Menestrel vs Sanity for an Astro site
Sanity has the most generous free tier on the market and then charges $15 per seat. Why per-seat pricing and client sites pull in opposite directions.
Prices and features surveyed at the source on 8 August 2026. They change: check with the vendor before deciding.
Sanity is, technically, one of the best products in this category. The Studio is genuinely pleasant, the query language is a joy, and the free tier includes 20 seats and unlimited locales, which is more than most paid plans elsewhere. Their Astro integration is well travelled.
If you are building one site and you are the only editor, Sanity’s free tier will probably serve you for years, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
Where the models diverge
| Sanity | Menestrel | |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 20 seats, 2 public datasets, 10,000 documents | 1 site, 2 editors, 200 entries |
| Paid | $15/seat/month (Growth), up to 50 seats | €3/month excl. VAT per site |
| Locales | Unlimited, free tier included | Unlimited from the first paid plan |
| Priced by | seat | site |
Per-seat pricing is a good fit for a company where a known team writes content. It is the wrong shape for an agency: every client you onboard is a new seat, their colleague is another, the seasonal person who updates the menu is a third. You end up either paying for people who log in twice a year, or sharing one login between several humans, which is how audit trails die.
We price per site and let seats be unlimited from the first paid plan, because the number of people who touch a brochure site is not a proxy for the value it produces.
Where Sanity is the better choice
- Structured content with real editorial depth. Portable Text, references, arrays of blocks: Sanity models content that a brochure site never needs and a magazine absolutely does.
- You want to customise the editing experience. The Studio is a React application you shape. Our admin is deliberately fixed: you define fields, we render them, and there is nothing to configure.
- Real-time collaboration. Several people in the same document, live. We went the other way on purpose: last write wins, no conflict dialog, because two people editing one page of a plumber’s site is not a scenario worth the complexity it costs.
- A single site, one editor, no budget. The free tier is excellent. Use it.
Where the difference actually bites
Sanity does not deploy your site. It publishes to its content lake and notifies you. Whether the rebuild ran, whether it failed, whether the page is live: yours to handle. This is the gap Menestrel exists to close, and it is the only claim we make that no competitor matches.
Your site keeps no runtime dependency. With Sanity you fetch at build time or at request time. With us, content is frozen into an immutable snapshot on a CDN at publish, and the build reads that. Our API can be off and your client’s site still rebuilds.
The editor sees less, on purpose. The Studio’s flexibility is its strength and, in front of a non-technical client, its cost. We show fields and one button.
If you are already on Sanity with Astro
You are in the best position of anyone reading these pages: your content is
already structured and your Astro integration already speaks Content Layer.
Export your documents to markdown collections and menestrel import takes it
from there, images included.
Keep Sanity for the project that needs Portable Text. Move the twelve brochure sites where seats are the whole cost.
Honestly, the limits
- Publishing takes a build, usually one to three minutes.
- No rich structured content beyond what a site page needs, no references between arbitrary documents, no GROQ.
- No real-time collaborative editing.
- Astro only.
The short version
Sanity is a better content platform. Menestrel is a better fit for a fleet of small sites edited by their owners, because the thing Sanity charges for, people, is the thing an agency has the most of and monetises the least.