as WPML.

Headless WordPress or Sanity?

Headless WordPress keeps the WordPress admin, its database and its plugin updates, while plugins that change what visitors see stop working without extra code. You carry the upkeep of both halves. If you are building a custom front end anyway, Sanity takes the PHP server and the plugin layer out of the job.

Can Sanity run my forms and bookings?

No, and it does not need to. Sanity manages content. Contact forms and booking widgets are built into the front end and send enquiries straight to your email, CRM or booking tool, without a form plugin to keep updated.

What AI features do Sanity and WordPress have?

Sanity's Content Agent, on every plan with 1,000 AI credits a month, finds, rewrites and translates content on request and changes nothing without approval; AI Assist comes with Growth. WordPress 7.0 added an AI client to core, and its AI plugin writes titles and excerpts, makes images and suggests alt text, using an AI provider you connect.