How to choose the right CMS for your business?

Modern-day Content Management System (CMS) solutions allow enterprises to create, manage and modify content on a website without having any technical or coding knowledge. They handle all the basic infrastructure of your website and lets you focus on the customer experience side of the website. Content Management System has evolved significantly over the years to cater to different user personas and channels.

The three most popular solutions available now are Traditional, Headless, and Hybrid CMS.

Let’s deep dive into each of them.

Traditional CMS

A traditional CMS is essentially what WordPress provides. It basically has a monolith that connects the front end to the back end of a website in a simple and easy-to-use application codebase. They have everything from the database for the content all the way to the presentation of it. Here are a few features of this type of CMS

1. A single system is required to service the whole website
2. Easy content management
3. Control of front end design through present themes and templates
4. Lower technical requirements for setup.

While this type of CMS is great for beginners, it lacks flexibility and scalability. These CMS usually control only website content and lack tools to manage content on other platforms like mobile apps. Additionally, it is very hard to innovate in this type of CMS since it runs on presets and is monolithic in nature. As your company grows you need to move to a more flexible CMS type.

Headless CMS

This type of CMS frees itself from presets or specific target presentation models. Adobe Experience Manager helps provide a headless CMS platform that is based on content as a service model and hence allows users to create a channel-neutral content set with variations that are independent of any platform or presentation style. Headless CMS platforms hence essentially help you create content and present it to the final visitor through external tools that allow for better innovation in presentation styles. Its benefits are:

1. Increased opportunity of customized user interface
2. Content can be easily deployed on multiple platforms like apps, kiosks, websites, etc.
3. Change is easy since the front and back ends are separate
4. Enhanced security

Headless CMS is another type of CMS that helps both developers and marketers.

Headless CMS, however, does have some downsides that make it slightly difficult to use.

1. Headless CMS requires you to build your design and structure yourself instead of using pre-built templates like in traditional CMS.
2. They are more expensive than traditional CMS since additional infrastructural investments are required to run it.
3. Headless CMS requires multiple formatting iterations since you cannot preview what the content will look like till it’s deployed.

These challenges of the headless CMS call for a better CMS platform that brings flexibility and sophistication to the table.

Hybrid CMS

This type of CMS platform provided by Adobe Experience Manager basically combines the best of both worlds of the previous two types of CMS. Also known as decoupled CMS it combines the API-driven headless CMS architecture with the front-end elements. Here are a few reasons why you should adopt AEM’s headless CMS architecture:

1. Marketer friendly back-end infrastructure to deploy content easily
2. Easier to set up and maintain and hence reduces costs of separately developing a front-end like in headless CMS
3. Allows omnichannel delivery of content
4. Empowers both marketers and developers
5. Allows for better authoring through template management and similar features.

Overall, it brings you the best of both worlds, offering more flexibility and ease in content publishing.