How to easily migrate from Contentful to Sanity

Written by Even Westvang

As we’ve been working away at our infrastructure, we have cast the occasional sidelong glance at other companies with projects based on some of the same principles as Sanity.

The great thing about headless CMSes is that they don’t lock you into technological choices. You can deliver your front-ends on whatever technology you like. Could the same hold true for data backends? Of course it can. Given that the system that you are importing to organizes data at least as well as the system you're importing from.

The team at Sanity have built a free contentful-to-sanity migration plugin.

The exporter takes a Contentful Space and creates a complete Sanity project for you from scratch. We both translate the schema and upload your data, including your assets and references.

Afterwards, you’ll have your data in a collaborative editor on a real-time backend, and a permissively licensed editor that you can extend with your own code and easily deploy.

Migrate your content to Sanity for free in 5 steps

The best way to evaluate Sanity for your team is with content they are already familiar with.

With the contentful-to-sanity migration tool, you can get up and running with your content in a Sanity Studio in no time with 5 quick steps:

1. Initiate an empty Sanity Studio in a new free project.
2. Run the migration tool with one simple command with a token to access your Contentful space.
3. Run a command to import your content to a Sanity dataset.
4. Change a line of code in the Studio configuration to use your content types exported from Contentful.
5. Run the command to deploy the Studio and invite your team to get a feel for how it is to work with their content.

The migration tool offers an efficient way for your teams to test Sanity. Developers can quickly get a feel for Sanity’s great developer experience, and content creators can to test out the clean, real-time editing environment.

Sanity offers unlimited free projects, unlimited admin users on the free plan, and generous API quotas.

After the migration, you can let developers test out the Studio Customization Framework, Sanity’s Content Lake and APIs. They will be able to query the content more freely, and customize the Sanity Studio with fewer restrictions, tailoring the system to how you work, not the other way around.