With Sanity, do I install a plugin in Studio or is it all on the frontend?
setting up personalization on an existing Sanity project and I am a bit confused about where the integration actually lives.
I assumed there would be a Studio plugin I install, wire up some config, and manage everything from inside Sanity. But I cannot find one in the plugin directory, so now I am wondering if the whole thing happens on the frontend instead. Which model is it
2 answers
There is no Studio plugin to install, and nothing like a "Sanity Exchange" package. The Sanity path is a set of Croct-published templates plus a small amount of frontend code.
The model is: your existing Sanity components map to Croct slots, and personalization is layered on top of them. You do not restructure your dataset. The mapping and the experiences live on the Croct side, and your frontend renders whatever the slot serves.
To get started you scaffold a pre-configured project with the CLI:
npx croct@latest initThat wires the SDK and the slots for you, so you are not assembling the integration by hand. From there you build experiences against the mapped slots.
One detail worth calling out: your existing Sanity content stays as the default fallback and is resolved server-side, so nothing is swapped on the client. When no experience matches a visitor, the regular Sanity content renders exactly as it does today.
The Sanity integration overview walks through the mapping model, and the CLI init command covers what the scaffold sets up.
Confirming from our own setup, there is no thing to install in Studio. We ran the CLI init, it scaffolded the project, and then we mapped our hero and pricing components to slots on the frontend. That is the whole model, templates plus the SDK, not a Studio plugin. Studio itself we never touched.