Magnolia vs. Sanity

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Magnolia
Score 8.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Founded in 1997 with a vision to create the first truly open content management system, Magnolia is presented as a fast way to launch digital experiences. With a mission to help clients move fast and stay flexible and boasting users among brands like Atlassian and The New York Times, Magnolia DXP supports industries ranging from automotive to telecommunications, offering enterprise features and headless agility to help them stay ahead. From humble beginnings in Basel, Magnolia's…N/A
Sanity
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Sanity from the company of the same name in San Francisco is a platform for structured content that comes with an open-source editing environment called Sanity Studio that users can customize with JavaScript and a real-time hosted data store.N/A
Pricing
MagnoliaSanity
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MagnoliaSanity
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
MagnoliaSanity
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
MagnoliaSanity
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
8.0
70 Ratings
2% below category average
Sanity
-
Ratings
Role-based user permissions8.070 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
8.0
69 Ratings
4% above category average
Sanity
-
Ratings
API8.562 Ratings00 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language7.562 Ratings00 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
8.0
75 Ratings
5% above category average
Sanity
-
Ratings
WYSIWYG editor8.566 Ratings00 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness8.466 Ratings00 Ratings
Admin section8.071 Ratings00 Ratings
Page templates8.973 Ratings00 Ratings
Library of website themes7.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design8.564 Ratings00 Ratings
Publishing workflow7.574 Ratings00 Ratings
Form generator7.059 Ratings00 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
7.5
70 Ratings
2% above category average
Sanity
-
Ratings
Content taxonomy7.564 Ratings00 Ratings
SEO support7.064 Ratings00 Ratings
Bulk management7.858 Ratings00 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions8.063 Ratings00 Ratings
Community / comment management7.052 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
MagnoliaSanity
Small Businesses
Divi
Divi
Score 9.9 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Image Relay
Image Relay
Score 9.5 out of 10
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
MagnoliaSanity
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(79 ratings)
8.5
(2 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.1
(9 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(69 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.5
(68 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
MagnoliaSanity
Likelihood to Recommend
Magnolia
Magnolia is a very capable DXP, that provides client with lots of flexibility in composing its own stack. While the core of the platform is a content management system, the open architecture of Magnolia DXP allows it to connect to any platform, allowing client to extend the capabilities. One scenario would be a centralized content hub - where through a single platform, content authors can choose which channel to distribute what content. For example, long form content for consumers viewing on a laptop, short form content for those using a mobile browser. This allow the client to personalized the experience based on channels. Another scenarios would be leveraging on GenAI - using Magnolia's built-in connector to ChatGPT. If that is not the service that one desire, you can always connect to another AI service such as Google Gemini. With GenAI, connected, content author can use AI as co-pilot to help them scale up their content production.
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Sanity.io
Customization and creation of CMS are almost limitless. Building and customizing the platform is facilitated by a wealth of documentation and video content. As opposed to graphql and traversing rest APIs, Sanity's query language is a breath of fresh air. It really helps you if you want something lightweight but at the same time you want it to be scalable then I think Sanity is your best option.
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Pros
Magnolia
  • Speed of development - time to delivery from zero to MVP was excellent
  • Ease of use - the authoring experience is very easy to build and train
  • PAAS/SAAS - the managed service platform removed the traditional overhead of running in-house technologies, meaning we could focus on value add, with less time spent keeping the lights on.
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Sanity.io
  • GraphQL support.
  • Nice Intuitive Web interface to write blogs.
  • They provide us a subdomain on their cloud so that we can start testing our things directly on the web.
Read full review
Cons
Magnolia
  • The documentation provides samples that are often out of context, and difficult to know where the provided example code should be implemented. More tutorials providing the full project or step-by-step instructions on how to implement subject material would help greatly. Baeldung is a resource I would consider the gold standard in how this is done in other spaces.
  • The use of JCR and Nodes makes object serialization/deserialization painful. Jackson compatibility or similar would be a welcome enhancement to the developer experience. Maybe leveraging code-gen from light modules to build model classes when possible could help accomplish this.
  • Modifying the home layout from light modules is frustrating. It seems that any configuration overrides made merge with the default rather than overwriting, which makes for a difficult combination of guess-and-check while referencing the documentation to see what should be in each row/column when making changes.
  • Including "mark all as read" or "delete all" in the notifications app would be a great quality of life improvement. It seems that by default, users have to individually select messages and operate them.
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Sanity.io
  • CMS can be a bit hard to work with for the new users
  • Documentation should include more examples of the output and code along with the output.
  • Custom inputs are quite difficult to start and work with.
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Likelihood to Renew
Magnolia
We have invested a lot of time and energy into tailoring a solution that works for the company.
We think the new features in v6.2 will help us get to the next level
We also don't have the resources to rebuild a website platform from scratch even if we wanted to
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Sanity.io
No answers on this topic
Usability
Magnolia
We've shown it to a number of users both clients and our own team and despite initial apprehensions, they "get it" very quickly. It's intuitive and friendly and quick to perform daily tasks. We once had a client tell us "Using Magnolia makes me smile" which says it all for us.
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Sanity.io
No answers on this topic
Performance
Magnolia
I gave [it] 7/10 only because of the loading time of pages. Otherwise, I think it deserves an 8. Normally this is not an issue per [se] but considering the rating matrix and as I have been asked to honestly write about it. Yes, the page loading times could be improved.
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Sanity.io
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Magnolia
You always get an answer based on your SLA. But you always get a solution. That's the successfactor in this case. To often i was frustrated about people in a company without even a clue what there product is about or how to solve a problem. Magnolia's Support Team does a very good job and try to help you in most of the cases
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Sanity.io
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Magnolia
I've used several CMSs like AEM and EpiServer, and comparatively, they all excel at different things. Magnolia is the best to develop for/against. Episerver has the best/most fluid UI in terms of content editing, and the overall admin experience AEM is just all around sucks.
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Sanity.io
Pricing is better than graph cms. and easy to use the intuitive interface to write my blog.
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Return on Investment
Magnolia
  • Magnolia has brought about positive impacts. For instance, we need not outsource web design and marketing services because thanks to this software, we can handle most work inhouse
  • The software is affordable with no compromises on capabilities and therefore it is gives us value for money.
  • The templates makes the whole process easy
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Sanity.io
  • It helped us to create an excellent developer experience and good experience for their editors as well
  • Sanity has created an incredible platform that effortlessly balances good DX for content modeling and good UI for content editing.
  • Pay-as-you-go hybrid service, no need to worry about reaching a cap and having to suddenly pay $500
Read full review
ScreenShots

Magnolia Screenshots

Screenshot of the customer experience: Brings together content and audiovisual digital assets to form more compelling digital experiences.Screenshot of the Magnolia App Launcher, used to switch between workspaces and manage pagesScreenshot of Magnolia's native analytics integration framework, used to take advantage of data directly in the authoring UI, coupled to content.Screenshot of global search that brings relevant content, no matter where it resides.Screenshot of customizing the ecommerce experience.