Payload CMS vs Sanity for Next.js in 2026: an honest comparison

Searching for "payload cms vs sanity nextjs" usually means you are already past the "what is a headless CMS" stage and trying to make an actual decision. I have shipped more than fifteen Sanity projects in production. I have not shipped Payload in production, but I have evaluated it seriously on three client decisions in the past year — reading the source, building small prototypes, and stress-testing the query model. What follows is the comparison I wished existed when I was sitting in those evaluation calls.

The decision matrix up front

If you already know your constraint — data residency, SaaS budget, or team size — you can probably stop here. Otherwise, keep reading for the nuance.

Hosting model: Sanity's content lake vs Payload's self-hosted approach

Sanity stores your content in its own hosted document store. You get a CDN, real-time collaboration, and zero ops overhead in exchange for a monthly bill that scales with API usage and dataset size. For most client sites this is a fair trade — I have never had a Sanity project where infrastructure ops became a meaningful line item. But for clients in regulated industries (healthcare, fintech in certain jurisdictions) or clients with explicit data-residency requirements, the conversation stalls. Your data lives in Sanity's cloud, and you cannot move it to an EU-only data centre of your choosing.

Payload flips this entirely. You own the database. Postgres on Railway, Neon, or your client's existing RDS instance — it doesn't matter. That is a genuine operational burden (backups, migrations, scaling read replicas) but it is also genuine control. For a startup that already runs Postgres and doesn't want another SaaS line item, or an enterprise with strict residency requirements, Payload's model is not a compromise — it is the point.

Query language: GROQ vs Payload's local API

GROQ is expressive and surprisingly powerful once it clicks. Deeply nested projections, conditional fields, joins across references — all readable once you know the syntax. The cost is that it is Sanity-specific. You are learning a query language that does not transfer to anything else.

Payload's local API is different in character. Because you are running Payload inside the same Next.js app (via the @payloadcms/next package), you query your content with TypeScript function calls in the same process — no HTTP round trip for server-side rendering:

// app/blog/[slug]/page.tsx — Payload local API call (same process, no HTTP)
import { getPayload } from 'payload'
import config from '@payload-config'

export default async function BlogPost({ params }: { params: { slug: string } }) {
  const payload = await getPayload({ config })
  const { docs } = await payload.find({
    collection: 'posts',
    where: { slug: { equals: params.slug } },
    depth: 2,
  })
  const post = docs[0]
  // ...
}

This is ergonomically nice for a Next.js team. No separate SDK, no serialisation overhead, full type safety from your schema without a code-generation step. The downside is that Payload must run in the same deployment as your Next.js app (or as a separate service), which changes your infra topology compared to Sanity's pure API model.

TypeScript developer experience

Sanity TypeGen is good — I have written about it separately — but it is a generation step. You define schemas in Sanity's schema format, run sanity typegen generate, and get types that reflect your GROQ query shapes. It works well in CI but it is an extra step, and the types are only as accurate as your GROQ projection.

Payload's TypeScript DX is better by design. Your schema is TypeScript. Payload infers collection types from your field definitions automatically. There is no generation step at dev time — the types exist because the schema exists. For TypeScript-heavy teams this is a meaningful quality-of-life difference.

Editor and Studio experience

Sanity Studio is the strongest headless editing experience I have worked with. Portable Text, hotspot-aware image cropping, real-time multiplayer editing, a structure builder that lets you surface exactly the views editors need — it is genuinely polished after five years of iteration. Non-technical clients consistently find it approachable after one 30-minute walkthrough.

Payload Admin has caught up substantially in v3. It is built on Next.js App Router itself, which means customising it feels familiar if you already live in that stack. It is less opinionated about rich text (it uses Lexical by default, which is capable but less battle-tested in content-heavy sites than Portable Text). Live preview exists but the ecosystem of third-party Studio plugins that Sanity has accumulated over years is not there yet for Payload.

Image pipeline and CDN

This is where Sanity has a durable advantage for most projects. The Sanity CDN serves images at cdn.sanity.io with URL-based transformations — width, height, format, quality, focal-point crop — all without a separate image service. Pair that with next/image and you get AVIF/WebP serving, LCP-friendly preloading, and LQIP blur-ups without touching your own infra.

Payload has no built-in image CDN. You configure an upload adapter — S3 is the standard — and then decide how to serve and transform images. Cloudflare Images, imgix, or a Cloudflare Worker that transforms on the fly all work, but you are assembling those pieces yourself. That is not a fatal problem but it is real work, and it adds cost to the initial build.

Pricing and total cost of ownership

Sanity's free tier covers small projects comfortably (three users, 2 GB assets, 500K API calls/month). A real production site typically lands on the Growth plan at $15/month per project. A multi-tenant agency setup or a high-traffic editorial site can push into $99+/month territory once you add seats and bandwidth. That cost is predictable and low relative to developer time, but it does not go to zero.

Payload is MIT-licensed. The software costs nothing. What you pay is infra (a Postgres database, object storage, possibly a separate compute instance) and the developer time to operate it. For a solo developer running three client sites, that ops overhead is real. For a startup with a DevOps function already in place, Payload's TCO can be lower over three years than Sanity's.

Honest recommendation by team type

Solo freelancer or small agency: Sanity. The hosted infrastructure, polished Studio, and Next.js SDK mean you spend time building features, not operating databases. The monthly cost is a rounding error on a client retainer.

Startup with a technical co-founder and existing Postgres infra: Payload deserves a serious look. Native TypeScript types, no SaaS bill, and data ownership matter more as you scale. Factor in the image pipeline gap.

Agency delivering many client sites: Sanity. The organisational model (separate datasets per client, Studio customisation via plugins, structure builder) is built for this workflow.

Enterprise or regulated-industry client with data-residency constraints: Payload is often the only viable choice. Self-hosted, EU-only Postgres, no third-party content lake in the chain.

Team that wants maximum Next.js co-location: Payload's local API and co-located Admin are architecturally cleaner for teams that want everything in one repo and one deployment. Sanity's external API model is fine, but it is a seam.

The honest bottom line: Sanity wins on ecosystem maturity, editor experience, and zero-ops image delivery. Payload wins on data ownership, TypeScript ergonomics, and total cost for teams already running their own infrastructure. Neither is a wrong answer in 2026 — the question is which constraints matter most on your specific project.