7 Best Headless CMS in 2026 (Tested & Compared)

7 Best Headless CMS in 2026 (Tested & Compared)

The best headless CMS in 2026 depends on your use case. Payload CMS is our top choice for Next.js teams that want to own the application and database. Sanity leads when a managed content platform and flexible editorial tooling matter more than self-hosting. Strapi wins for a mature open-source ecosystem, Contentful suits enterprise content operations, and Storyblok excels at visual editing.

Every vendor blog ranking headless CMS platforms puts itself at no. 1. We have a different bias: Techsy ran its publishing operation on Sanity, then migrated the production site to a self-hosted Payload instance in July 2026. As of August 3, our public blog sitemap contains 5,237 localized URLs across 23 languages, grouped into 238 live article families. We operate Payload ourselves; none of the vendors in this ranking paid for placement.

Quick Summary: Best Headless CMS at a Glance

The best headless CMS platforms in 2026 span from fully open-source self-hosted options like Strapi and Payload to enterprise SaaS platforms like Contentful, with pricing ranging from completely free to $81,000 per year. This table gives you the full picture at a glance.

Our ranking methodology combines production operation of Sanity, a full Sanity-to-Payload migration, hands-on API and content-model evaluation, official documentation, and pricing checked against vendor pages. The migration forced us to test the parts demos skip: media reuse, tenant-scoped relationships, localized slugs, canonical groups, scheduled publishing, and verifying 23 sibling documents after every release. We approached this the same way we approached our Supabase vs Firebase comparison: use the tools, document what broke, then write the verdict.

What Is a Headless CMS? (And Why It Matters in 2026)

A headless CMS is a content management system that separates the content backend (where you create and store content) from the frontend (where it gets displayed). Instead of a monolithic system like traditional WordPress where the CMS controls both your content and your templates, a headless CMS delivers content through an API to any frontend, React, Next.js, Astro, a mobile app, even a smart fridge if you're feeling ambitious.

Think of it like a restaurant kitchen. A traditional CMS is a kitchen attached to one dining room. A headless CMS is a kitchen that delivers meals to any dining room, food truck, or catering event through a pickup window (the API).

Why does this matter now? The headless CMS market is projected to grow from $973 million to $7.1 billion by 2035, at a 22.6% CAGR according to Future Market Insights. Enterprises are shifting to omnichannel delivery, the same product description needs to appear on your website, mobile app, in-store kiosk, and voice assistant. A traditional CMS can't do that without ugly workarounds.

The tradeoff is real, though. You get more flexibility, but you also get more setup work. There's no "install WordPress and pick a theme" simplicity. You're building your own frontend. For many teams, that tradeoff is absolutely worth it. For others, especially small businesses without developers, a traditional CMS is still the right call.

How We Evaluated Each Headless CMS

We scored each CMS across 8 criteria. We weighted multilingual support and migration control heavily because we run a 23-language content pipeline. Your priorities may differ, so treat the scores as a decision aid rather than a universal league table.

1. Developer experience, setup time, documentation quality, TypeScript support, SDK maturity
2. Content editor UX, visual editing capabilities, real-time collaboration, learning curve for non-technical editors
3. API flexibility, REST, GraphQL, custom query languages (like Sanity's GROQ), response times
4. Multilingual/i18n support, locale management, translation workflows, RTL language support
5. Pricing and free tier generosity, what you actually get before paying, pricing transparency
6. Self-hosting and deployment options, can you run it on your own infrastructure? What's the DevOps overhead?
7. Ecosystem and community, plugins, integrations, GitHub activity, npm downloads, Stack Overflow answers
8. AI features, content generation, image handling, workflow automation, LLM integration

1. Sanity, Best for Developer Flexibility and Structured Content

Sanity is a schema-as-code CMS with a custom query language (GROQ), a fully customizable React-based editing Studio, and one of the most generous free tiers in the headless CMS market. It gives developers complete control over content modeling, querying, and the editorial interface.

Disclosure: Techsy used Sanity in production before migrating to Payload in July 2026. That gives us more evidence than a trial account, but it also means our assessment reflects an engineering-led publishing workflow rather than a marketing team building visual pages.

Why Sanity Still Ranks Near the Top

In our experience, Sanity's biggest strength is content modeling flexibility. You define your schemas in JavaScript or TypeScript, commit them to Git, and deploy changes through your normal CI/CD pipeline. When we needed to add chartBlock and inlineImage types to our content schema six months in, it took about 30 minutes, schema change, deploy, done. Try adding a custom block type to Contentful's content model that quickly.

GROQ (Graph-Relational Object Queries) took about a week to learn, but once it clicked, querying content became genuinely enjoyable. Here's how we query multilingual content in our pipeline:

// Querying multilingual content with GROQ
const posts = await client.fetch(`
  *[_type == "post" && language == $lang]{
    title, slug, excerpt,
    "author": author->name
  }
`, { lang: 'en' })

The real-time collaboration in Sanity Studio is excellent, multiple editors can work on the same document without conflicts. And the free tier includes 20 seats, which is more than enough for most teams.

Where Sanity Falls Short

GROQ syntax has gotchas that'll trip you up. The difference between -> (dereference) and . (property access) is subtle, and error messages aren't always helpful. New team members consistently struggled with this during their first week.

There's no built-in visual page builder. If your marketing team expects Squarespace-like drag-and-drop page building, Sanity isn't it, look at Storyblok instead. Studio customization is powerful but requires React knowledge, which adds to the learning curve for backend-focused teams.

Pricing: Free (20 seats, generous API limits), Growth at $15/user/month, Enterprise custom.

Verdict: Sanity wins if your team has frontend engineers who want full control over content modeling. Skip it if your content editors need a drag-and-drop page builder.

2. Payload CMS, Best for Next.js Teams

Payload CMS is a TypeScript-native, open-source CMS that can live inside a Next.js application or run as a separately deployed service. Its Local API removes network calls when the CMS and application share a runtime; its REST and GraphQL APIs support separated deployments. Techsy uses the latter shape: a self-hosted Payload service at cms.techsy.io supplies the public frontend.

This is the headless CMS that made the biggest splash in 2026, and honestly, it deserves the hype. Payload 3.0 cut dependencies from 88 to 27, and the local API means your content queries happen in-process, no network latency, no API rate limits.

What Makes Payload Different

The schema-as-code approach will feel familiar if you've used Sanity, but Payload's TypeScript integration goes deeper. Your content types generate full TypeScript types automatically, no any types leaking through your codebase.

// Payload config — schema-as-code in TypeScript
import { buildConfig } from 'payload'

export default buildConfig({
  collections: [
    {
      slug: 'posts',
      fields: [
        { name: 'title', type: 'text', required: true },
        { name: 'content', type: 'richText' },
        { name: 'status', type: 'select', options: ['draft', 'published'] },
      ],
    },
  ],
})

The Lexical-based rich text editor is solid, live preview works with React Server Components, and version 3.81.0 (April 2026) added built-in LLM eval support for code generation. Payload also went framework-agnostic, it now works with Remix, Astro, and SvelteKit, not just Next.js.

What Our Sanity-to-Payload Migration Actually Tested

We moved the entire Techsy blog to Payload in July 2026 rather than evaluating it in a sandbox. The live result is measurable: 238 article families currently resolve into 5,237 localized URLs, their images load from media.techsy.io, and the public pages no longer reference Sanity's CDN.

The difficult work was relational, not editorial. Authors and categories had to be resolved inside the correct Payload tenant. English had to publish first so every translation could store the canonical post's integer ID. Media uploads needed filename-aware reuse to avoid duplicating thousands of assets. After each multilingual publish, we had to verify that all 23 documents shared one translation group and that every body survived conversion.

Payload gave us database ownership, TypeScript-native configuration, and a publishing API we could debug end to end. It did not remove operational work. We now own authentication, backups, media storage, tenant isolation, revalidation, and the failure modes between them. That trade is why Payload is our pick for an engineering team already committed to Next.js, not a blanket recommendation for every content team.

Where Payload Falls Short

The ecosystem is younger than Strapi's. Fewer plugins, fewer community tutorials, fewer Stack Overflow answers when you get stuck. If you're not comfortable reading source code to solve problems, that's a real consideration.

And despite the framework-agnostic push, the DX is still best with Next.js. Using it with Astro or SvelteKit feels like a second-class citizen right now.

Pricing: 100% free and open source (MIT license). No paid tiers for self-hosted. Payload Cloud hosting is available for managed deployment.

Verdict: Payload is the clear winner if you're already building with Next.js. It removes the CMS/app boundary entirely. Skip it if your team doesn't use React or prefers a managed SaaS with dedicated support.

3. Strapi, Best for Self-Hosted Open Source

Strapi is the most widely-adopted open-source headless CMS with over 60,000 GitHub stars, a mature plugin marketplace, and both REST and GraphQL APIs out of the box. If data sovereignty and self-hosting are your top priorities, Strapi is the safest bet.

You can run Strapi on any $5-20/month VPS, Railway, Render, or Fly.io all work, and own your data completely. No vendor lock-in, no API call limits, no surprise bills. That's the pitch, and it genuinely delivers.

Strapi 5 and the Current State

Strapi 5 brought improved content versioning, better TypeScript support, and a cleaner API. The admin panel is polished enough for non-technical editors, which is a real advantage over Payload's more developer-focused interface.

The plugin marketplace is where Strapi pulls ahead of newer alternatives. Need SEO analysis? There's a plugin. Email integration? Plugin. Custom field types? Plugin. You won't find this ecosystem depth with Payload or Directus yet.

Where Strapi Falls Short

Admin panel customization is more limited than Sanity Studio. You can extend it, but you're working within Strapi's framework rather than building from scratch. Content modeling through the admin UI is convenient but less flexible than Sanity's or Payload's schema-as-code approach.

Self-hosting also means self-managing. Backups, security patches, scaling, that's on you. Strapi Cloud removes this burden starting at $18/month, but the self-hosted version remains free.

The i18n plugin works, but its workflow is less flexible than the document relationships we used in Sanity and now maintain in Payload. At 23 languages, automation and post-publish sibling verification matter more to us than the convenience of editing translations in one admin view.

Verdict: Strapi is the safest open-source bet. Choose it if data sovereignty and self-hosting are non-negotiable. Skip it if you need deep schema customization or want a fully managed experience without DevOps.

4. Contentful, Best for Enterprise Content Operations

Contentful is the original headless CMS, the platform that popularized the API-first approach to content management. It's battle-tested, well-documented, and trusted by companies like Spotify, Vodafone, and Chanel for large-scale content operations.

But "enterprise-grade" comes with enterprise pricing, and that's where Contentful loses points for most teams reading this comparison.

What Contentful Does Well

The content modeling UI is genuinely excellent. Non-technical editors can understand and work with content types, and the editorial workflow (drafts, scheduling, approval chains) is more mature than any other platform on this list. If you have a content operations team of 10+ editors, Contentful handles the coordination better than anyone.

Documentation is thorough. The REST API is rock-solid. The ecosystem of integrations (Netlify, Vercel, Gatsby, Next.js) is the largest of any headless CMS. You won't struggle to find tutorials, starter templates, or hiring candidates who know Contentful.

The Pricing Problem

Here's where it gets painful. The free tier gives you 10 users and 100,000 API calls, sounds fine until you realize that each locale counts toward your content entry limits. For a multilingual site, you burn through those limits fast.

The first paid tier is $300/month (Lite). For a startup or small team, that's a hard sell when Sanity's Growth plan starts at $15/user/month and Strapi is free to self-host. Enterprise pricing ranges from $33,000 to $81,000 per year.

GraphQL is available but read-only, you can't use it for content mutations. And migrating away from Contentful is notoriously painful due to its proprietary content model format.

Verdict: Contentful is the safe enterprise pick with big-company budgets. Skip it if you're a startup, $300/month for the first paid tier is steep when Sanity and Strapi start free.

5. Storyblok, Best for Visual Editing and Marketing Teams

Storyblok is the headless CMS with the best visual editor on the market. If you've ever watched a marketer struggle with a developer-focused CMS and thought "there has to be a better way," Storyblok is probably that better way.

Our standalone Storyblok guide covers its component schema, preview setup, localization model, and implementation trade-offs in more depth than this ranking can.

The component-based visual editor lets non-technical users build and edit pages in a live preview, dragging components around, editing text inline, and seeing changes in real time. No code required from the marketing side.

Where Storyblok Shines

The sweet spot is marketing-heavy websites where content editors need autonomy. Think landing pages, campaign microsites, corporate websites with frequent content updates. The developer sets up the components once, and the marketing team assembles pages from those building blocks.

Real-time visual preview works across frameworks, Next.js, Nuxt.js, Astro, SvelteKit. The editor experience is genuinely impressive. I've seen non-technical team members building pages within 30 minutes of their first login.

Where Storyblok Falls Short

The component architecture requires thoughtful upfront planning. If you design your components poorly, you end up with a rigid system that's harder to change than a traditional CMS. This isn't Storyblok's fault exactly, it's the nature of component-based systems, but it's a real risk for teams that skip the architecture phase.

Pricing scales with users and locales. The Growth plan at ~$99/month includes 5 users and 4 locales. If you need 10+ locales for multilingual content, costs climb quickly. For context, Sanity's free tier gives you unlimited locales.

Verdict: Storyblok wins for teams where marketers and editors need to build pages independently. Skip it if your developers want full code-level control over content modeling.

6. WordPress (Headless), Best for Migration from Traditional WordPress

WordPress powers 43.6% of all websites, yet none of the top headless CMS comparison articles even mention it. That's a massive blind spot, because many developers searching for "best headless CMS" are coming from WordPress and need a migration path, not a complete rewrite.

For the migration architecture, caching model, and plugin limitations, read the full headless WordPress guide.

Headless WordPress means using the WordPress backend (admin panel, content management, plugins) while replacing the PHP frontend with a modern stack like Next.js, Astro, or any framework that consumes APIs. Content is delivered via the built-in WP REST API or the WPGraphQL plugin.

When Headless WordPress Makes Sense

You've got a large existing WordPress site. Your editors know WordPress. Your SEO rankings are tied to existing URLs. A full migration to Sanity or Strapi means content migration, URL mapping, editor retraining, and SEO risk. Headless WordPress lets you modernize your frontend incrementally while keeping the backend your team already knows.

The plugin ecosystem is unmatched, ACF (Advanced Custom Fields), Yoast SEO, WPML for multilingual, these all still work with headless mode. And hiring WordPress developers is easy compared to finding Sanity or Payload specialists.

The Honest Take

WordPress wasn't designed to be headless. The REST API is a bolt-on, not a first-class feature. Response times are slower than purpose-built headless CMS platforms. Plugin conflicts with headless mode are common, some plugins assume a PHP frontend exists. The security surface area is larger since you're still running a full WordPress installation.

If you're comparing TypeScript vs JavaScript for your new frontend stack, keep in mind that WordPress's REST API returns untyped JSON. You'll need to add your own type definitions, unlike Payload which generates TypeScript types automatically.

WordPress headless is a migration strategy, not a destination. It's the bridge that lets you go headless without rewriting everything on day one.

Verdict: WordPress headless is the right move if you have an existing WP site and need to go headless incrementally. Don't start a greenfield project with headless WordPress.

7. Directus, Best for Database-First Teams

Directus is an open-source data platform that wraps any existing SQL database, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, MariaDB, MS SQL, or Oracle, with an instant REST and GraphQL API plus an admin UI. Point it at your database and you have a CMS.

Our Directus implementation guide goes deeper on schema introspection, permissions, extensions, and deployment.

That database-first philosophy is what sets Directus apart from every other platform on this list. Your database schema is the source of truth, not a proprietary content model. If you stop using Directus tomorrow, your data stays exactly where it is, in the same structure, fully accessible through standard SQL.

Where Directus Fits

The ideal Directus user already has a database with content in it and wants CMS capabilities on top. Maybe you have a PostgreSQL database powering an internal tool and you want a nice admin panel for non-technical team members. Maybe you're tired of building CRUD interfaces by hand. Directus gives you that instantly.

The auto-generated REST and GraphQL APIs are solid. The permission system is flexible, role-based, field-level, with custom access rules. Cloud hosting starts at $99/month, but self-hosting is free and straightforward.

Where Directus Falls Short

Directus is more of a data platform than a content-focused CMS. Content modeling features, rich text editing, media management, content preview, are less polished than Sanity, Contentful, or Storyblok. The community is smaller than Strapi's, which means fewer plugins, fewer tutorials, and more source-code reading when you hit edge cases.

Visual editing is basic. If your primary need is building and managing editorial content, Directus feels utilitarian compared to the content-first platforms.

Verdict: Directus is the smart choice if you already have a database and want CMS capabilities on top. Skip it if you're starting from scratch with content-first needs.

Headless CMS Pricing Comparison (2026)

Headless CMS pricing ranges from completely free (self-hosted open source) to $81,000/year for enterprise tiers. The biggest surprise for most teams isn't the sticker price, it's the hidden costs of API call limits, locale restrictions, and user seat caps that push you into higher tiers faster than expected.

The cheapest headless CMS is the one you self-host. Strapi, Payload, WordPress, and Directus are all free to run on your own infrastructure. The real question is whether your team can handle the DevOps overhead, server maintenance, backups, security updates, scaling. A $5/month VPS plus 2 hours of monthly maintenance might cost less than Sanity's $15/user/month, or it might cost more when you factor in engineering time.

For teams evaluating their AI tools for startup tech stacks, consider that the CMS is often the most expensive SaaS tool after your cloud provider. Choosing an open-source self-hosted option can free up budget for AI tooling.

How to Choose the Right Headless CMS (Decision Framework)

Choosing the right headless CMS comes down to three questions: who's editing the content, where is it being delivered, and what does your team already know? This decision framework maps your specific needs to the best platform.

A couple of nuanced scenarios the table doesn't cover. If you need multilingual support for 5+ languages, narrow your shortlist to Sanity and Payload, they give you the most programmatic control over locale workflows. If you're a solo developer building a blog or portfolio, Strapi self-hosted on a cheap VPS is probably the most pragmatic choice. And if your CEO insists on a "no-code" editing experience, Storyblok is the only platform on this list that truly delivers it.

What We Learned Migrating a 23-Language Pipeline from Sanity to Payload

Sanity was the first production home of our multilingual pipeline. We later expanded from 10 to 23 languages and moved the live corpus to Payload. The pipeline uses file-based handoffs for research, briefs, writing, validation, translation, and publishing; the CMS is the final delivery layer rather than the source of editorial truth. That architecture made the migration possible without rewriting every article.

Schema Decisions That Saved Us

We chose document-level i18n over field-level localization. Each language gets its own document rather than storing every translation inside one record with locale-specific fields. We preserved that model during the Payload migration because it had already proved its value in Sanity.

Why? Document-level i18n means each translation can have its own slug, publication status, revision history, and repair cycle. When an Arabic document needs an RTL-specific correction, we can update it without modifying the other 22 languages. The cost is referential integrity: every sibling must retain the right canonical and translation-group relationship.

Schema-as-code saved us when we needed to add chartBlock and inlineImage block types six months into production. We wrote the schema, committed to Git, deployed, and the new types were available across all languages immediately. With a UI-based content model like Contentful's, that kind of schema migration involves clicking through admin panels and hoping you didn't miss a field.

What Broke

GROQ's learning curve was steeper than we expected. The first week, our team produced queries that technically worked but were wildly inefficient, fetching entire document trees when they only needed two fields. The Sanity documentation is good but doesn't cover performance optimization patterns well.

Asset management at scale was one reason the migration became more involved than a content export. We had to preserve shared hero images, map inline assets, and prevent duplicate uploads while moving delivery to our own media domain. Payload made the storage path ours, but we still had to build the reuse and verification logic.

We also integrated MCP with our pipeline for automated publishing, you can read more about the protocol in our MCP guide. Structuring the prompts and agent workflows for consistent multilingual output required significant context engineering. It works well now, but the setup took several weeks of iteration.

The Honest Assessment

If we were building a marketing site with heavy visual page-building needs, we would probably pick Storyblok. If we wanted a managed structured-content platform without owning CMS infrastructure, Sanity would remain on the shortlist. For Techsy's current use case—an engineering-owned Next.js stack, 23 language documents per article, and a custom publishing pipeline—Payload gives us the control we were willing to operate ourselves.

Multilingual and Localization Support Compared

Multilingual support is the most under-discussed factor in headless CMS comparisons. If you're building for multiple languages, this table will save you hours of research. We tested the workflow first with 10 languages, then expanded and migrated it to 23, including Arabic RTL and Japanese, Korean, Ukrainian, Greek, and Traditional Chinese scripts.

If multilingual is critical to your project, Sanity and Payload give you the most programmatic control. Both support API-driven translation workflows that you can automate with scripts or AI tools. Storyblok's locale limits on lower tiers — 4 locales on the Growth plan, get expensive fast if you're targeting more than 4 languages.

Contentful's free tier only includes 2 locales, and each additional locale counts toward your content entry limits. A 23-language setup like ours requires a careful enterprise quote before Contentful can stay on the shortlist.

WordPress's multilingual story depends entirely on plugins, WPML costs $99/year minimum, and Polylang's free tier is limited. Neither integrates as cleanly as native i18n built into Sanity or Payload.

FAQ, Headless CMS Questions Answered

What is the best headless CMS in 2026?

Payload CMS is our best headless CMS pick for engineering-led Next.js teams that want self-hosting and database ownership. Sanity is the stronger managed choice for flexible structured content and a customizable editorial studio. Strapi leads for teams prioritizing a mature open-source ecosystem. The right choice depends on your stack, operating appetite, and whether editors need visual page-building tools.

Is headless CMS better for SEO?

A headless CMS itself doesn't improve or hurt SEO, your frontend implementation determines that. However, headless CMS platforms enable faster page loads through static generation and CDN delivery, which benefits Core Web Vitals scores. The tradeoff is that you're responsible for implementing structured data, meta tags, and sitemaps yourself rather than relying on plugins like Yoast SEO on traditional WordPress.

What is the difference between headless and traditional CMS?

A traditional CMS like WordPress bundles content management and frontend rendering into one system. A headless CMS separates them, it manages content and delivers it via API, while you build the frontend separately with any framework. This gives you more flexibility but requires more development effort. Traditional CMS is easier to set up; headless CMS scales better across multiple channels.

Which headless CMS is best for developers?

Sanity and Payload CMS are the most developer-friendly choices we tested. Sanity offers schema-as-code, GROQ queries, and deep Studio customization. Payload gives TypeScript-native configuration, generated types, a Local API, and the option to own the database and deployment. We chose Payload after running both, but Sanity demands less CMS infrastructure work.

Which headless CMS is best for ecommerce?

For headless ecommerce, pair a headless CMS with a dedicated commerce platform. Contentful integrates well with Shopify and Commercetools for enterprise setups. Sanity works with Shopify's Storefront API and Saleor. Storyblok's visual editor is excellent for product landing pages. Avoid using a headless CMS as your primary product database, use it for editorial content like blog posts, landing pages, and marketing copy alongside a commerce backend.

Can small businesses use headless CMS?

Yes, but with caveats. Strapi self-hosted on a $5/month VPS or Payload CMS on Vercel's free tier cost nothing. However, small businesses without developers will struggle with the setup. If you don't have a developer on your team, a traditional CMS like WordPress or Squarespace is more practical. Headless CMS becomes worthwhile for small businesses when they need multi-channel content delivery or have a developer who can build the frontend.

Is Sanity CMS really free?

Sanity's free tier is genuinely generous, it includes 20 user seats, 500K API requests per month, and 20GB of bandwidth. Most small-to-medium projects never exceed these limits. You only need the Growth plan ($15/user/month) when you need advanced features like custom access controls, higher API limits, or SAML SSO. There are no hidden costs or forced upgrades on the free tier.

Should I switch from WordPress to a headless CMS?

Don't switch unless you have a specific reason. Good reasons: you need to serve content across multiple frontends, you want better frontend performance, or your frontend team is frustrated with WordPress theming. Bad reasons: following trends, assuming headless is automatically better, or wanting to "modernize" without a clear benefit. Consider headless WordPress as a middle ground, it keeps your existing backend while letting you build a modern frontend.

What is the easiest headless CMS to learn?

Storyblok has the lowest learning curve for non-technical users thanks to its visual editor. For developers, Strapi is the easiest to get started with, install it, run the admin panel, and you have a working CMS in minutes. Sanity and Payload require more initial configuration but reward you with greater flexibility. Contentful sits in the middle, easy for editors, moderately complex for developers setting up content models.

Can I use a headless CMS without coding?

Storyblok is the closest to a no-code headless CMS experience, editors can build pages visually without writing code. However, a developer still needs to set up the initial project, create components, and deploy the frontend. No headless CMS is truly "no-code" end-to-end, someone on your team needs to build the frontend that consumes the API. If you want a completely no-code solution, a traditional site builder like Squarespace or Wix is a better fit.

Need help choosing a headless CMS for your project? We have operated Sanity, migrated the production corpus to Payload, and documented the trade-offs above. Get a free consultation