Storyblok vs Sanity for Next.js in 2026: An Honest Comparison

Storyblok and Sanity are the two headless CMS options I get asked to compare most often by clients who've outgrown WordPress but aren't ready to commit to an enterprise contract. Both are production-grade, both have generous free tiers, and both work well with Next.js App Router — which makes the choice genuinely non-obvious. Here's how they actually differ when you're building a real project.

What each CMS is optimising for

Storyblok is a visual CMS first. Its entire product is built around a component-based block editor with a live preview pane that non-technical editors find immediately usable. You define "bloks" (their spelling), and the editor drags them onto a page canvas. The mental model is closer to a page builder than a structured content system.

Sanity is a structured content platform. Content lives as documents and fields, not pages. The editor experience is closer to a form than a canvas. That sounds like a downside, but it means your content is portable — the same article document can feed a web page, a mobile app, an RSS feed, and a JSON API without reshaping.

Neither framing is wrong. They're just solving different problems.

Developer experience with Next.js App Router

Sanity ships next-sanity, which gives you a typed GROQ client, Presentation (live preview) wired to App Router's draft mode, and Sanity TypeGen for end-to-end type safety. Setup is roughly:

// lib/sanity.ts
import { createClient } from 'next-sanity'

export const client = createClient({
  projectId: process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_SANITY_PROJECT_ID!,
  dataset: process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_SANITY_DATASET!,
  apiVersion: '2024-01-01',
  useCdn: true,
})

You write GROQ, fetch in server components, and ISR revalidation hooks into webhooks — all first-party. The schema lives in your repo, so you get version control on content structure.

Storyblok uses a REST API (v2) or GraphQL endpoint. The @storyblok/react SDK handles bridge communication for the visual editor. The pattern looks like this in a server component:

// app/[slug]/page.tsx
import { storyblokInit, apiPlugin, getStoryblokApi } from '@storyblok/react/rsc'

storyblokInit({ accessToken: process.env.STORYBLOK_TOKEN, use: [apiPlugin] })

export default async function Page({ params }: { params: { slug: string } }) {
  const storyblokApi = getStoryblokApi()
  const { data } = await storyblokApi.get(`cdn/stories/${params.slug}`, {
    version: 'published',
  })
  // render bloks
}

The Storyblok SDK has historically been heavier than Sanity's, and App Router RSC support arrived later. It works, but you'll hit edge cases around the bridge script (needed for the visual editor) conflicting with React 19 hydration. Sanity's Presentation tool is purpose-built for RSC and avoids that class of problem.

Editor experience

This is where Storyblok wins clearly for marketing teams that want drag-and-drop page composition. The visual editor shows the actual rendered page on the right while the editor manipulates content on the left. For landing page–heavy sites where the team is constantly rearranging blocks, that feedback loop is valuable.

Sanity's Portable Text editor is excellent for long-form prose, and Studio is highly customisable — you can build custom input components, structure the sidebar however you want, and use AI Assist for copy generation. But there's no built-in visual canvas. You can approximate it with Presentation, but it takes meaningful setup time.

For a blog or documentation-heavy site: Sanity. For a marketing site where editors expect to see the page as they edit: Storyblok.

Pricing comparison

Sanity's free tier is meaningfully more generous on API calls — 500k vs 25k is a real difference for a blog with decent traffic hitting ISR cache misses. Storyblok's per-user pricing climbs quickly once you add more than two or three editors. A five-editor team at Storyblok's entry plan costs roughly €45/month before asset overages; Sanity Growth for the same team is $75/month but includes significantly higher limits.

At scale, both platforms push you toward annual enterprise contracts. Storyblok publishes a "Business" tier and enterprise; Sanity has a "Business" plan at $949/month that unlocks custom roles, audit logs, and SSO. Neither is cheap once you need those features.

Schema and content modelling

Sanity schemas live in your codebase as TypeScript definitions. You version-control them, run TypeGen, and get end-to-end types from schema through GROQ query to React component. That is a genuine productivity advantage once the project is past initial setup.

Storyblok's component definitions live in the Storyblok dashboard and sync to your codebase via a CLI. It works, but the authoritative source of truth is a cloud dashboard, which complicates PR-based workflows. There's no equivalent of sanity typegen generate that derives TypeScript types automatically from your schema.

When I'd pick each one

Choose Storyblok if:

• The client team will be composing pages visually, not just editing field values
• The site is primarily marketing pages with high layout variability
• The team has used visual page builders before and expects that workflow
• Locale count stays low (multilingual costs jump fast on paid plans)

Choose Sanity if:

• Content needs to serve multiple surfaces (web, app, API consumers)
• The team values schema-as-code and typed queries
• You're building a blog, docs site, or product with complex content relationships
• API call volume is high or unpredictable (the free tier headroom matters)
• You need RBAC, custom workflows, or AI Assist without an enterprise contract

The real differentiator

Storyblok and Sanity are not actually competing for the same project types most of the time. If a client frames it as "we want editors to build pages," Storyblok. If they frame it as "we have content that needs to be reliable, typed, and reusable," Sanity. The mistake I've seen is forcing the structured-content model onto a team that thinks in page layouts — that ends in frustration regardless of how clean the architecture is.