It’s finally here: the Sanity Spring Release 2025. It’s been teased for several weeks now, with hints of what’s included and a fun, CLI-cake-themed landing page, but the day has finally come.
With this release comes the final pieces to complete Sanity’s vision, and turn it into a full-blown Content Operating System. It brings four new features, a reimagining of some of the core workflows, and a huge improvement to the documentation.
It’s geared around helped the community to build even better content operations and content-powered experiences, and handle even more of the leg-work for us to do so.
The age of Headless CMS is over. Welcome to the era of “The Content Operating System”.
What’s included in the Spring Release
The Spring Release has introduced:
- The App SDK for building custom, complex content applications
- Serverless Functions hosted on Sanity’s infra, for syncing and automation
- AI Agent and the Agent Actions API to drive automated workflows with AI
- Canvas, for AI-powered, free-form writing as part of your content workflow
- A brand new Media Library to manage images, videos, and files
- The Dashboard that unifies all your content applications
- Insights that help you understand what’s happening across those content applications
- Content Releases for easier visibility and control over batch content releases
- New and improved Documentation site with UX, AI-powered search, and new and updated documentation
I wasn’t kidding when I said it was a big release. There’s so much here, so let’s unpack some of the most exciting parts.
App SDK
React hooks and helpers for building native Sanity apps in minutes
The App SDK is extremely exciting as it allows developers to easily build apps that can leverage the same technology that powers the studio, without having to develop it themselves. This means their app content updates in real-time, with data written to and read from the Content Lake and synced with the Live Content API.
Apps built with the App SDK also benefit from Sanity’s own authentication to ensure only users with permission can use the custom apps. This saves developers the chore of configuring authentication, another huge headache that’s now solved out of the box.
For content teams, this opens a whole new world of possibilities. For example, a worldwide charity could expose a custom app to let workers on the ground upload candid videos of the work they’re doing, in a bespoke interface, without any need for CMS training. This lets the charity better communicate exactly where its donations are being spent, and connect donors with to-the-minute updates, for a powerful, emotional connection.
I'm really excited by what we can create with the App SDK. The pace of Sanity app development is going to go trough the roof.
Find out more about the App SDK in my deeper dive into the App SDK article.
Functions
Serverless functions running on Sanity’s infrastructure
Where previously developers had to host and manage their own infrastructure for serverless functions, Sanity now provides first-class support for serverless functions.
Functions let developers make any mutation the beginning of a larger content process orchestration, now with the resiliency of the Sanity Composable Cloud.
Developers can use Functions to automate their content operations and the content lifecycle. They can validate data and augment content operations with agent actions, invalidate frontend caches, and update third-party systems.
Agent Actions
Schema-aware AI that automates content operations
Agent Actions is another super exciting feature that’s launched in the Spring Release. It’s aim is to automate content tasks via easy to use, developer friendly configuration.
With Agent Actions, developers can create AI-powered content generation and transformation workflows, and trigger them with a single API call. These agents are schema-aware, so the AI generated output will fit within your existing schema, and can even make updates to your content directly.
For developers working with AI within Sanity, it’s a huge advance in the ease of creating AI-powered workflows.
And for content teams, it means your developers can build helpful automation for you, letting you focus on your message and your audience, and less on the glue work to get there. This helps you improve your time to publish, the quality of your content and the validation of your content.
Canvas
AI-accelerated content creation for teams
Nestled in the new Dashboard is Sanity Canvas, a free-form, AI-powered, context-aware authoring experience. This app lets editors write freely, without worrying about which components to use or how to best lay that content out on the screen.
It comes with all the features you’d expect from Sanity, such as real-time, multiplayer collaboration and live data synchronisation, as well as what you’d expect from authoring software, such as formatting options and text autocomplete.
Where it really shines though is in its advanced features. Canvas allows you to collect context: notes that detail information about your organisation, products, users, and more. These can be easily brought into your editor screen to serve as prompts or information to help you write. They’re fully collaborative, and can be shared with your team.
What’s more, the editor is AI-powered, and this AI is context-aware. This means it will automatically use the context you’ve brought into the editor to better refine its output, keeping it on-brand with tone of voice docs, and having all information at hand from product specs and other documents.
Lastly, Canvas can be connected to a document in the Studio, allowing for direct import into that document. It’s schema-aware, and will automatically map from Canvas into the Studio document, without any manual glue work. It’s an incredible process to see in action.
Media Library
Structured digital media handling
The Media Library is also getting supercharged, with brand-new functionality, and a new home nestled into the Dashboard.
Developers now have full control over the schema of their media, allowing for new content fields to be added and controlled. Media is also accessible globally, across all projects. This will improve the management of media, eliminating duplication, mismatched versions, and siloed asset libraries.
The Media Library comes with other new features too, such as aspects, allowing for easier management and discovery of media, as well as integrating directly with the studio schema, such as restricting image fields in the studio to only allow images with a certain aspect attached.
To keep it on feature parity with the previous Media Library, the new Media Library is available to all users on all plans. However, there is a paid upgrade for the Media Library, called Media Library+, that will unlock further functionality, such as more aspects and managing video.
Dashboard
The new home for your unified content operations
The Dashboard is the new entry point for all users. From here they can access the studios they have access to, as well as any apps that are embedded in the dashboard, such as Canvas, Media Library, Insights, or other custom apps.
This adds a new and much needed layer to the Content Operating System, allowing easy traversal between studios and apps, and providing the container for accessing each aspect of Sanity.
Read more about the Dashboard in our Sanity Dashboard article.
Insights
Actionable suggestions for your content ops
Understanding content is just as important as writing and editing it. Sanity have released Sanity Insights to make that easier to do.
Insights is a zero-config dashboard that surfaces real-time content activity inside the Sanity Studio. It gives teams visibility into how content moves through workflows, and highlights trends, bottlenecks and opportunities.
Insights should help editors, developers, and product owners stay aligned without switching tools or digging through datasets. It’s native to the Studio and works out of the box.
Content Releases
I think content releases are a really cool idea, and had been looking forward to them. Where previously you could switch between Published and Draft views of your content, you can now expand this with release views.
For example, if you’re planning a big marketing release (such as the Sanity Spring Release), you can mark new content and content edits as belonging to a specific release.
You’re then able to view the version of your content that will be published when this release goes live. It gives you this release-specific lense over all of your content, making managing batched releases easier.
And with scheduled releases, you can publish this specific release all at once, or schedule it for a specific day. It’s a really excellent way to manage campaigns.
Documentation Updates
Refactored and upgraded with AI
With the rapid growth and big changes that Sanity have had, they’ve had to introduce a lot of new pages to their documentation. This surge of information felt like it had outgrown the UX and information architecture that they previously had.
With this release, the documentation site has been completely revamped, with a brand new information architecture and UX, making it much more user friendly.
Information is more logically grouped, moving through the documentation is now much easier, and the UI is much more inviting, to help developers continue learning and understanding without getting fatigued.
Sanity has also supercharged it with AI to let developers ask questions in natural language and quickly find answers from across the documentation.
Using the documentation is now so much easier, and finding things much better. There’s now room for many more rich examples and more granular detail where needed, and I’m really looking forward to using it.
Conclusion
That concludes our run-down of the Sanity Spring Release 2025. It’s an incredible time to be part of this community as the tooling and ecosystem just keep getting better and better.
If you’re looking to dive into Sanity, or want to leverage what’s been released, send us a message to hello@hexdigital.com, and we’d love to have a chat.