Should you upgrade Drupal or replatform to Sanity?

What forces the Drupal decision in 2026?

Two end-of-life dates force the Drupal decision in 2026. Drupal 7 lost security support on 5 January 2025, and Drupal 10 reaches end of life on 9 December 2026, the same week Drupal 12.0.0 is scheduled to ship (Drupal.org release schedule; Drupal.org, Drupal 12 release issue, October 2026). After that, drupal.org makes no new Drupal 10 releases, security fixes included. From 24 October 2026, that leaves 46 days (Deploi arithmetic from the dates above). Drupal 11 has no published end-of-life date; drupal.org supports each major until two further majors ship (Drupal.org release process, October 2026).

What does staying on Drupal involve?

Staying on Drupal means a Composer upgrade for a Drupal 10 site and a full migration for a Drupal 7 site. A Drupal 10 site upgrades in place once it clears three checks (Drupal.org upgrade guide, October 2026):

• It runs Drupal 10.3.0 or later.
• It meets Drupal 11's platform requirements, including PHP 8.3.0 or later.
• The Upgrade Status module finds no compatibility gaps, after Drupal Rector fixes custom code deprecated in Drupal 10.

The hard part is contributed modules: the guide tells you to check each module's issue queue for Drupal 11 patches, so one abandoned module can hold the whole upgrade.

Drupal 7 is a different job. Drupal.org says an update can't simply be applied to a Drupal 7 site: content and configuration migrate into a new Drupal 10 or later site, the theme is rebuilt, and contributed modules without an upgrade path need manual or custom migrations (Drupal.org migration overview, October 2026). That's a rebuild in all but name, which is why Drupal 7 owners should price other platforms too.

Staying also means Drupal's cadence: a core security release window every month (Drupal.org release schedule, October 2026) and a new major version every two years (Drupal.org release process, October 2026).

When does replatforming to Sanity win?

Replatforming to Sanity wins when you'd rebuild the site anyway and the content has to serve more than one website. Sanity is a headless platform: it stores content and serves it through APIs (application programming interfaces), and it doesn't generate web pages (Sanity's Drupal guide, October 2026). Drupal stores rich text as HTML in its database, which is hard to reuse outside a browser. Sanity stores rich text as Portable Text, a JSON rich text format, so an app, a feed or a second site can render the same field (Sanity's Drupal guide, October 2026).

Three situations favor the move:

• You're on Drupal 7, so a Drupal 11 path also means a new site, a new theme and a content migration.
• The same content feeds several sites, apps or brands, which is the case for running several sites from one content platform.
• Your front end is moving to a JavaScript framework, and your developers would rather define content models in code than in an admin interface.

Sanity's own Drupal page claims "limitless content types and nested objects" (Sanity, Switching from Drupal?, October 2026). Read that as marketing; the side-by-side Sanity and Drupal comparison tests the claims.

When should you stay on Drupal, or pick a CMS other than Sanity?

Stay on Drupal when one website is the only channel and editors depend on Drupal's permissions. Sanity's 2020 guide says Drupal grants editor access by role and content type (Sanity's Drupal guide, October 2026). Sanity's default roles grant access to whole datasets, and custom roles are Enterprise only (Sanity Docs, Roles; Sanity pricing, October 2026), so matching Drupal means an Enterprise quote. Pick another content management system (CMS) if you must host the content database: Sanity hosts it, and only Sanity Studio can be self-hosted (Sanity's Drupal guide, October 2026; Sanity Docs, Studio development, October 2026).

How big is a Drupal to Sanity move?

A Drupal to Sanity move is a content migration plus a new front end, and four counts from your Drupal site set its size:

• Content types, each a Sanity document type.
• Paragraph types, each an object type in an array (Sanity's Drupal guide, October 2026).
• Views, each rewritten as a GROQ (Graph-Relational Object Queries) query in the front end.
• Custom modules, each a feature to rebuild or drop.

Each one becomes one Sanity type, one query, or one feature to rebuild or drop, so the counts, not the mapping, set the one-time cost of moving.

Sanity's migration skill for AI (artificial intelligence) agents scaffolds the import scripts but doesn't fully automate them (Sanity, What's new in August, October 2026), so your developers own those scripts; the Drupal to Sanity playbook covers Sanity's Drupal tooling, the field map and the step-by-step plan.

How do you compare the cost of staying on Drupal with the cost of moving to Sanity?

Compare both paths over the same horizon, with the next forced event in each column, and count one-time and recurring costs separately. A fair horizon for a Drupal 11 site runs to the Drupal 13 release, due in 2028 by Deploi arithmetic from drupal.org's two-year cadence (Drupal.org release process, October 2026). Sanity's subscription is the one published price: Growth costs $15 per seat a month, billed monthly, and Enterprise is custom pricing (Sanity pricing, October 2026). Twenty editors on Growth pay $300 a month (Deploi arithmetic from the figures above).