As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates Sanity 3/5 and Strapi 2.5/5 in Content Marketing. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 4 of the 6 judges pick Sanity and 2 pick Strapi. Sanity scores higher on 3 of 7 criteria (Pricing transparency, Planning, editorial calendar & briefs and AI assistance & content rights). Strapi scores higher on 4 of 7 criteria (Creation, review & approval, Structured content, localisation & export, European sovereignty, plus 1 more). Provenance — Sanity: Rest of world; Strapi: EU-Made, United States. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
The bench splits, and the split is the answer. Sanity takes editorial planning (4.2 vs 1.7, six judges leaning its way), AI and content rights (5.5 vs 3.8, six leans) and pricing transparency (7.8 vs 5.7, six leans), publishing Free at $0 and Growth at '$15 per seat per month' where Strapi's Enterprise price stays unpublished. Strapi takes collaboration and approval (7.0 vs 6.2, five leans, one tie), content model and reuse (7.0 vs 6.2, four leans), distribution and integrations (6.7 vs 6.3, three leans) and sovereignty (3.8 vs 3.0, five leans); its sovereignty attributes list a US legal entity jurisdiction and US-default data residency. Weighted totals diverge by judge: the content lead, SME marketer, data protection officer and skeptic land higher for Sanity; the localisation lead and web engineer land higher for Strapi. No overall winner.
Choose Sanity if
You need published prices before committing: Sanity lists Free at $0 and Growth at '$15 per seat per month' with viewer seats free, and six judges lean Sanity on pricing transparency (7.8 vs 5.7).
Your editorial team needs planning support beyond a review-stage filter: Sanity leads editorial planning 4.2 to 1.7 with six judges leaning its way, even though its calendar plugin is deprecated and publishing needs an external script.
You need training on your transferred input data prohibited: the Sanity verdict records it prohibited or disabled in all configurations, and six judges lean Sanity on AI and content rights (5.5 vs 3.8).
Your buying committee mirrors the content lead, SME marketer, data protection officer or skeptic: their weighted totals land higher for Sanity (5.6 vs 5.1, 5.3 vs 4.7, 5.3 vs 5, 5.8 vs 5.2).
Choose Strapi if
Your team runs multi-stage review: Strapi scores 7.0 against 6.2 on collaboration and approval, five judges leaning Strapi with one tie, on configurable review workflows with per-stage role permissions and a required stage that blocks publishing.
You need to export content, relations, assets and schemas yourself via the command line: content model and reuse leans Strapi 7.0 to 6.2, with four judges leaning Strapi and two ties.
Your delivery pipeline builds on auto-generated REST and GraphQL APIs with an OpenAPI specification and webhooks: distribution and integrations leans Strapi 6.7 to 6.3, three judges to one with two ties.
Your scorecard weights sovereignty: five judges lean Strapi (3.8 vs 3.0, one tie), and its sovereignty attributes list a US legal entity jurisdiction and US-default data residency.
Your team profile matches the localisation lead or web engineer: their weighted totals favor Strapi (6.3 vs 5.8 and 6.4 vs 5.9).
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Localisation Lead
Ships every piece in German, English and French for the DACH region and beyond. Wants locales on the field, not copies of the entry, translation status per language, and a documented export of content, model and locales — because a repository that cannot leave is a hostage, not an asset.
Sanity
Strapi
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Planning, editorial calendar & briefs
Sanity
A graphical editorial calendar with schedule, reschedule and author display is documented, and Editorial Workflows adds stages, assignments and durable history beside the documents people edit — dates and statuses are covered. The captured calendar page marks that plugin deprecated in favour of Sanity Scheduled Publishing, and we found no public information on content grouped by campaign or channel, workload or deadline views per person, or briefs carrying goal, audience and keywords.
Strapi
We found no public information on an editorial calendar, briefs, or campaign and topic planning with due dates and owners. The vendor's campaign-management page describes content blocks, content models and AI agents, not scheduled work, and the captured pricing and workflow pages show review stages and releases but no calendar or planning view.
Creation, review & approval
Sanity
Comments and tasks run on all paid plans with role permissions, a complete change history per dataset, and review stages from draft through approved, and a full audit trail with a history API is named at the Enterprise plan. We found no public information on configurable multi-step approvals per market, mandatory reviewers, or scheduled publishing that waits for approval.
Strapi
Configurable multi-stage review workflows per content type, per-stage role permissions, named stage owners and a required stage that blocks publishing until reached give a real approval trail, and review workflow actions are captured in the audit log; the vendor even markets an eight-step legal review. We found no public information on inline suggested edits or guest access limited to assigned pieces, and audit logs and review workflows sit in the Enterprise plan only, with content history at 14 days on Growth.
Structured content, localisation & export
Sanity
Unlimited locales on every plan, configurable content models with references stored as structured JSON in the Content Lake, nested locale fields such as title.en, AI translation of whole documents or single fields, and variants for testing and personalisation are exactly what I need for German, English and French side by side. What holds it back: we found no public information on translation status per locale, fallback languages or named translation-service connectors, and export is documented only as a copy of subscriber data in Sanity's standard database export format within thirty days after termination.
Strapi
Structure is deep — collection and single types, repeatable components, dynamic zones, six relation types — and the export story is the best I have seen: a documented command-line export of entities, relations, schemas and assets as JSONL, an unpacked directory or an encrypted archive, with import and transfer alongside and self-service export written into the terms. But localisation is at entry level, with entries translated into other locales per content type and unlimited locales, while we found no public information on field-level locales, fallback languages, translation status per language or named translation-service connectors.
Publishing, distribution & integrations
Sanity
Content is stored as structured JSON and delivered via GROQ and GraphQL to any channel that consumes an API, with webhooks, a live CDN, functions, a CLI and fifteen named frameworks from React to Astro. We found no public information on published API rate limits, a public status page, or maintained connectors for CRM and analytics tools; the calendar plugin itself needs your own script or cronjob to perform the actual publishing.
Strapi
Auto-generated REST and GraphQL APIs with a published OpenAPI specification, webhooks on publish, update and media change with fully populated entry payloads, a reviewed plugin marketplace and named framework integrations from Next.js to Flutter make delivery broad. We found no public information on published rate limits, performance data per piece pulled back from analytics, or a public status page, which keeps this short of a dependable-source score.
AI assistance & content rights
Sanity
The AI terms name the third-party providers — OpenAI, Anthropic and Pinecone — and state that all configurations explicitly prohibit or disable training on data transferred to them, with provider retention of a few days, the option to stop using the AI services at any time, and credit costs priced publicly at four credits per query and two per action. We found no public information on EU processing for AI features, on ownership of generated output written into the terms, or on marking generated content for EU AI Act transparency.
Strapi
The AI terms are candid that input is transmitted to third-party AI provider APIs and that output might not be copyrightable, with credits, monthly overages and per-feature enablement plus a bring-your-own-key path documented, and the vendor disclaims no misrepresentation of output as solely human generated. We found no public information naming the model providers, stating that customer content does not train them, or covering EU AI Act labelling of generated text, and the warranties and service levels are excluded from the AI integration.
European sovereignty
Sanity
A data processing addendum is offered and the privacy policy cites Norwegian and EU GDPR frameworks with standard contractual clauses; the terms of service are governed by California law with exclusive venue in San Francisco, the site is hosted in the United States, and customer input data is sent to US AI providers, with the region of the Google Cloud Platform hosting not stated. EU hosting for content and assets is not established, so this reaches a DPA with a US-facing contracting posture and no further.
Strapi
The captured pages give different figures for the contracting entity — the terms name a Delaware corporation under California law while the privacy policy gives a Paris address, a French-law processing reference and a GDPR representative under Article 27 — and primary storage is stated as the United States and the EEA. Self-hosting and cloud region selection give customers residency control and a third-party provider list is published, but we found no public information on the locations of those providers or on where AI processing happens.
Pricing transparency
Sanity
A buyer can compute a great deal: the Growth plan is $15 PER SEAT / MONTH with Viewer seats free, unlimited locales and content types on all plans, and every overage priced — $1 PER 25K additional API requests, $0.30 PER 1GB bandwidth, $0.05 PER AI CREDIT, plus document, dataset and support add-ons, with the plan unlocking SSO and the audit trail named. Enterprise remains custom-priced and annual billing with invoicing begins there, so full annual cost for a large team still needs a sales conversation.
Strapi
Growth is priced at $45 per month with three seats and additional seats at +$15/month/seat, unlimited locales, content types and usage with no resource overages, Strapi AI at 1,000 credits per month and additional credits at +$1.50 per 100, single sign-on priced as a $150/month add-on (+$50/month/seat), and the plan that unlocks review workflows and audit logs is named. The Enterprise plan carries no public price, so the top tier's annual cost stays a sales conversation.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Sanity
Strapi
Legal entity
Not determined
Incorporated in US
Ownership
Not determined
Not determined
Data residency
Not determined
Not determined
Subprocessors
US CLOUD Act reach
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates Sanity higher: 3/5 against 2.5/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 4 of the 6 judges pick Sanity and 2 pick Strapi. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is Sanity or Strapi European?
Sanity is not European by provenance (Rest of world). Strapi is European (EU-Made, United States). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Do Sanity and Strapi have a free plan?
As of 28 Oct 2026, both vendors’ own pages state a free plan. Each product page links the pricing page it was read from.