Comparison
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Jun 4, 2026
Sanity vs. Directus
Architecture, content modeling, admin UI, automation, AI, and pricing compared.
Matt Minor
Senior Director, Growth
Note from Directus
Yes, this is a Directus vs Sanity page written by Directus. Yes, we know that's absurd. Every vendor publishes one of these and ranks themselves first, so we have to publish ours or you won't find one that mentions us at all. So, if we have to play this game, we'd rather play it differently. What follows is the most honest comparison we could write.
Two backends, two opposite directions.
Sanity and Directus both give you a backend with auto-generated APIs and an admin UI on top of structured content. They get there from opposite directions.
Sanity is an API-first SaaS: your content lives in Sanity's hosted Content Lake, queried through GROQ (their custom query language) or GraphQL, served from their CDN. The admin (Sanity Studio) is open source and self-deployed, but the data behind it is Sanity-hosted.
Directus is a self-hosted (or managed) platform that sits on top of any SQL database you bring or spin up.
Pick Sanity if you want a SaaS content backend with a customizable Studio, GROQ as a structured query language, and a strong JAMstack ecosystem.
Pick Directus if you want to own your data in a real SQL database, self-host (or use Directus Cloud), pay predictable infrastructure costs instead of API-call pricing, and get native dashboards, visual automation, AI Assistant, MCP server, and realtime APIs out of the box.
The feature-by-feature view.
A few rows do most of the work. Hosting model (self-host vs. Content-Lake-only) is the architectural fork. Where data lives (your database vs. their hosted Content Lake) is the data-sovereignty question. GROQ is Sanity's distinct technical advantage. Real-time multiplayer is built into Sanity Studio at a fidelity Directus matches partially through presence. Native AI, MCP, Flows, Insights are capabilities Directus ships natively that Sanity ships in narrower form or doesn't ship at all.
Dimension | Directus | Sanity |
|---|---|---|
License | Source-available (custom Monospace license) | Studio is MIT; Content Lake is proprietary SaaS |
Hosting | Self-host (Docker, Node) or Directus Cloud | Studio self-hosted; Content Lake SaaS only |
Schema Philosophy | Reads your existing SQL schema | Schema defined as JS/TS in the Studio repo |
Supported Databases | Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, MSSQL, SQLite, Oracle, CockroachDB | N/A (Content Lake only) |
API Output | REST, GraphQL, WebSockets, GraphQL Subscriptions | REST, GraphQL, GROQ, Listen API |
Admin UI | The Studio (Vue 3) | Admin Panel (React, inside Next.js) |
Query Language | SQL (under the hood), filter syntax | GROQ (custom), GraphQL |
Modeling Primitives | Collections, fields, relationships, M2A, translations | Documents, references, arrays, Portable Text |
Real-Time Multiplayer | Presence, Field Locking + Live Updates | Built-in multiplayer (cursors, presence, instant sync) |
Managed Cloud | Directus Cloud | No |
Where Data Lives | Your SQL database | Sanity's Content Lake, vendor-controlled |
Native Realtime APIs | WebSockets, GraphQL Subscriptions | Listen API (Content Lake-specific) |
Native AI Assistant | Yes, in the Studio | Sanity Create, AI Assist (authoring-focused) |
Native MCP server | Yes | No |
Visual Automation | Flows | No (webhooks + Sanity Functions) |
Native Dashboards | Insights | No |
Asset CDN | Bring your own | Built-in CDN with image transforms |
Localization | Translations on any field, all tiers | Plugin-based |
Pricing model | Per-environment / per-seat or self-hosted free | Per-seat + API-call / document / bandwidth quotas |
The main architectural difference.
The two admin UIs, side by side.
Directus Studio
Sanity Studio
Open Studio, hosted backend.
Sanity Studio is MIT licensed. The Studio code is open source, you self-host it, you customize it, you deploy it wherever you want. The Content Lake (the hosted data layer) is proprietary, closed-source SaaS. You can read and fork Sanity Studio. You can't read or run the Content Lake.
Directus is distributed under a source-available license. (See directus.com/license for the live terms.) The source code is fully readable and modifiable, and free to self-host for the vast majority of use cases.
Content modeling.
Both tools model structured content well. The shape of the primitives differs.
Documents in Sanity are typed entries defined by schema files in your Studio repo. References connect documents to each other. Arrays let you compose documents from blocks of varied types. Portable Text is Sanity's structured rich-text format: a tree of typed blocks rather than HTML or markdown.
Collections in Directus are real database tables. Fields are columns. Relationships are foreign keys. Many-to-Any (M2A) lets a single field reference items from any number of unrelated collections, useful for flexible page composition, polymorphic relationships, and arbitrary cross-collection joins. Because the model is the database, the same data is trivially queryable by any system that speaks SQL.
Rich text. Portable Text is more opinionated and is better suited to teams who publish the same content to many surfaces (web, mobile, voice). Directus uses standard rich-text and WYSIWYG fields, plus repeatable groups and M2A for structured composition. More conventional, fine for teams whose primary output is a web front-end.
Localization. Sanity handles localization via plugins or schema-level locale variants. There's no single canonical pattern. Directus stores translations as related rows in a translations table that can hang off any field, available natively on every tier without plugins.
GROQ. Sanity's distinct technical contribution. A query language specifically designed for nested document graphs. Directus speaks SQL under the hood and exposes filter syntax over REST and GraphQL.
The admin experience.
Directus ships the Studio, built in Vue 3 and framed as a workspace, not as a content-publishing tool. The same UI that lets a content editor edit a blog post lets an operations person build a dashboard, configure a workflow, manage permissions, or chat with the built-in AI Assistant.
Sanity ships Sanity Studio, built in React, self-hosted, and fully customizable. You write your schemas in JS/TS, you can replace any component in the Studio with your own React, you can ship custom plugins, you can theme it per project. Real-time multiplayer (cursors, presence, instant sync) is built in.
If your team mixes content people, ops people, analysts, AI agents, and developers who all need to work on the same governed data layer, the Directus Studio is built for that mix and Sanity isn't.
Automation and workflows.
Directus has Flows, a visual automation builder. Drag together triggers, conditions, and operations to build pipelines that run on data changes, schedules, or webhooks. Non-developers can build moderately complex automations. Developers can drop into custom JavaScript at any step.
Sanity does not ship a visual automation builder. Automation comes from three places: webhooks (fire on document changes), Sanity Functions (their serverless functions tied to Content Lake events), and custom Studio plugins. All code-based; none visual.
If your automations are code-owned and your team prefers schema-and-functions-as-code, Sanity's model is clean and modern. If your team includes non-developers who want to build their own automations (content routing, scheduled tasks, multi-step approvals, integrations), Flows is a clear Directus win.
Realtime, delivery, multiplayer.
Three capabilities that show up differently and matter at evaluation time.
Real-time multiplayer editing.
Sanity ships built-in real-time multiplayer in the Studio: live cursors, presence, instant sync of edits across collaborators. Directus has presence indicators and live updates on records, but Sanity's multiplayer feature set is more complete for editorial teams working concurrently on the same documents.
Realtime APIs.
Directus ships native WebSockets and GraphQL Subscriptions in the core. Subscribe to changes on any collection and push live updates to clients without adding infrastructure. Sanity ships the Listen API, which streams Content Lake changes to subscribed clients. Both work. The shapes are different: Directus uses standard protocols any client would use the same way; Sanity's Listen API is specific to the Content Lake.
Content delivery and assets.
Sanity ships a global CDN with on-the-fly image transformations baked in. For a marketing site that serves content globally, their CDN handles delivery without additional configuration. Directus is unopinionated in that it does not ship a built-in global CDN. You bring your own caching layer (CloudFront, Cloudflare, Fastly) and your own asset CDN (S3+CloudFront, Cloudinary, Bunny). Directus ships asset transformations and signed URLs natively, but the global edge layer is your choice by design.
AI.
The Directus AI Assistant is a bring-your-own LLM that lets your team natively chat and work with your data and content.
Directus ships with a native AI Assistant inside the Studio. It's conversational and it takes action. It can create content, translate fields, summarize records, route items for review, and operate against your data with the same access policies as a human user. It's not a separate "AI mode," it's part of the same workspace.
Directus also runs a native MCP server. External AI tools (Claude Desktop, Cursor, ChatGPT, your own agent) can connect and work with the same data using the same access policies. AI is treated as another API consumer.
Sanity has been adding AI features: Sanity Create (AI-first authoring tool) and AI Assist (in-Studio drafting, translation, and metadata help). These are scoped primarily to authoring assistance inside the Studio. There's no native MCP server.
Developer experience.
Both tools get you to a working backend in minutes.
npx
directus-template-cli@latest init
Directus
npx
create sanity@latest
Sanity
Both have CLIs. Both have TypeScript SDKs. Both have docs that range from solid to occasionally thin in specific corners.
Both tools get you to a working backend in minutes.
Both have CLIs. Both have TypeScript SDKs. Sanity's GROQ documentation covers the query language in depth.
GROQ is Sanity's distinct DX feature. For teams that write a lot of nested content queries, the conciseness reduces verbosity compared to standard REST/GraphQL filter syntax. Directus uses SQL on the database side and standard REST/GraphQL filter syntax on the API side.
Directus has a TypeScript SDK with generated types, a more cohesive UI workspace with native AI, automation, dashboards, and realtime out of the box, and broader native capability density.
Schema as code. Both support it. Sanity's schemas are JS/TS files in the Studio repo, version-controlled and code-reviewed naturally. Directus supports it through Schema Snapshots: you snapshot your database schema (since the database IS your schema in Directus) and apply snapshots to other environments. Both work; the mental model differs.
What it actually costs.
Self-hosting (Directus only): Free. You bring infrastructure, do operations, take on backups and upgrades. Sanity has no self-host option for the Content Lake.
Managed cloud: Directus Cloud has starter, team, and growth-style tiers running from low double-digits to a few hundred dollars per month. Sanity runs on a per-seat plus quota model. Growth-tier seats sit in the mid-double-digits per user per month, with overages on API calls, bandwidth, and document counts on top.
The thing that varies most: Sanity's pricing is per-seat plus metered on API calls, bandwidth, and documents. Teams routinely under-estimate Sanity's total cost at scale because the metered line items grow with traffic and content volume, not with users. Model the total bill against your real expected traffic, document count, and seat count at your one-year scale, not the headline tier.
Enterprise: Both have enterprise tiers with SSO, audit logs, dedicated support, and SLAs. Both will quote you.
Neither is perfect.
Three areas where Sanity is weaker | Three areas where Directus is weaker |
|---|---|
The Content Lake is SaaS-only. No self-host, no on-prem, no air-gapped, no VPC deployment. Hard regulatory or sovereignty requirements rule it out for the data layer. | Sanity Studio is fully customizable in ways that go beyond Directus's extension primitives. If your team wants to deeply reshape the editorial UI, Sanity gives you more direct control over the React tree. |
No real database access. Your data lives in their cloud as documents, queryable only through GROQ, GraphQL, or REST. No SQL, no warehouse-native joins, no analytics jobs against the raw store, no sibling services sharing the same tables. | Sanity ships real-time multiplayer editing (live cursors, presence, instant sync) as a built-in feature. Directus has presence and live updates, but the multiplayer fidelity is lower. |
Migration off Sanity is significant work. Documents are in Sanity's content model, accessed through Sanity's APIs, and exporting at scale takes engineering effort, especially for Portable Text content. | GROQ handles nested document graphs. For teams that do a lot of complex content queries, GROQ is more concise than filtering with SQL or GraphQL. |
Who each is (usually) best for.
Directus is usually best for | Sanity is usually best for |
|---|---|
Teams who want their content data to live in a SQL database they own, queryable by any service that speaks SQL | Teams that want a hosted content backend and don't want to operate a database |
Teams with hard requirements around self-hosting, on-premise, air-gapped, EU data sovereignty, or regulated-industry compliance | Teams whose editorial workflow involves multiple editors collaborating in real time on the same documents |
Teams where content, operations, analytics, and AI agents all need to work on the same governed data layer | Developers who want to deeply customize the admin UI and treat the Studio as a fully bespoke React app |
Teams where non-developers own real workflows: dashboards (Insights), visual automations (Flows), AI-assisted operations | Teams who write a lot of nested content queries and would rather use GROQ than SQL or verbose GraphQL |
Projects that need standard realtime APIs (WebSockets, GraphQL Subscriptions) usable from any client, not a vendor-specific Listen API | Projects already standardized on the Sanity JAMstack ecosystem (Visual Editing, Presentation, starters, integrations) |
Projects where AI Assistant or native MCP server are part of the plan, not a "we'll add AI authoring later" item | Teams whose primary integration is "front-end developers consume the Content Lake APIs" and not "shared data layer across services" |
Migration notes.
From Directus
Doable and well-trodden. The standard path: export your Sanity dataset using their CLI (sanity dataset export), transform the NDJSON document stream into a relational schema (document types become collections, references become foreign keys, Portable Text content needs a deliberate translation decision (store as JSON in a column, normalize into structured tables, or render to HTML/markdown) pick the one that matches your downstream consumers), and import into your SQL database. Plugins don't transfer; rebuild Studio customizations as Directus extensions. Webhooks reattach to Flow triggers. Plan the Portable Text translation carefully; it's the migration step that deserves the most engineering attention.
From Sanity
Harder. Sanity's document model is more opinionated than a SQL schema, and any database features you've used (custom Postgres types, advanced indexes, M2A, multi-database joins, materialized views, raw SQL access) don't exist in Sanity. You'd remodel your schema as Sanity documents and migrate data through the Mutation API. Anything outside Sanity's document model (analytics queries, sibling services touching the database, scheduled jobs) needs to be re-architected to live somewhere else.
In both directions, custom code (extensions, plugins, hooks, Functions, Flows) doesn't transfer. Reimplement in the target tool's extension model.
Common questions.
Is Directus better than Sanity?
Neither is better in a general sense. Sanity is a hosted content backend for teams that want a customizable editorial Studio and do not want to manage infrastructure. Directus is a database-first backend for teams that want to own their data in a SQL database they control. Pick based on which of those matches your situation.
Can Sanity be self-hosted?
Partially. The Sanity Studio, which is the admin UI, is open source and self-hosted. The Content Lake, where your data actually lives, is SaaS-only. You cannot run the data layer on your own infrastructure. If data residency, on-premise deployment, or air-gapped infrastructure is a requirement, Sanity is a non-starter.
What is GROQ?
GROQ is Sanity’s custom query language for fetching content from the Content Lake. It has a learning curve for teams coming from SQL or REST filtering.
Is Directus open source?
Directus is source-available with an "open source" version for any organization under $5m revenue annually and 50 employees. The Open Innovation Grant gives individuals and smaller teams the ability to use Directus freely without limits or feature blocks.
How does Sanity pricing work?
Sanity charges per seat plus metered usage for API calls, document counts, and bandwidth. The free tier is usable for small projects. Growth-tier seats run in the mid-double digits per user per month, with overages on top. Teams routinely underestimate total cost at scale because the metered line items grow with traffic and content volume, not just headcount. Model your one-year bill before committing.
Does Directus have real-time multiplayer editing like Sanity?
Not to the same extent. Directus has presence indicators and field locking. Sanity ships live cursors, presence, and instant sync across collaborators as a built-in feature. If multiple editors regularly work on the same document simultaneously, Sanity’s multiplayer experience is more complete.
Does Directus have an MCP server?
Yes. Directus ships a native MCP server. External AI tools such as Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, and custom agents can connect to Directus and operate under the same role-based permissions as human users. Sanity does not ship a native MCP server.
