Contentful vs Sanity: Scoring a Real Content-Ops Requirement Set
Objective: Given RateGain's actual content-ops requirements (multi-channel publishing, no dedicated CMS engineer, a customer-facing docs portal needing SLAs), build a weighted scorecard and pick Contentful or Sanity based on requirement fit, not brand familiarity.
You're the content-ops lead at RateGain Travel Technologies, the Nasdaq-listed travel & hospitality SaaS company. Product docs, the marketing blog, and an in-app help widget all need to pull from one content source, and no engineer is dedicated to CMS maintenance.
Score Contentful and Sanity against RateGain's five real requirements, weight each by business impact, and recommend one platform with the scorecard as your justification.
Before you start
What you'll need
Free path (everything below is enough to finish)
No account friction, and a scorecard other stakeholders need to review and re-weight belongs in a shared spreadsheet, not a slide.
The process
1 step
Step 01 of 01
The lesson splits the major options by strength: Contentful for enterprise SLAs and mature permissions, Sanity for developer/editor experience and a usage-based free tier, Strapi for full control at the cost of ongoing maintenance. The Callout warns against picking based on which name is trending.
RateGain needs SLA-backed uptime for a customer-facing docs portal, zero dedicated CMS engineering headcount, and real-time co-editing for a distributed content team. Contentful's Team plan runs ~$300/month; Sanity's free tier scales with usage. Which wins on requirement fit?
Procedure
- List RateGain's 5 requirements as rows: SLA/uptime guarantee, no dedicated CMS engineer needed, real-time collaborative editing, omnichannel API delivery, predictable cost at current scale.
- Score each platform 1-5 per row based only on the lesson's documented strengths (Contentful: SLAs, permissions; Sanity: dev experience, real-time editing, usage-based free tier).
- Weight the SLA and no-dedicated-engineer rows 2x, since a docs-portal outage and an unstaffed maintenance burden are the two risks RateGain named explicitly.
- Sum weighted scores per column and flag the higher total as the recommendation, not the platform anyone already recognizes.
REQUIREMENT SCORECARD (RateGain content-ops) Requirement Weight Contentful Sanity SLA-backed uptime 2x 5 3 No dedicated CMS engineer needed 2x 4 3 Real-time collaborative editing 1x 2 5 Omnichannel API delivery 1x 4 4 Predictable cost at current scale 1x 3 4 Weighted totals: Contentful 27, Sanity 25 Recommendation: Contentful, driven almost entirely by the 2x-weighted SLA and staffing rows.
Healthy
The recommendation traces back to specific weighted rows an executive can question and re-weight themselves.
Unhealthy
A one-line verdict like 'Sanity is more modern, let's use that' with no requirement trace.
What this means
When the top two platforms are close on raw score, the weighting decision (which requirement matters 2x) is the real recommendation, not the final number.
So what do I do about it?
| Symptom | Action | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Team is deadlocked between two platforms that score almost identically | Re-interview stakeholders on which single requirement is truly non-negotiable, then weight only that row | 30 min |
Final deliverable
A weighted requirements scorecard naming Contentful or Sanity as the recommendation, with every row traceable to a specific RateGain requirement.
See a reference example
Five-Star Business Finance, CMS scorecard summary (excerpt) Recommendation: Sanity Driving rows: - Real-time collaborative editing (1x): loan-product copy is reviewed by compliance and marketing simultaneously; Sanity scored 5 vs Contentful's 2. - Predictable cost at current scale (1x): usage-based free tier covers projected traffic through next fiscal year with zero committed spend. SLA row scored lower (3 vs Contentful's 5) but was not weighted 2x here, since no customer-facing portal is planned this year.
Success criteria
You're done when you can:
- Scores both platforms against all 5 requirement rows before naming a winner
- Applies 2x weighting only to the requirements the scenario explicitly flags as highest-risk
- States the recommendation as a traceable total, not a brand preference