Sanity vs Payload: Ultimate Hosted vs Self-Hosted CMS Guide

If you're building a Next.js project and researching headless CMS options, you've probably landed on Sanity and Payload CMS as your two finalists. I've shipped production sites on both — Sanity for client projects with tight editorial workflows, Payload for multi-tenant apps where I needed full control over the data layer. After auditing both platforms in depth for 2026, I'm convinced the hosting model is the single most important decision you'll make, and everything else flows from it.

This guide walks through the actual trade-offs between a hosted Content Lake (Sanity) and a self-hosted database (Payload), based on real documentation, GitHub issues, and production experience — not marketing pages.

Two fundamentally different architectures

Before comparing features, you need to understand what you're actually choosing between, because these aren't two flavors of the same thing.

Sanity stores your content in a proprietary hosted backend called the Content Lake. You get a managed CDN, a media library, real-time collaboration, and a query language called GROQ — all as hosted services. The Studio (your admin panel) is a single-page app that connects to this backend. You can host the Studio yourself or let Sanity host it, but the Content Lake is always Sanity's infrastructure.

Payload takes the opposite approach. It's an MIT-licensed Node.js framework that runs on your infrastructure. You pick your database (Postgres, MongoDB, or SQLite), you pick your hosting (VPS, Vercel, Cloudflare, Docker on a bare metal server), and the admin panel runs as part of your Next.js application. There is no external API call between your frontend and your CMS — the Local API hits your database directly from server components.

This isn't a minor architectural detail. It shapes your pricing, your security posture, your deployment strategy, your performance characteristics, and your exit options.

The decision tree

Here's how I walk clients through this. Answer these five questions honestly, and the right choice usually becomes obvious.

Question 1: Who owns your infrastructure?

If you have a devops team (or you are the devops team and you're comfortable with that), Payload gives you control that Sanity can't match. You run your own database, your own backups, your own CDN. No API rate limits beyond what your infrastructure can handle. No per-seat pricing eating into your margins as your editorial team grows.

If you don't have devops capacity and you want someone else to worry about uptime, CDN configuration, and database scaling, Sanity handles all of that. You deploy your Studio and your frontend — that's it. The Content Lake, CDN, media storage, and real-time sync are Sanity's problem.

The honest trade-off: Sanity charges you money for that convenience. Payload charges you time and expertise.

Question 2: How sensitive is your data?

This one's straightforward. If you have compliance requirements around data residency, if your legal team needs data in a specific geographic region, or if "third-party cloud storage" is a non-starter for your organization, Payload is your only option between these two. It's MIT-licensed, self-hosted, and your data stays wherever you put it.

Sanity's Content Lake is proprietary SaaS. You can export your data, but at runtime your content lives in Sanity's infrastructure. For marketing sites and blogs, this is usually fine. For regulated industries, healthcare data, or internal tools handling sensitive business logic, it can be a deal-breaker.

Question 3: What does your query pattern look like?

Sanity's GROQ is genuinely powerful. It lets you shape, join, and project data at the API layer in ways that reduce the amount of work your frontend has to do. If you're building a content-heavy site where editorial teams create complex, interlinked content and your frontend needs flexible queries across document types, GROQ is excellent at fetching exactly what you need in a single request.

Payload's Local API eliminates the network hop entirely. When you call payload.find() from a Next.js server component, you're hitting your database directly — no HTTP request, no CDN, no API rate limit. For applications where you need to fetch data during server-side rendering and every millisecond of latency matters, this is a significant architectural advantage.

The trade-off shows up at scale. Sanity's CDN handles traffic spikes for you, but you'll hit rate limits and bandwidth caps that are tied to your pricing plan. Payload gives you unlimited queries against your own database, but you're responsible for making sure that database can handle the load.

Question 4: How complex is your editorial workflow?

Sanity ships with Comments, Tasks, Content Releases, and scheduled publishing out of the box. The Presentation tool gives editors live visual preview with click-to-edit overlays. If you have a large editorial team that needs approval workflows, collaborative editing, and staging environments without writing custom code, Sanity has a meaningful head start.

Payload gives you versions, field-level access control, and hooks that let you build any workflow you want. But "any workflow you want" means you're building it. If your editorial needs are simple (create, review, publish), Payload's built-in capabilities are enough. If you need multi-stage approvals with role-based gates, you'll be writing that logic yourself using hooks and access control functions.

Question 5: What's your exit strategy?

This is the question most teams skip, and it's the one that matters most three years from now.

With Payload, your data is in your database. If you outgrow Payload or decide to switch to a different framework, your content is sitting in Postgres or MongoDB — formats that every other tool on earth can read. Your schemas are TypeScript files. Your migrations are SQL files. There's no proprietary format to escape from.

With Sanity, your data is in the Content Lake. Sanity provides export tooling, and your schemas are portable JSON definitions, but your runtime queries are GROQ — a language that only works with Sanity's backend. Your architectural decisions (how you structure references, how you query data, how you handle previews) are coupled to Sanity's platform. Migrating away means rewriting your data access layer, not just moving a database.

This isn't necessarily a reason to avoid Sanity. Vendor lock-in is a trade-off, not a sin. But you should make that trade-off consciously, not discover it when your pricing tier changes.

Where each platform struggles

I've spent time in both GitHub issue trackers, and both platforms have real pain points that their marketing won't mention.

Sanity's pain points

The most consistent complaints are about Studio performance. Multiple GitHub issues report keystroke lag in text inputs — delays of 300-500ms per keystroke that make editing feel sluggish. This gets worse with large arrays (900+ references) and deeply nested Portable Text structures. The backend (Content Lake and CDN) is generally fast and reliable. The friction is in the editor experience, and it tends to be schema-complexity dependent.

The other real concern is pricing overages. Sanity's free and Growth plans have metered limits on API requests, bandwidth, documents, and assets. If your traffic spikes or your content library grows faster than expected, you can hit hard caps that block operations until you upgrade. Estimate your usage carefully before committing to a plan.

Payload's pain points

The most serious concern is security. In 2025-2026, Payload disclosed a critical SQL injection vulnerability (CVSS 9.8) affecting Postgres and SQLite adapters when JSON or richText fields are present. They also disclosed a cross-collection IDOR vulnerability in multi-auth setups with serial IDs. Both have been patched, but they highlight a real risk: if you self-host Payload, you must stay current on upgrades. Falling behind on patches can leave you exposed to severe vulnerabilities.

The second cluster of complaints is dev-server performance. Users report 10-60 second load times and multi-gigabyte RAM usage during development, particularly with large schemas and multi-tenant configurations. This is partly tied to specific Next.js versions — maintainers have identified regressions in Next.js 15.5+ and are working on fixes. But it means your local development experience can be rough if you're running a complex project on constrained hardware.

The real cost comparison

Teams often compare Sanity's $15/seat/month to Payload's "free" and think the decision is obvious. It's not.

Sanity's costs are predictable and visible: per-seat pricing plus metered usage. You know what you're paying, and you can budget for it. The surprise comes when you scale — more editors, more API requests, more bandwidth — and your bill grows faster than expected.

Payload's costs are hidden and variable: hosting (a VPS, Vercel, or cloud provider), database (managed Postgres or MongoDB), object storage for media (S3 or equivalent), backup infrastructure, monitoring and observability, and the engineering time to set up and maintain all of it. For a solo developer or small team with existing infrastructure, this can be cheaper than Sanity. For a team that needs to provision everything from scratch, the total cost of ownership can exceed Sanity's pricing, especially in the first year.

The honest answer is: neither is universally cheaper. Run the numbers for your specific situation.

My recommendations by project type

After working with both platforms across different project types, here's how I'd frame the decision.

For marketing sites and blogs where you have a non-technical editorial team and you want fast time-to-market, lean towards Sanity. The hosted infrastructure, visual editing, and editorial workflow tools will save you weeks of setup time.

For e-commerce catalogs and product-heavy sites where you need complex relational data, field-level access control, and server-side queries without API rate limits, lean towards Payload. The Local API and database control give you performance headroom that's hard to match with a hosted API.

For multi-tenant applications and internal tools where you need tenant isolation, custom auth flows, and full control over the data layer, Payload is the stronger choice. Its multi-tenant patterns and database-level isolation are more explicit than Sanity's multi-dataset approach.

For regulated industries where data residency and self-hosting are requirements, Payload is your only option. Sanity's Content Lake is proprietary SaaS, and there's no self-hosted variant.

For large editorial teams with complex publishing workflows, Sanity's built-in Comments, Tasks, Content Releases, and role-based access control give you a head start. You can build equivalent workflows in Payload, but you'll be writing more custom code.

The question that matters most

Here's what I tell every client who asks me "Sanity or Payload?":

The CMS is not the product. Your website, your app, your editorial workflow — that's the product. The CMS is infrastructure. Pick the infrastructure model that lets your team ship and iterate fastest, and make sure you understand what you're trading away.

If you trade away infrastructure control for convenience, make sure Sanity's pricing and platform constraints won't become a problem as you scale. If you trade away convenience for control, make sure you have the engineering capacity to operate what you're building.

Both are excellent tools. The wrong choice is the one you make without understanding the trade-offs.

Let me know in the comments if you have questions about choosing between hosted and self-hosted CMS setups, and subscribe for more practical development guides.

Thanks, Matija