There Is No Visual Editor

This is the most important thing to understand about Sanity: Sanity Studio is a configuration framework, not an out-of-the-box editing environment.

You define your schemas in JavaScript/TypeScript. Sanity Studio renders a form based on those schemas. The result is a functional admin interface – but it's form-based, not visual. There's no live preview of your content in your actual frontend built into the platform.

Preview in Sanity is something you build yourself – using Sanity's preview API hooks, you wire up a preview pane or a separate preview URL. This is a developer task, not a platform feature.

b10cks ships a two-way-bound visual editor where editors click on elements in the live preview and the editing panel jumps to those fields – in real time, without a page reload. This is platform-level, not implementation-level. Zero developer setup for the editorial experience.

GROQ vs. REST

Sanity uses GROQ (Graph-Relational Object Queries) – a powerful, expressive query language designed specifically for Sanity's document model. If you learn it, it's genuinely good.

The trade-off: GROQ is proprietary to Sanity. Your SDK choices, your frontend integrations, and your developer onboarding are all conditioned on familiarity with a language that exists nowhere else. That's a real form of vendor lock-in that's easy to overlook when GROQ feels like just another query language.

b10cks offers REST – standard, transferable, framework-agnostic. Any developer you hire already knows how to consume these APIs.

Self-Hosting: One Matters More Than You Think

Sanity Studio – the frontend editing environment – is open source and can be deployed anywhere. But Sanity's Content Lake – the backend, the database, the actual content storage – is Sanity's proprietary managed cloud. It cannot be self-hosted.

This means that no matter how you customize Sanity Studio, your content always lives on Sanity's infrastructure. You can't run Sanity on-premise, in your own AWS account, or under your own data governance.

b10cks is fully self-hostable. The backend, the database, the storage – all of it runs wherever you decide. Self-hosting requires a single Docker Compose command and your own infrastructure.

Localization Is Not a Platform Feature

Sanity doesn't have a localization system. You implement localization yourself – typically using a community plugin (sanity-plugin-internationalized-array or similar) that stores locale variants as object fields on documents. The approach works, but it's not standardized, not maintained by Sanity, and not integrated into the editing workflow.

For production multilingual products, this means developers spend time on infrastructure that b10cks ships by default: field-level translation control, locale inheritance, per-locale publish controls, locale switching in the editor.

The Seat Pricing Problem

Sanity's free plan is generous: 20 seats at no cost. But the Growth plan is $15/seat/month with no upper bound on seat count. For a 20-editor team, Growth costs $300/month in seat fees. For 30 editors, $450/month.

And Growth is still limited: 25,000 documents, 5 permission roles.

b10cks has no per-seat fees. Invite your entire company – developers, content managers, stakeholders, clients – without the meter running. You pay for storage and traffic. That's all.