Storyblok wins on editor experience for most marketing teams, Sanity wins on flexibility for teams with a developer on hand, Contentful suits large organisations with complex governance (and now sits inside Salesforce), and Payload wins if you want to own your content infrastructure outright. The right answer depends on your team, not on a feature checklist.
Quick links
- How we judged these
- Storyblok: the best editor experience
- Sanity: the most flexible for structured content
- Contentful: built for enterprise, now owned by Salesforce
- Payload: best if you want to own your stack
- Which one actually fits your team?
- FAQ
How we judged these
We ranked these four on the things that actually change a project’s outcome: editor experience, cost shape, SEO and AEO fit, and how much developer time each one demands.
Every “best CMS” list claims to be objective. This one is opinionated, because we build on these platforms and some genuinely suit a marketing site better than others. The four criteria:
- Editor experience. Can a marketer publish a change without waiting on a developer, and without breaking the page?
- Cost shape. Not a specific number, since vendor pricing changes constantly and most of it sits behind a JavaScript-rendered page we cannot reliably quote. What matters is whether the model suits a small team or an enterprise, and where the jump between tiers tends to bite.
- SEO and AEO fit. A CMS does not rank pages. The front end pulling from it does. But some content models make answer-shaped, well-structured pages easier to produce than others, and that is worth scoring.
- Developer overhead. How much ongoing engineering time each platform assumes, from setup through to the tenth content model change.
We are not covering WordPress here, headless or otherwise. That is a different decision, and we have covered when WordPress is the wrong default for a marketing site elsewhere.
Storyblok: the best editor experience
Storyblok wins this category because its visual editor lets a marketer see the actual page while they edit it, not a form disconnected from the result.
Storyblok was the first headless CMS to ship a visual editor, and it still shows. The editor loads your live front end in an iframe and overlays clickable regions on each content block, so a marketer can click a section on the actual page and change it, with the result visible immediately rather than guessed at from a form. That single feature closes the gap that usually makes marketers dependent on a developer for every small change.
Where it earns its place
- Modular content blocks. Storyblok calls them “bloks”: reusable components a marketer can drag, drop and rearrange without touching code.
- Multi-device preview. Desktop, tablet and mobile render side by side in the same editor session.
- Built-in workflow. Version history, role permissions and an approval step come as standard, not as an add-on.
Where it costs you
The visual editor needs your front end wired up to render inside its iframe, which is extra setup work a headless-only CMS does not ask for. And because the content model is block-based, a very unusual, freeform layout can feel more constrained than a schema you design entirely yourself. For a typical marketing or content site, that trade-off is the right one. Current pricing sits on Storyblok’s pricing page; expect the jump from a single-editor tier to a team plan to be the point most agencies feel.
Sanity: the most flexible for structured content
Sanity wins here because its content modelling is genuinely open-ended, and because real-time collaboration is built into the editor rather than layered on top.
Sanity treats every piece of content as structured data you can query, version and reuse across a website, an app and anything else you build later, rather than a page of formatted text you copy and paste when a second channel appears. Multiple editors can work on the same document at once, with live presence and conflict-free merges handling the overlap automatically. Sanity itself now describes the platform as a content operating system rather than a plain CMS, reflecting how far the modelling and workflow tooling has grown beyond the original “headless CMS” label.
Where it earns its place
- Schema you design. Content types are defined in code, so an unusual data shape (a product with fourteen conditional fields, say) is straightforward rather than a workaround.
- Real query language. GROQ lets a developer pull exactly the fields a page needs, nothing more.
- Genuinely multi-channel. Built from the ground up to serve a website, an app and a kiosk from the same content, if that is ever the brief.
Where it costs you
That flexibility is also the cost. A marketer cannot reshape the content model without a developer, and the editing interface, while capable, is a form-based studio rather than a live page preview like Storyblok’s. Sanity suits a team that already has a developer involved in ongoing changes, not one hoping to go fully self-serve. Current pricing is on Sanity’s pricing page.
Contentful: built for enterprise, now owned by Salesforce
Contentful wins for large organisations that need fine-grained governance across many brands or markets, and its position just shifted: Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire it.
Contentful has spent a decade as an API-first content platform used by thousands of enterprises to run digital experiences across web, mobile and other channels from one source of truth. Its enterprise features (fine-grained role-based access, multi-environment workflows, scheduled publishing, detailed audit trails) are built for organisations with real governance problems: many editors, many brands, many approval chains. On 1 June 2026, Salesforce announced a definitive agreement to acquire Contentful, intending to fold it into Salesforce’s Headless 360 and Agentforce content tooling, with the deal expected to close in the third quarter of Salesforce’s next fiscal year, subject to regulatory approval.
Where it earns its place
- Governance at scale. Multi-environment publishing and audit trails suit organisations that need to prove who changed what, and when.
- Deep integrations. A decade of enterprise customers means connectors into most of the martech stack already exist.
- Salesforce alignment, if you are already there. If your organisation runs Salesforce, the coming integration is a genuine reason to look at Contentful rather than a marketing line.
Where it costs you
That same weight is overkill for a single marketing site. The tooling is built for enterprise scale and priced accordingly, and the ownership change adds a genuine question mark for anyone weighing a multi-year platform decision right now: worth watching before you commit, not a reason to rule it out. Pricing is on Contentful’s pricing page.
Payload: best if you want to own your stack
Payload wins for teams that want full ownership of their content infrastructure, no per-seat licence, and no dependence on a vendor’s roadmap or uptime.
Payload is an open-source, MIT-licensed headless CMS and application framework built in TypeScript, with a fully functional admin UI, REST and GraphQL APIs, and deep integration with Next.js out of the box. Every collection, field and access rule lives in your own codebase, and generated types flow directly into your front end. Because it is self-hosted (or deployed to your own serverless setup), there is no per-seat fee and no vendor lock-in: you run it, you own it, you can fork it if you ever need to.
Where it earns its place
- No licence ceiling. Add fifty editors and the bill does not move, because there is no seat-based pricing.
- Full code ownership. The whole content model lives in version control alongside the rest of your codebase.
- Built for Next.js. If your front end is already Next.js, the integration is closer than any SaaS CMS offers.
Where it costs you
You are now responsible for hosting, updates, security patches and backups, work a SaaS vendor absorbs for you elsewhere on this list. That is a fair trade for a team with the engineering capacity to carry it, and a poor one without it.
Which one actually fits your team?
Pick Storyblok if a marketer needs to publish confidently without a developer on call. Pick Sanity if a developer is already part of the content workflow and you want more modelling freedom. Pick Contentful if you are an enterprise with real governance needs, or already inside the Salesforce ecosystem. Pick Payload if you want to own the whole stack and have the engineering capacity to run it.
None of these four decide your search or AI visibility on their own. A headless CMS separates content from presentation, and what actually gets read, ranked and cited is the front end that renders it. We compared the two stacks we build on most often in Astro vs Next.js: which headless stack for a marketing site, and the short version holds here too: get the framework choice right and any of these four CMS options will serve you well. Get it wrong and the best content model in the world still ships a slow, hard-to-crawl page.
Work out what a headless build actually costs
CMS choice is one input. Framework, page count, integrations and copy move the number more. Our calculator gives you an honest range in about a minute, with no form-gate and no follow-up sequence you did not ask for.
- A realistic range for a headless build on any of these platforms
- What actually drives the cost up, so you can trade off
- No sales call required to get a number