For a Next.js site, the best headless CMS depends on how much control and governance you need. Sanity offers flexible, real-time structured content with excellent developer experience; Contentful is a mature, enterprise-grade managed platform; Strapi is open-source and self-hostable, so you own your data and infrastructure. All three pair well with Next.js consumed via ISR.
Quick comparison
- Sanity: flexible content modeling, real-time editing, great DX — hosted, usage-based pricing.
- Contentful: mature, enterprise features, roles and governance — hosted, higher cost.
- Strapi: open-source, self-hostable, full data ownership — you run and maintain it.
Which to choose
- Want fast, flexible structured content with minimal ops: Sanity.
- Enterprise governance, roles, and a managed SLA: Contentful.
- Data residency, self-hosting, or full ownership: Strapi.
Our approach
We use Strapi when clients want to own and self-host their content, and Sanity when they want fast, flexible modeling without running infrastructure. Either way we consume content in Next.js with Incremental Static Regeneration, so pages stay static-fast and fully crawlable while editors publish freely.