Picking a headless CMS in 2026: the four-question test
Forget feature matrices. Answer four questions about your editors, your locales, your integrations, and your runtime — and the choice writes itself.
Picking a CMS should take one meeting, not six months. The market has matured: Dato, Sanity, Storyblok, Contentful, and Hygraph all ship visual editing, strong APIs, and decent localization. The differentiators are smaller than the vendor marketing suggests.
Here are the four questions we ask every client before we open a single browser tab:
1. Who edits, and how often? If your marketing team edits daily and hates JSON, you need a visual editor with block-level previews — Storyblok or Contentful. If your editors are developers or structured-data specialists, Sanity's Studio is the best tool on the market. Daily editing cadence matters more than feature matrices.
2. How many locales, and who manages translations? Dato has the best localization model at the field level — one record, many locales, clean API. Storyblok handles it adequately. Sanity's i18n story requires a plugin and some discipline. If you're shipping more than four locales with human translators, Dato is hard to beat.
Referenced in this article
A 1,400-page SAP marketing site, edited by 40 humans without conflict.
3. What's already in your integration stack? If your team lives in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Contentful's ecosystem is mature. If you need custom webhooks and Typescript SDK coverage, Sanity or Dato. If you want a visual editor your non-technical stakeholders can demo, Storyblok wins the boardroom.
4. Where does the site run? Edge-rendered Next.js on Vercel or Cloudflare? Any of the above works. Astro islands? Sanity and Dato have first-class support. If you need ISR with webhook-based revalidation, Storyblok's webhook story is the smoothest.
Answer those four questions honestly and the choice writes itself. We've shipped on all five platforms — call us if you want a second opinion.
Related work