Searching for "payload cms vs sanity nextjs" usually means you are already past the "what is a headless CMS" stage and trying to make an actual decision. I have shipped more than fifteen Sanity projects in production. I have not shipped Payload in production, but I have evaluated it seriously on three client decisions in the past year — reading the source, building small prototypes, and stress-testing the query model. What follows is the comparison I wished existed when I was sitting in those evaluation calls. The decision matrix up front Criterion Sanity Payload CMS Hosting model Sanity-hosted "content lake" (SaaS) Self-hosted — Postgres or MongoDB, any infra Query language GROQ (Sanity-proprietary) Local API (TypeScript), REST, GraphQL TypeScript DX TypeGen generates types from GROQ queries Schemas are TypeScript — types are native Studio / editor UI Sanity Studio v3 (React, highly customisable) Payload Admin (Next.js App Router, code-first) Image pipeline Sanity CDN + image transformation URL API Bring…