15 Kickass Sanity CMS Examples (So Many Use Cases!)
Diverse Sanity examples to show you what's possible with this amazing CMS!
In need of a Shopify + Sanity example/inspriation? Check out Cliik!
Cliik is a beautiful, dynamic, ecommerce experience powered by Sanity and Shopify.
The product pages are rich in content, media, and design. They are dynamic with features like hoverable hotspots that upon hover reveal a small video demonstrating that area of the product.
Tech Stack
- Sanity
- Vue
- Nuxt
- Mux
- Shopify (using Sanity Connect)
Here's an example of a local service business leveraging Sanity CMS. It's a small and mighty site boasting perfect Lighthouse scores on desktop.
Tech Stack
- Sanity
- Next.js
- React
- TailwindCSS
- Vercel
Sanity Considerations, Final Thoughts, and FAQs
Sanity is an excellent choice for all types of content and organizations
As you can see Sanity handles diverse content needs, from small sites with one content model to enterprises serving content to many applications, users, and languages.
When is Santiy a bad choice?
For some, the turnoff of Sanity is the requirement for technical know-how to get it set up. Mainly, it requires code to define the schema and deploy Sanity Studio (the UI for managing content). But, this is not a drawback for most, it's actually a positive quality of the system. The ability to use code enables very flexible content models and workflows that at the end of the day, don't require technical knowledge for editors to use.
Given that there is a generous free tier, I recommend testing it out by creating a new project and adding some of your content models to it. You'll get the feel for it pretty quickly.
Sanity's documentation is very helpful and plentiful so I also recommend giving that a read too.
What languages do you need to know?
JavaScript/TypeScript. Sanity Studio is fully typed and it's recommended to use TypeScript. However, it'll work just fine if you use vanilla JavaScript.
Besides that, whatever other language/platform/framework you want to use on the frontend. Sanity delivers its content via a GraphQL API or a GROQ API (their custom query language that is easy to learn).
Is Sanity open source?
Partially. Sanity Studio is open source which is the frontend where editors create, edit, and publish content. Once the content is created, it's stored in Sanity Content Lake which is the datastore/backend and the content is then available via the API (the backend is not open source).
This balance is beautiful. The open-source status of the UI is actually a really powerful concept. It's not just about customizing the colors or logos, no, you can customize workflows, previews, plugins, etc.
Here's a use case I ran into: I have a reusable set of fields called "Post Fields" which contains the title and image field. Without customization, the UI would show "Untitled" in the content grid as it doesn't know where my title is. With just a couple of lines of code, I point the UI to which fields I want to show in my preview.
Here's what that looks like:
All of these customizations are done locally and previewed on a local development server which is super simple and easy to use.
This allows developers to make modifications to the structure locally, preview them, and publish them when they are finalized.
Plus you can version control it to keep track of changes and revert any issues that may pop up. I push all my changes to my Github account for this very reason.
Once published, Sanity Studio is updated for all editors and is available on your domain.
I found it helpful to look at the default Santiy Studio folder structure to gain an understanding of the code. It's rather straightforward as you can see.
How's their rich text?
One of the flexible places is Portable Text (their implementation of rich text).
It's... incredible.
You/a developer can create custom components that editors/non-technical people can easily add in the middle of rich text... meaning you're not limited to just H1-H6, blockquote, etc. You can create things like a comparison grid, callouts, charts, or anything you can dream up.
Is Sanity an enterprise CMS?
Absolutely. My two top enterprise CMSs are Sanity and Hygraph.
Sanity is more flexible, but Hygraph is less technical and offers some unique features like field data that comes from remote sources.
How do I migrate my data to Sanity?
There are two guides I recommend checking out:
- Sanity's Guide
- My Guide that supplements Sanity's with gotchas and best practices