Choosing between Sanity, Payload and a custom content layer.

Sanity fits teams that need a highly customised editing experience

Sanity's Studio is genuinely code, which means an engineering team can build a highly tailored editing interface, custom validation and structured content that maps precisely to a complex domain. That flexibility comes with a cost: someone has to build and maintain that Studio configuration, and a non-technical client left alone with an unconfigured Studio can find it overwhelming.

It is a strong choice when content structure is genuinely complex, like a publication with many content types and cross-references, and when there is ongoing engineering capacity to keep the schema evolving alongside the content team's needs.

Payload suits teams that want a self-hosted, code-first CMS with an admin UI included

Payload gives you a working admin panel out of the box, generated from your schema, without the separate hosted service that Sanity or Contentful require. For teams that want full control over their data, self-hosting, and a single codebase that includes both the CMS and custom application logic, Payload removes a layer of vendor dependency.

The trade-off is that you own the hosting and the operational burden that comes with running a Node application in production, rather than paying a vendor to handle that. For a team already comfortable operating infrastructure, this is a reasonable trade. For a team without that capacity, it is a real cost most quotes leave out.

A custom-built content layer is rarely the right first move

Building a bespoke content management system from scratch sounds appealing when off-the-shelf options feel like overkill for a simple site, but the real cost shows up months later in the missing features that any mature CMS already solved: draft previews, versioning, media handling, access control. Most projects that go this route rebuild half a CMS by accident.

Custom makes sense only when the content model is so unusual that no existing tool fits, and even then, starting from a headless CMS and layering custom logic on top is usually faster than building the editing experience from zero.

The real question is who will be typing into this system in a year

A marketing team that needs to publish blog posts weekly without developer involvement needs a genuinely simple, well-labeled editing interface, which pushes toward a CMS with strong UI defaults rather than a highly technical one that assumes an engineer is present. Ask who edits content day to day before choosing based on developer preference alone.

Budget for the schema work, not just the license

None of these tools work well with a lazy content model. Whichever platform you choose, the actual work is designing a schema that matches how content will be reused across pages, locales and future features, and that design work costs more time than picking the tool itself.