Reduce platform costs, speed up publishing, and move to a CMS that scales. We handle your entire Contentful to Sanity migration: migrating content, customizing Sanity Studio, updating your Next.js frontend, and launching with zero SEO surprises.
Business Impact
Teams that migrate from Contentful to Sanity aren’t running from a “broken” platform. They’re running toward one that fits how they actually work now. At scale, the same problems appear: a content model only developers can touch, editors waiting on every update, and pricing that goes up every time the business grows.
Sanity is built differently. Schemas in code, not a GUI. A configurable editing environment built around how teams actually publish. Pricing that doesn’t penalize growth.
The platform that worked at one stage starts adding friction at the next. That’s usually when teams migrate from Contentful to Sanity.
As a Contentful agency that specializes in modernizing tech stacks, our content migration services keep the transition low-risk — structure intact, relationships preserved, and workflows improved from day one. One site or multiple markets, we bring the process and expertise to get it done cleanly.
Why Migrate from Contentful?
# 1
Your Content Model Has Outgrown GUI-Based Schema Tools
# 2
Editorial Teams Need a More Configurable Workspace
# 3
Real-Time Preview and Collaborative Editing Are Now Requirements
# 4
Governance Needs to Operate at the Document Level
# 5
Scaling Across Markets and Teams Needs Predictable Economics
Sanity Migration Expertise
Migrating your core content platform is a high-stakes project. Our expertise is in making the transition from Contentful to Sanity predictable, secure, and impactful from day one. We understand the specific nuances of both platforms — we know precisely where Contentful’s structure creates bottlenecks and how to design a Sanity architecture that solves for them, not just replicate them.
We manage the entire process end-to-end, from a zero-downtime data migration to fine-tuning your frontend for optimal performance with Sanity’s APIs. The result is a seamless cutover with no lost SEO equity and a content platform your developers and editors will actually love to use.
Contentful vs. Sanity: a Platform Comparison
Rigid GUI-based schema management struggles with complex or modular content, severely limiting project flexibility.
Ideal for complex data structures. Schema-as-code enables a proper Git-based review process, easily handling intricate models.
A standard, one-size-fits-all interface that cannot be adapted to unique workflows, forcing the team to conform to the tool.
Sanity Studio is a fully customizable React app. Build the perfect editorial environment with custom components and real-time previews to boost productivity.
Advanced workflows and approvals are locked behind expensive enterprise plans, forcing you to pay more for basic publishing control.
Granular permissions and configurable approval flows are available on all plans, enabling precise control without a costly upgrade.
Managing many languages creates a complex and brittle architecture, requiring extensive upfront planning to avoid future problems.
Localization is defined in the schema, offering simplicity and flexibility. Adding new languages does not increase platform cost.
The pricing model punishes growth. Tiers are tied to users and locales, so scaling your team or markets sharply increases costs.
Fair usage-based pricing with no per-seat or per-locale fees. This model is ideal for scaling teams, as you only pay for what you use.
An outdated workflow where the content model is modified via a UI, preventing schema versioning and contradicting modern infrastructure-as-code practices.
A modern infrastructure-as-code approach. The schema is code managed in version control, creating a single, transparent workflow for the model and Studio.
How We Run a Contentful to Sanity Migration?
01
Audit & Planning
We map your entire Contentful space (content types, fields, references, assets, locales, roles, webhooks, and integrations) together with your team. The output is a clear migration strategy with scope, timeline, risks, and a zero-downtime cutover plan, agreed before any build work starts.
02
Schema & Studio Design
We design a Sanity architecture tailored to your publishing operations, simplifying complexity rather than just copying your Contentful model. The new schema, Studio configuration, and editorial workflows are reviewed with your team before implementation.
03
Data Migration
We build repeatable pipelines to migrate all content, assets, and metadata while preserving integrity. This includes converting Rich Text to Portable Text and running reconciliation checks at each stage. We conduct dry runs on staging before deploying to production.
04
Frontend & Integrations
We connect your Next.js frontend to Sanity via GROQ or GraphQL, refactor data fetching, and configure caching, ISR/SSR, and edge delivery for performance. Core Web Vitals are a standard on every project. All third-party integrations are re-mapped and verified before launch.
05
Launch & Onboarding
Launch follows a strict checklist, ensuring URL parity, redirects, and Core Web Vitals for a zero-downtime cutover with a rollback plan. Post-launch, we monitor SEO and promptly fix issues. We conclude with editorial workshops and documentation to empower your team to own the new system.
Sanity Development Examples
We unlock the full potential of Sanity — a composable platform for building complex, scalable solutions. These examples showcase our expertise, from custom Studio configurations and thoughtful data models to seamless API integrations
"Our main goal was to get a new website that met SEC compliance requirements while also being well set up for SEO. The FocusReactive team handled both the design and development using Sanity CMS and Vercel, and delivered a fully working site ready for launch. The process was smooth, and we now have a clean, reliable website that gives us a strong foundation for future growth."
Michael Koenig
Founding Partner at Financial Team
FocusReactive successfully took over and enhanced our existing site and shop, making the platform faster, more stable, and significantly improving the user experience. The team delivered high-quality work on time, reduced development overhead, and proved to be proactive, knowledgeable, and highly reliable throughout the collaboration.
Gerben Dijkstra
Product Owner, glimble by Arriva
FocusReactive has been an exceptional partner, delivering all our requirements ahead of schedule. Their team feels like an extension of ours, understanding our strategy and anticipating our needs. They helped us build two modern, SEO-friendly marketing websites that our marketing team can easily manage without relying on developers. The team is incredibly talented, responsive, and always takes pride in their work. Thanks to FocusReactive, we've been able to scale our marketing efforts more effectively. We couldn’t have asked for a better partner.
Mike Addonizio
VP of Marketing at Betway
Contentful to Sanity Migration FAQ
Contentful to Sanity Migration FAQ
The two platforms have fundamentally different pricing models.
Contentful's free plan is designed to be quickly outgrown. The moment your project shows real potential and begins to scale, you are confronted with a sudden and steep paywall, forcing an abrupt jump to their $300/month plan just to continue operating.
Sanity offers a generous free tier supporting up to 20 users. Their paid "Growth" plan then introduces a per-seat cost of $15/month, alongside a pay-as-you-go model for higher usage of resources like API calls and bandwidth. This means costs scale based on both your team size and your application's traffic.
It depends on the user.
For Editors: Contentful offers a simple, straightforward interface out of the box. However, a well-configured Sanity Studio is often far more intuitive for complex tasks because it can be completely customized to a team's specific workflow. Instead of adapting to a generic tool, the tool is built for them.
For Developers: Sanity is widely considered to have a superior developer experience. Its "schema-as-code" approach, powerful query language (GROQ), and the ability to customize the entire editing environment within a React application makes it faster and more flexible to build and maintain.
Existing integrations and APIs may continue to work after cms migration, but most require mapping, reconfiguration, or replacement depending on the new content model and architecture.
On average, a standard migration project takes between 8 and 12 weeks. This timeline can vary depending on factors like the complexity of your content models, the total volume of content entries (e.g., pages, blog posts), and the number of custom integrations required for your specific workflow.
When planned and executed correctly, a migration to Sanity will not harm your SEO rankings; in fact, it often improves them. We preserve all URL structures (implementing 301 redirects where necessary), meticulously map all metadata (titles, descriptions, canonicals), and ensure structured data remains intact. Furthermore, Sanity’s performance and flexibility often lead to faster page load times, which can positively impact your search rankings.
Think headless CMS are not customizable? We disproved this using Sanity
Sanity encourage to customize almost everything. Any Sanity module can be rewritten. This makes it possible to have your own combination of standard and custom components in your application.
A Deep Dive into Sanity's Visual Editing and Presentation Tool
Explore Sanity’s new Visual Editing and Presentation tool. See how these features make editing smoother, simplify content updates, and give developers and editors live previews right inside the CMS.
