Contentive vs Contentful and Sanity

We're architecturally in the same family as Contentful and Sanity — user-defined content models, an API in front of them, no opinion about the front end. If you're comparing us, you already understand headless and you don't need the pitch. So here's the actual difference.

They hand you an API and wish you luck

A headless CMS gives you three things: a place to define content shapes, a place to author content, and an API that serves it. That's the whole product. Everything downstream — the front end, the hosting, the build pipeline, the deployment, the staging environment, the rollback story — is yours to assemble.

For a product team with front-end engineers, that's exactly right. The CMS should stay out of the way.

For an agency shipping client sites, it means every project starts by wiring together a CMS, a framework, a host, a CI pipeline and a preview setup. You do it once, then you do it again for the next client, and you maintain all of it.

We ship the rest of it

Contentive has the same content-model core, plus Liquid themes, hosting, staging, promote-to-production, one-click rollback, forms, analytics, memberships and a WordPress importer. You go from content model to a live site without assembling a stack.

If you want the headless path, it's still there — a GraphQL API with a typed SDK, generated from your model. Build in Next.js or Astro and ignore our renderer entirely. We just don't think that should be the only road.

Pricing you can predict

The most common complaint about Contentful in particular is the bill. Request-based pricing produces surprise overages, and it's a bad fit for an agency running twenty low-traffic client sites where most reads are cached anyway.

We price on live sites. Free to build (one workspace, no live site), £39/mo for three live sites, unlimited workspaces, unlimited seats, £10.99/mo per site after that. Inviting your client never raises your price. Usage allowances are headroom, not meters — we'll warn you at 80% and we don't auto-bill overages.

The client-editing difference

Sanity Studio and Contentful's editor are built for content teams — people who work in a CMS daily and have some appetite for learning one. A client's office manager who wants to post a seasonal notice once a month is a different user, and the thing that matters for them is that the editor contains only what they're allowed to do.

That's also a handover difference. Structure permissions and content permissions are separate capabilities, so a client can publish without ever seeing the model.

Agents

Our MCP server exposes the platform as agent tools — bring your own Claude or Cursor, scoped per workspace, no token markup. Everything an agent builds is an ordinary object in the Studio afterwards. Both Contentful and Sanity now ship agent access to their APIs too — the difference is what the agent is for. Ours is aimed at building a whole site, model to theme, rather than editing content, and the result is editable by hand afterwards, same as anything built in the Studio directly.

Where they're ahead

Maturity, scale, and certifications. Contentful has enterprise compliance, multi-region, and a decade of hardening. Sanity's editor is excellent and its ecosystem is deep. Both have large communities and real support organisations. We're early, and small.

If you're a large organisation with procurement requirements, those things matter more than anything in this post.

The honest summary

If you have front-end engineers and want a content API, use Sanity or Contentful — they're very good at that job. If you're an agency who wants to model, theme, host and hand over a client site without assembling five services, that's the gap we're built for.