Sanity

Shopify's built-in content tools work for product descriptions and basic pages. Once your content strategy goes beyond that (landing pages, editorial, localised content, campaign pages), you need a proper CMS.

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Sanity gives your marketing team a visual content studio that connects directly to your Hydrogen frontend. They create pages, update campaigns, and publish content without filing a dev ticket. And because Sanity stores content as structured data (not blobs of HTML), that content is queryable, reusable, and ready for AI agents to read and act on.

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This is the key reason we chose Sanity over alternatives. Shopify's Storefront MCP, Catalog MCP, and Dev MCP all favour headless architectures. Sanity's structured content model is purpose-built for the agentic commerce era. If you're building a storefront today that needs to work with AI tools tomorrow, Sanity is the content layer.

Structured content, not HTML blobs

Content in Sanity is stored as structured data with defined schemas. This means your content can be queried, filtered, and transformed across channels. Not trapped in a WYSIWYG editor that only renders one way.

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Real-time collaboration

Multiple editors can work on the same document simultaneously. Live preview shows exactly what the published page will look like. No save-and-refresh workflows.

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AI-ready architecture

Sanity's structured content is purpose-built for AI agents to read, query, and surface. As Shopify rolls out MCP integrations and agentic commerce tools, your content layer is already compatible.

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Developer experience

Sanity's APIs are fast and well-documented. Content changes propagate instantly. The developer experience is significantly better than Contentful or Prismic for complex content models.

We pair Sanity with Shopify Hydrogen and Algolia. Sanity handles content, Shopify handles commerce, Algolia handles search and discovery. Each tool does what it's best at. The frontend pulls from all three via APIs, rendered on Shopify's Oxygen edge network for global performance.

Do I need Sanity if I'm on a Shopify theme?

Probably not. Sanity is for headless builds where the frontend is decoupled from Shopify. If you're on a Liquid theme, Shopify's built-in content tools and metafields are usually enough.

How does Sanity compare to Prismic?

We've used both extensively. Prismic is simpler to set up and works well for smaller content models. Sanity is more powerful for complex content architectures, multi-market content, and AI readiness. For new headless builds, we default to Sanity.