Sanity vs PlanetScale

Structured content platform — headless CMS with real-time + GROQ
vs. Serverless MySQL (Vitess) and Postgres at scale

Pricing tiers

Sanity

Free

20 seats. 2 public datasets. 10K documents. 250K API req + 1M CDN req/month. Content Agent + live preview + visual editing.

Free

Growth

$15 per seat/month. 50 seats. 2 datasets (public or private). 25K docs. Same API limits + pay-as-you-go overages.

$15/mo

Enterprise

Custom. SAML SSO, Media Library, dedicated support, 99.99% SLA.

Custom

Sanity website ↗

PlanetScale

Postgres EBS single-node — PS-5

Single-node EBS, 512 MiB RAM, arm64. Entry point for Postgres.

$5/mo

Postgres EBS HA — PS-5

3-node (primary + 2 replicas), 512 MiB, arm64.

$15/mo

Vitess (non-Metal) — PS-10

Vitess MySQL sharded cluster, 1 GiB RAM.

$39/mo

Postgres Metal — M-10

3-node Metal, 1 GiB RAM + 10 GiB local storage. Much higher IOPS.

$50/mo

Vitess Metal — M-160

Vitess Metal, 16 GiB RAM + 110 GiB storage.

$609/mo

Enterprise

Custom agreements, dedicated regions, 99.99% SLA.

Custom

PlanetScale website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing free on Sanity vs pg-ebs-nonha-starter on PlanetScale.

Metric	Sanity	PlanetScale
ha	—	0 nodes
ram mib	—	512 MiB

Features

Sanity · 16 features

Agent Context — Expose your content schema + docs to LLM agents.
Content Agent (AI) — AI assistant inside Studio for generation + translation.
Content History — Every change versioned. Rollback + diff.
Content Lake — Distributed real-time DB for structured content. Multi-region replicas.
Datasets — Logical content partitions (stage/prod/etc.). Easy cloning.
GROQ — Graph-Relational Object Queries — JSON-native query language.
Image CDN — Smart transforms (crop, format, quality) via URL params.
Internationalization — Multiple locales per document with native i18n plugins.
Live Previews — Draft previews with stega-encoded content.
Media Library (Ent) — Org-wide media with DAM features.
Portable Text — Structured rich text format (JSON). Portable across channels.
Real-Time Collaboration — Live presence + collaborative editing.
Sanity Studio — Open-source React editor — customize with your own components + workflow.
Scheduled Publishing — Schedule content to publish at a future date.
Visual Editing — Click-to-edit inline on your Next.js/etc. website.
Webhooks — Events on create/update/delete with GROQ filter.

PlanetScale · 12 features

Backups — Automated daily backups with retention.
Database Branching — Git-like branches of your DB schema (not data). Create, diff, merge via deploy r…
Deploy Requests — Schema changes in a feature branch get reviewed + auto-applied to main with zero…
HIPAA — HIPAA-compliant deployments (Enterprise).
Metal (NVMe) — Dedicated NVMe local storage. 10x IOPS vs EBS, latency-critical workloads.
PgBouncer Pooler — Managed PgBouncer for Postgres clusters. Optional dedicated pooler.
PlanetScale Boost — Query result cache with sub-ms reads.
Point-in-Time Recovery — Restore cluster to any point within retention window.
Postgres on PlanetScale — PostgreSQL 15+ with the same branching + deploy-request flow. Launched 2024.
Query Insights — Per-query performance analytics, slow query tracking, explain plans.
Read-only Regions — Route reads to the nearest region for lower latency.
Vitess (MySQL at scale) — Horizontally-sharded MySQL (YouTube-scale) — original PlanetScale offering.

Developer interfaces

Kind	Sanity	PlanetScale
CLI	Sanity CLI	PlanetScale CLI (pscale)
SDK	@sanity/client, sanity-python, @sanity/ui + next-sanity	@planetscale/database
REST	Image CDN, Sanity HTTP API	Management API
MCP	Sanity MCP	PlanetScale MCP
OTHER	GROQ Query Language, Webhooks	MySQL Wire Protocol, Postgres Wire Protocol

Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Sanity and PlanetScale are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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