From Sanity to KeystoneJS

We are the Sanity to KeystoneJS migration experts

Challenges with Sanity

Key pain points

We obviously prefer Sanity, so much so that our own website is on Sanity. But if you don't have the right implementation team, you might find yourself in a bad situation. Its highly customizable nature can lead to complexity and time-consuming setup processes for less experienced developers. We've inherited our fair share of stinkers, but we advise that before you jump ship, you let us look over it to see if it's salvageable.

That said, if you are considering moving, we can help you migrate away with automated migration scripts, web scraping, and content mapping. It'll be a 1:1 with whatever platform you choose.

Not always plug-and-play

Sanity gives you a ton of flexibility, but it’s not a “drag-and-drop” CMS. If your team prefers instant themes and presets, you’ll need a little extra setup to get started.

Potentially high resource demand

As your content model grows, Sanity gives you incredible power and real-time performance. Just keep in mind that very large projects may require a bit more horsepower behind the scenes.

Less ideal for beginners

Editors love Sanity once everything is set up, but teams switching from traditional CMSs may need a short onboarding period to learn the workflow.

Infrastructure management needed

Unlike hosted CMS platforms, you own your content pipeline. That gives you full control and scalability, but also means setup and environments need to be managed properly.

Technical skill required

Since Sanity is schema-driven, developers can model content precisely the way your business needs it. Non-technical teams benefit from that structure, but setup usually requires engineering support.

Complexity in setup

Sanity doesn’t force rigid templates or assumptions. You have to define everything like content, structure, and workflows. The tradeoff: a bit more initial setup for much more flexibility long-term.

Benefits of KeystoneJS

Key advantages

KeystoneJS is one of those tools that really clicks if your team thinks in code. It's a schema-driven, open-source headless CMS built on Node.js, and the developer experience is genuinely good. You define your content models in TypeScript, Keystone generates a GraphQL API and an admin UI for you, and you're off. There's very little magic or abstraction hiding what's happening under the hood, which we appreciate when building complex projects for clients.

The Prisma ORM integration is a real highlight. Automatic migration generation, type-safe database access, and support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite mean you're not fighting your data layer. If you've ever had to wrangle a CMS into supporting a non-trivial relational content model, you'll understand why this matters. Keystone lets you express those relationships cleanly and query them with a proper GraphQL API.

The document field editor is also worth mentioning. It's one of the more thoughtful rich text implementations we've seen in a headless CMS. You can embed custom React components directly into the editor, which means content teams can work with your actual design system components rather than generic blocks. For teams that care about structured content, Keystone gives you real tools to enforce it.

Where Keystone really shines is in projects where the development team wants full ownership of the stack. There's no vendor lock-in, no proprietary query language, and no surprise pricing tiers. If you want a CMS that feels like a well-designed library rather than a platform, Keystone delivers on that promise.

Schema-as-code with full TypeScript support

Define your entire content model in TypeScript with strong type inference throughout. The schema drives everything from the database to the admin UI to the GraphQL API.

Automatic GraphQL API generation

Every content type you define automatically gets a full CRUD GraphQL API with filtering, pagination, and relationship resolution. No manual endpoint wiring needed.

Prisma-powered database layer

Built on Prisma ORM with automatic migration generation and type-safe queries. Supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite out of the box.

Flexible document field editor

The rich text editor supports custom embedded components that map to your design system, giving content editors structured authoring without sacrificing flexibility.

Granular access control

Fine-grained, field-level access control defined in code. You can write custom logic for create, read, update, and delete operations per field or per list.