Why Teams Look for a Sanity Alternative
Sanity is a capable headless CMS with a strong free tier. For plenty of teams it is the right call. Two differences push developers toward Cosmic, and one of them is about how the bill grows.
There is a Studio to configure and deploy. Sanity Studio is an open source React application that lives in your repository. You configure it in code, run sanity deploy to ship it, and change code to add a field type or an editor plugin. Sanity does include free Studio hosting on every plan, so this is a code ownership question rather than a server bill.
Costs are per seat, and the features enterprises need sit behind the Enterprise plan. Sanity's Growth plan is priced per seat. SSO/SAML, an uptime SLA, and dedicated support are Enterprise features on Sanity's pricing page, and additional datasets are a $999/month add-on each.
Cosmic takes a different shape: a fully hosted dashboard with nothing to deploy, flat plan pricing, and an AI agent suite built into the product.
Pricing Comparison
All Sanity figures below are taken from sanity.io/pricing and were verified on August 6, 2026. Sanity changes its plans, so check the source before you make a decision.
Cosmic pricing
| Plan | Price | Buckets | Team members | Objects |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/month, forever | 1 | 2 | 1,000 |
| Builder | $49/month | 2 | 3 | 5,000 |
| Team | $299/month | 3 | 5 | 20,000 |
| Business | $499/month | 5 | 10 | 50,000 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom |
The Free plan requires no credit card. Additional team members are $29/user/month. Optional add-ons are $99/month each, or $199/month for the bundle. Current details are on Cosmic pricing.
Sanity pricing
| Plan | Price | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/month | Up to 20 seats, 10,000 documents, 2 public datasets, 1M API CDN requests/month, 250K API requests/month, 100GB assets, 100GB bandwidth, 1,000 AI credits/month, free Studio hosting |
| Growth | $15 per seat/month | Up to 50 seats, 25,000 documents, private datasets, 5 permission roles |
| Enterprise | Custom | SSO/SAML, uptime SLA, dedicated support, Media Library |
Sanity's Growth add-ons, priced on the same page: dedicated support at $799/month, an increased quota bundle at $299/month, and additional datasets at $999/month each, up to two extra.
Reading the two side by side honestly
Sanity's free tier is more generous on seats and documents than ours: 20 seats and 10,000 documents against our 2 seats and 1,000 objects. If a large team wants to evaluate a CMS at zero cost, that is a real advantage and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
The questions worth asking as you scale:
- Private datasets. On Sanity, private datasets are a Growth plan feature, and datasets beyond the included two are $999/month each. Every Cosmic Bucket is private by default, and plans include multiple Buckets for staging, production, or separate brands.
- SSO and an uptime SLA. Both are Enterprise line items on Sanity's pricing page. Budget for a custom contract if you need them.
- Per seat versus flat. Sanity's entry price per user is lower than adding seats to Cosmic at $29/user/month. Cosmic's plan price is flat, so the cost of the platform itself does not move as your content volume and agent usage grow.
Run both models against your actual headcount and dataset count. We would rather you do that math than take our word for it.
What's Different About Cosmic
A REST API and TypeScript SDK
GROQ is Sanity's native query language and it is genuinely powerful. Cosmic's primary interface is a REST API, with an official TypeScript SDK on top of it:
import { createBucketClient } from '@cosmicjs/sdk'; const cosmic = createBucketClient({ bucketSlug: process.env.COSMIC_BUCKET_SLUG as string, readKey: process.env.COSMIC_READ_KEY as string, }); const { objects: posts } = await cosmic.objects .find({ type: 'blog-posts', 'metadata.category': 'engineering' }) .props('id,title,slug,metadata') .sort('-created_at') .limit(10);
Queries are object filters and URL parameters. A developer who knows REST can read that on day one without learning a new query syntax first.
Nothing to deploy for editors
The Cosmic dashboard is hosted and managed by us. There is no admin application in your repository, no deploy step, and no version to keep current. Editors log in at app.cosmicjs.com. Adding a field is a change in the dashboard rather than a code change and a redeploy.
AI agents built into the platform
Cosmic ships four kinds of agents:
Content Agents research, write, generate images, and publish to your Bucket, including on a schedule.
Code Agents connect to your GitHub repository, read the codebase, create branches, and open pull requests.
Computer Use Agents drive a real browser for competitive research, automated QA, and site monitoring.
Team Agents live in Slack, WhatsApp, and Telegram, so your team can trigger content operations from chat.
Multi-agent workflows chain these together on a schedule. Cosmic also provides an MCP Server so MCP-capable AI tools can read and write your content directly.
For an accurate comparison: Sanity includes Content Agent on all plans for content operations, exposes it through Slack and their API, and publishes an MCP server as well. Check Sanity's AI docs for their current capabilities. The differences we are confident stating are ours: code agents that open pull requests in your repo, computer use agents, WhatsApp and Telegram team agents, and multi-agent scheduled workflows.
imgix media CDN
Cosmic serves all media through imgix. Resize, crop, and convert with URL parameters:
https://imgix.cosmicjs.com/image.jpg?w=1200&auto=format,compress&fit=crop
There is no separate media pipeline to configure and no third-party image service to bill separately. Sanity also provides an image transformation API through its own CDN.
What Real Teams Say
"Cosmic is: us never having to ask a developer to change anything on the backend of our website."
Maximilian Wuhr, Co-Founder at FINN
Other teams running Cosmic in production: Parque Explora, Plato, Vuetify, Tripwire Interactive, Cipher Sports, Eastman Music, Prairie Robotics, and Integral Privacy Technologies.
Cosmic is backed by Y Combinator (W19).
Migrating from Sanity to Cosmic
Both platforms are API-first, which makes migration structured:
- Map your Sanity schema types to Cosmic Object Types
- Export your Sanity content through their API
- Import to Cosmic using the REST API or the TypeScript SDK
- Point your frontend at the Cosmic SDK
- Swap environment variables and deploy
Start with the Cosmic docs. If you want a hand scoping the migration, book time with Tony below and bring your schema.
Start Free, No Credit Card Required
The Cosmic free plan includes 1 Bucket, 2 team members, 1,000 objects, and full access to the REST API and TypeScript SDK.
Want to talk through your migration? Book a 30-minute demo with Tony, Cosmic's CEO.
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