15 Kickass Sanity CMS Examples (So Many Use Cases!)
Diverse Sanity examples to show you what's possible with this amazing CMS!
Sanity is a beautiful combination of flexibility and maintainability.
I'm excited to show you these Sanity examples demonstrating the capabilities of this wonderful CMS.
Whether you are evaluating Sanity as a CMS or looking for inspiration, this post is for you.
First I'll go over the various Santiy CMS examples and highlight their tech stacks, content models, and other highlights (from enterprise examples to small sites).
Then, I'll give quick bits of info that will help you understand Sanity.
Let's dive into the examples of apps built with Sanity!
List of The Best Sanity CMS Examples
Cloudflare is in my top three favorite tech products/services, so naturally I have to list it first. :)
Specifically within Cloudflare, I love Cloudflare Workers. It's a serverless product that lets you run code at the edge offering ludicrous speed a capabilities.
When Cloudflare needed a CMS to showcase projects using Workers, they turned to Sanity.
Tech Stack
- Sanity
- GatsyJS
- Cloudflare Workers
Here's an enterprise organization (bringing in around $1 billion in revenue/year) that leverages Sanity. Sanity is on my list of the best CMSs for Enterprises.
Highlights:
- Multiple locales (8 languages users can select from)
- Content-rich pages such as destinations that feature everything you want to know broken down into sections so it's not one massive block of text. The destination pages include a custom navigation with a scroll spy to highlight the current section you are on.
- Other content models include travel info pages and routes (another large content model worth checking out).
If you're wondering whether or not Sanity can handle your enterprise project, one, look at Eurostar, and two, almost definitely, yes.
Tech Stack
- Sanity
- React
- GraphQL API
According to Sanity's Website (/Eurostar?), "they saw an 80%+ decrease in the time required to complete CMS-related development tasks".
Reloadify is a SaaS offering a multilingual digital experience.
Content Models
- Team Members (example) – Beautiful team pages that include the person, their position, qualities, bio, other team members, and a reference to the articles this team member has written.
- Blog/Content Hub (example) – Includes a table of contents (likely made possible by the customizable portable text as IDs are added to the headers), categories, author info, and more.
Tech Stack
- Sanity
- Next.js
For publications or other content-heavy sites, team features become a key selling point of CMSs.
How well does the CMS handle a team of editors creating, editing, and publishing content?
Can multiple editors work on one article at the same time?
Answers: Very well and yes.
Let ACS Publications be a sound demonstration of an enterprise publication leveraging the powerful collaboration features of Sanity including real-time collaboration letting all the editors access changes in real-time to create the best content, quickly.
Content Models
- Locations (example) – Fields include time zones, languages, best times to visit, and a first-party current calculator made possible with custom components.
- Travel Tips (example) – A simple blog that honestly could use some work such as adding some margin/a gap below each paragraph.
- Cheap Flights (example) – Lots of data points outlining the details of various flights including pictures that are being pulled in via a reference
Tech Stack
- Sanity
- NodeJs & Python
- Next.js
- GenAI
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)
Wow! I'm not sure what's cooler – the website or the product.
This website displays many videos demonstrating their product which is available via Shopify product pages.
The product? Check out their videos as they are worth a thousand words :)
Tech Stack
- Sanity
- Next.js
- Vercel
- Mux
- Shopify
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
I think I have a natural tendency to like websites that are unique.
This website is anything but cookie-cutter.
Tech Stack
- Sanity
- Nuxt.js
- Shopify (Sanity Connect)
This may be a WIP site (honestly I can't tell), but I wanted to feature it because of the graphs within the CMS data.
It appears they are storing sports data in Sanity and displaying the data in beautiful graphs and tables. They are using custom components to render this data.
Tech Stack
- Sanity
- Angular
- Vercel
Zach, the Author of this site, publishes some banger blogs!
Let me define "banger":
- Content-heavy body fields (probably doing well with SEO)
- A table of contents on the left that's sticky while you scroll down
- A quiz on the right to generate leads
- A list of articles that link to the currently viewed article
This is also an example of a WordPress to Sanity migration.
Eat Karnel is a marketing site and ordering platform. It's a dynamic site made possible with custom web development and is incredibly fast, partially thanks to Sanity's API.
Dog Years leverages Sanity to create a simple yet nicely designed blog. It's an incredible fast-loading site with near-perfect Lighthouse Scores. This goes to show Sanity is a viable CMS for even a single content model.
This is a feel-good site that helps people find local resources such as food pantries, crisis intervention, and youth groups – built with Sanity.
Here's a simple portfolio website leveraging Sanity to display media and photoshoot locations. While Sanity is incredibly powerful and customizable, it's also a suitable CMS for simple data management.
Tech Stack:
- Sanity
- Next.js
- TailwindCSS
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