Sanity Spring Release 2025: 6 Ways Sanity Empowers Teams

Managing content at scale is rarely a simple affair. Speed and personalization are the benchmarks of a job well done, but content teams often have to use inefficient tools or manual workflows. Sanity update 2025 solves many of these problems by turning the tool we know into a fully integrated platform for content operations.

This release goes beyond improvements, introducing smarter solutions for content management. With the whole structure brought into one place, teams are able to plan, create, and ship content together frictionlessly.

Since we’re very enthusiastic about Sanity development, we prepared a short article on the 6 ways it can empower your content teams.

Let’s get to it!

Sanity is a fully customizable, all-code backend for content-driven websites and applications. Although it started as a Content Management System (CMS), its structured approach to content management helped it evolve beyond that.

At the platform's core lies Sanity Studio, a real-time collaborative application for content creation. Sanity Studio is open-source and connects to the hosted Content Lake, which allows for structured content modeling, APIs, and integrations.

Source: Sanity.io

What sets Sanity apart from its competitors is its developer-first approach and support for TypeScript and React. Rather than treat content as simple text, Sanity handles everything as structured data, which makes it more flexible and reusable.

Now that you’re more familiar with Sanity, it’s time to see what changes this update brings to the table.

Through a combination of features that support collaboration, AI automation, organization, and serverless extensibility, Spring Release 2025 built foundations for a new system. Here’s a quick overview of what’s included in Sanity’s Spring Release:

• Sanity App SDK - A new toolkit for building custom Sanity applications inside or outside the Studio. It includes built-in authentication, caching, and live updates, and supports cross-dataset navigation and real-time experiences by default. The same SDK is used internally to power apps like Canvas and Media Library.
• Functions - Serverless event handlers hosted by Sanity/ Their role is to replace webhooks with scalable, secure automation that runs on content changes. Works with the new Blueprint system and runtime CLI.
• Agent Actions - Schema-aware, AI-driven automation. It can be triggered via API to perform tasks like tagging, translation, and summarization. Built on the Instruct API and designed to fit into CI/CD pipelines or backend systems with no Studio interaction required.
• Dashboard - A new customizable and integrated default home screen for content operations. Provides access to Canvas, Media Library, custom apps, and recently used content across all Studios and datasets.
• Insights - A Dashboard widget that surfaces draft activity, content bottlenecks, and upcoming releases across projects. Helps teams identify stalled content and plan releases more effectively.
• Canvas - A new collaborative, AI-assisted writing interface that connects directly to your structured content models. Includes support for organizational templates, real-time editing, and automatic content-to-schema mapping.
• Media Library & Media Library+ - A native digital asset management system with structured metadata (Aspects), cross-dataset access, and global search. Assets can now be linked directly to structured content using global document references. Media Library+ includes enterprise-grade features: unlimited metadata fields, role-based access control, asset usage tracking, in-place replacement, and authenticated/private assets.

Sanity’s newest update is great news for everybody involved in the content creation process of your business.

Creators and editors can improve their workflow with the new Canvas writing experience and improved asset management. Developers will not be left behind, as Sanity hands them powerful tools for building custom applications and automating workflows.

Most importantly, however, entire organizations will be able to comfortably manage and plan their content operations from within a single platform. All the new functions introduced in this update come together to create a cohesive experience for content management and creation.

“Sanity really gets what modern teams are dealing with. We finally get proper tools to manage images and assets across the whole organization.
The new APIs and how everything is tied to your org context make building and scaling custom features way easier.”
— Jakub Dakowicz, CTO at Pagepro

Now, take a closer look at how exactly this new update can empower your team.

Sanity’s Dashboard is the primary entry point for content teams. It provides a unified home screen for all content operations tasks. Users can use it for multiple purposes:

• Quick access to documents
• Switching between all Sanity Studios, Media Library, Canvas, and custom apps
• Managing workflows across projects and datasets

The Dashboard is customizable and extendable, meaning teams can tailor their workspace to fit unique business logic and scale content operations.

The Insights widget, available directly on the Dashboard, is an activity monitor for your organization’s content workflows. It offers a visual overview of content activity, showing what’s being drafted, updated, and published across your entire content model. You can review metrics like the number of documents in draft, recently published items, or documents that haven’t been updated in over a year.

These insights can help detect potential blockers by surfacing stalled work and identifying where content is getting stuck. They also showcase upcoming releases to keep product launches on track.

The Dashboard and the integrated Insights widget are a great efficiency boost for content teams. With navigation, collaboration, and monitoring all focused in one place, new possibilities for improvements open up.

It’s possible to coordinate multiple studios and projects and use data from Insights to optimize processes. The teams can avoid potential stoppers and make better decisions about where to focus their efforts.

Although most organizations will likely have only one project, they will still benefit from the information flow and unified customer experience.

Canvas, formerly known as Create, is a free-form content creation app with AI writing support.

In classic content management systems, creators often have to work directly in form fields. For some, this breaks the natural writing flow and muddles the overall vision.

Canvas addresses this problem by creating a distraction-free writing environment with AI assistance. It aids in maintaining context by allowing the writers to attach notes, research, and guidelines to keep their content relevant and in tune with the brand.

Last but not least, Canvas can automatically transform free-form writing into your Studio's content model. That means no more manual field mapping or reformatting!

One of the biggest changes coming in with Canvas is the addition of AI ‘ghostwriter’, who can act as a collaborative partner. Instead of taking over the content, it follows the user’s lead, offering suggestions and input.

Team collaboration has never been more frictionless, as team members can create with comments, tasks, and revision history. Canvas is integrated with your organization, so content sharing requires little effort.

What’s more, Canvas is aware of your organization's studios and schemas. You can map content directly to your structured models without copy-pasting to save precious time.

In traditional CMS, files are often treated as separate from the main content. This can make maintaining relationships between them and where they are used difficult.

Sanity’s team took notice of it when designing the Media Library. It introduces a more structured content approach to digital asset management. It’s now possible to bring media into content architecture and provide a solid foundation for assets across datasets, teams, and channels. Even better, assets can now be made programmable and AI-ready as part of your content workflow.

The most interesting change, however, is the introduction of Aspects. These are custom metadata schemas that can be applied to an asset. Asset information can be modeled just like content.

Media Library+ adds features built for larger teams and enterprise use cases. It supports unlimited Aspects per asset (versus one in the core version), role-based access control, private/authenticated assets, version history, and in-place replacements. It also shows where assets are used, which can be very useful for managing licensed content and limiting duplication.

With this update, digital asset management has completely changed. Files uploaded to the Media Library can be immediately available across different studios and applications, with metadata that makes them searchable and reusable.

Aspects allow teams to organize assets according to their specific needs. Multiple assets can be linked directly to structured content to reduce duplication and make othe verall organization easier.

Each business is unique, and so are the needs its CMS needs to fulfill. However, creating custom tools often takes time and in-depth technical knowledge of your platform’s inner workings.

App SDK easily solves this problem by providing users with tools to build new Sanity apps and in-studio functions. For example, you could create personalized workflows and views, like live-updating queries.

Since caching, optimistic UI updates, and authentication are all handled automatically, it's possible to develop applications that feel like native Sanity experiences. You don’t have to worry about knowing all the details of versions, perspectives, and updates.

If you have ever felt like your CMS is not providing you enough tools for your needs, App SDK might be what you’ve been looking for all along.

It empowers developers to build portable apps that can live outside Sanity Studio. Your custom-made applications can focus on specific workflows instead of providing a general-purpose interface.

App SDK can integrate with other Sanity tools and navigate between custom views and studio documents while maintaining context. All of this creates a cohesive experience across custom and built-in tools. Those who are thinking about creating their own CMS can use Sanity's Content Lake for building personalized frontends.

Keeping up with the changes in your growing website can be a challenge. Content often needs to trigger actions in external systems or update, but implementing these integrations traditionally requires setting up separate infrastructure

Functions are Sanity's approach to serverless computing. They expand on Sanity's webhook capabilities by allowing more complex logic to be executed in response to content events.

Developers are able to write event handlers that respond to content changes. This is achieved by hosting code that runs in response to content changes directly within Sanity. The handlers can then be easily and securely deployed alongside the Studio.

Reducing manual work across your website is a great way to increase team productivity. Functions can update existing internal content, like translations or levels of your product stock, and even external factors, like search indexes.

There are also long-running tasks, such as generating new assets (video, audio, or PDFs), which Functions can run server-side. For example, a function could be triggered to analyze an image and generate a caption using AI, connecting the Media Library, Studio, and AI capabilities in a seamless workflow.

One of the most crucial factors is the safety of your more sensitive content. Functions are able to contain secrets and can run tasks like securely creating payment links.

AI and LLMs became an integral part of our lives, while Agents can take over many of the repetitive and menial tasks we used to spend hours on. Still, such tools often exist independently from the rest of your stack. As a result, they can be hard to integrate with pre-existing automated workflows.

Sanity’s new Agent Actions change that. They bring AI capabilities to content workflows through a programmatic interface that can be triggered from anywhere and can be integrated with your CI pipelines, automation tools, or codebases.

With Agent Actions, AI can operate on content through code rather than manual interaction and support context-aware instructions using existing content. Instead of being a tool, AI is an important part of your automation.

Agent Actions open up new possibilities for time-saving and optimization. Automate long, repetitive tasks like tagging, localization, and content summarization, and free up time for creative and strategic work.

Because Agent Actions are schema-aware and programmatic, they ensure consistency and accuracy across all automated content changes, reducing manual errors. Integration with CI/CD pipelines and automation tools means teams can embed AI-driven content operations directly into their development and publishing workflows, accelerating delivery and iteration.

Sanity’s Spring Release 2025 shows that content operations don't have to focus only on managing files. Modern content management needs to be able to build structured and scalable systems, customized to your business’s needs.

Each part of this update helps to unify the experience of content teams. Features like AI assistance or serverless automation can dramatically shorten the time needed for preparing new amazing content pieces, and the new organization tools help to keep everybody on the same page.

Developers received a powerful foundation to build on, while editors face fewer blockers and better collaboration. Growing teams can start treating content as an operational layer, and not another publishing task.

If you're looking to scale content without the chaos, Sanity's Spring Release is worth a closer look. We’re happy to offer our expertise if you need help getting started with Sanity.

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Sanity Composable Content Cloud is the headless CMS that gives you (and your team) a content backend to drive websites and applications with modern tooling. It offers a real-time editing environment for content creators that’s easy to configure but designed to be customized with JavaScript and React when needed. With the hosted document store, you query content freely and easily integrate with any framework or data source to distribute and enrich content.

Sanity scales from weekend projects to enterprise needs and is used by companies like Puma, AT&T, Burger King, Tata, and Figma.