Which CMS?
Choosing the Best Content Management System for Your Organization
A content management system (CMS) allows your marketing team to organize and publish content to end users without any background in coding or development. These platforms increasingly include suites of tools and integration capabilities that make them a central hub for day-to-day digital marketing work.
But with so many solutions on the market, and such a wide range of complex features, choosing the right CMS as your business scales and shifts can be tricky.
Which CMS you choose not only impacts your solution architecture, but also influences the scalability of your sales and marketing efforts. Our framework helps you think through different scenarios and pitfalls, so you minimize those growing pains and maximize your CMS return on investment.
Want to jump around? On this page, we'll cover:
Why Your CMS Matters
Which CMS you choose has a direct impact on how your marketing and technology teams handle website updates, distribute new online content, roll out campaign materials, or optimize existing website pages for search.
Modern CMS platforms tend to have common features such as:
- Field-based content templates: A form-like feature used for entering structured content into website pages or components.
- Content hierarchies & taxonomies: A structure used to organize content, often designed to match the website’s information architecture, and sometimes referred to as a “content tree.”
- “What you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) editing tools: Tools that make page design and edits easier within established templates and formats for marketers who are not also developers.
- Asset repositories: Libraries for maintaining catalogs of digital assets such as image files, audio, PDFs, and video.
- Workflows, versioning, and content history: Tracking used to manage content approvals and QA and to ensure logs of content are kept for auditing or rollback purposes.
Is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) the same thing as a CMS?
In 2020, Gartner made a bit of a stir within the industry when it announced it would retire its Web Content Management magic quadrant — traditionally the gold standard for ranking the best CMS platforms — in favor of a new category it termed digital experience platforms (DXP).
Gartner and many other industry leaders see the DXP as the next step in the evolution of content management. In this view, simple, website-based CMS platforms transform into DXPs by adopting tools and features that allow for the sharing of content across multiple touchpoints, personalization, marketing automation, integrated analytics, machine learning, and user profiling.
While many organizations are moving toward DXP solutions, others prefer building martech stacks around highly specialized, best-in-breed solutions versus relying on a single company and software to cover all their bases. Other companies simply don’t require that degree of integration and tooling, so moving to a DXP isn’t necessary or efficient for their business.
Signs You Might Be Ready for a New Cms
You may already be feeling the pinch of a CMS that isn’t quite the right fit. Before investing in a wholesale CMS replatforming project, it’s worth taking the time to consider:
- Costs: Think through your current CMS pain points and translate those gaps into costs. How much are those roadblocks costing your organization in terms of wasted hours? What are you spending on licensing, maintenance, upgrades, and hosting for your current CMS?
- Causes: Evaluate the root causes of your CMS problems. Could you break through the roadblock with an enhancement or customization? Does your team have a training or skillset deficit? Or does the platform truly keep you from accomplishing your business goals?
Migrating to a new platform isn’t always the right answer — you could be fine with an upgrade or a workaround — so how can you tell if the time is right for a new solution? Here are a few signs that you might be ready for a new CMS: Your marketing team can’t make changes to content without help from IT and development teams.
- You want to expand CMS access to make other teams part of your content workflows.
- Your platform no longer feels robust enough for your use cases.
- Your platform doesn’t seem to deliver on the demo or includes a lot of extras you don’t need (but you’re still paying for).
- Your content plan has expanded to include user more robust user experiences, requiring tool, functionality, and form integrations your CMS doesn’t easily support.
For mid-market to enterprise companies, sourcing the right CMS can be even more complicated. Finding the best fit while staying scalable, attempting to anticipate the types of content you’ll need to support in the future, and navigating the complexity of packaged offerings can make it difficult to decide which CMS you need with confidence.
How a CMS migration helped one company 5x its conversion rate
An outside point-of-view on your current platform could benefit a young IT or marketing team. A third-party partner or even a vendor consultation may be able to help you spot opportunities with your current CMS or point you toward a platform that better suits your current level of maturity and business needs.
The Pros and Cons of a Headless CMS
In your quest for the best CMS to fit your business model, you may have come across the buzz about “headless” CMS options. How do you know if you need one?
A headless CMS structures content without locked in layouts or templates, so that content assets can be used across multiple delivery platforms (for example, a website, mobile app, and smart watch display). Also called “API-first” or “front-end agnostic,” these platforms allow marketing teams to manage content across a wide range of touchpoints with greater flexibility and speed.
On the other hand, gaining a headless CMS means losing the WYSIWYG tools that marketers use to preview and format content in layout prior to publishing and accepting a less straightforward sitemap for websites – a significant hassle and loss of control for some marketing teams.
If you’re considering a headless CMS, consider the following points:
| Headless CMS Pros | Headless CMS Cons |
| Content is “pure” and available for immediate reuse across multiple channels and front-end executions. | Marketing authors lose the ability to preview and edit content in final layouts. |
| A headless CMS simplifies content management to the basics of storing copy, imagery, and content elements. | A headless CMS can lack some of the structure that other platforms use to associate content with information architecture constructs or site functionality. |
| Developers can build multiple front-end displays for the same content, and manage each set of code separately from the CMS. | Development and IT teams need to be versed in the different front-end techniques they wish to leverage. |
| A headless CMS can be considered “future-proof,” as it is built to integrate with new technologies. | A headless CMS requires integration in order to deliver a full end-user experience, which needs to be factored into cost, timing, and maintenance. |
Considering a Cloud-Based CMS
Choosing a cloud-hosted CMS, which you may have heard described as a SaaS or PaaS CMS, can be very appealing to marketing organizations that want to hit the ground running (and that have the money to spend). In lieu of a traditional licensing and hosting structure, where your IT team or hosting partner may need to set up on-premises servers and infrastructure, in a cloud-based model, the burden of hosting falls on the CMS vendor themselves.
Sound too good to be true? When you’re considering a cloud-based CMS, keep an eye out for hidden costs, but be sure to weigh those against the benefits you could achieve.
| Cloud-based CMS benefits | Cloud-based CMS pitfalls |
| Vendor-maintained environment: no need for your internal team to manage licensing or handle on-prem hosting. | Ongoing subscription fees: whereas an on-premises setup can have a major upfront cost to stand up, the cost of a cloud-based option gets spread out over time and can add up for your business. Watch for increased pricing tiers if your company is planning to scale. |
| Simple sign up and log on process: hosting and maintenance happen in the background. | Limits on updates and changes: depending on your subscription, you may be limited to a certain number of changes or updates. Keep an eye on the fine print before choosing your cloud subscription option. |
| Easy access: access the platform’s back-office from any device or location. | Paying (again) for platform upgrades: is your vendor rolling out a major new version of the CMS? You may want to make sure that’s included in either your subscription or planned for separately in your budget, as some companies charge extra to get the latest-and-greatest version. |
| Secure: security and bug management are managed by the vendor. | Integrations and customizations: while a cloud-based solution can certainly scale back the cost of IT support, don’t expect to fully dismiss your development team. With any solution, you will likely be leveraging APIs to integrate with the rest of your marketing suite, and in many cases, enhancing the out-of-the-box solution with your own customizations. |
| Compliant: privacy considerations may also be managed by the vendor. | Vendor lock-in: due to reliance on the vendor for the hosting of your content and CX hub, this can certainly set up organizations to become overly dependent on a single vendor’s proprietary solutions. Backing out of these relationships can often prove costly and make migrations and re-platforming a challenge in the future. |
Choosing the Right CMS
Choosing which CMS is best for your company’s current position and future goals can be daunting and leaning into the pressure to choose the ideal platform can be uncomfortable. To escape the decision fatigue, some organizations rush into platform selection based on little more than a Gartner quadrant placement and ball-park price point. Unfortunately, that’s how so many teams find themselves saddled with CMS platforms they can’t fully use, features they didn’t want, and maintenance requirements that crush their current team structure.
How do you avoid that unhappy outcome in your own CMS platform selection process? While there is no one-size-fits-all approach, we’ve observed several key steps that characterize successful CMS selection and migration projects.
Finding your best-fit platform starts by gathering the right stakeholders. Core stakeholders usually include marketing and IT, but could also other business units and leadership. In your meeting, take time to define and align your requirements. This stage of the process should also include a careful consideration of your customer. If you’ve previously mapped your customer journey, think about the ways in which your new CMS would ideally support and accelerate that process.
As you go, keep the rest of your martech stack top-of-mind. Don’t think of your CMS in a bubble; make sure you’re considering how you’ll be able to connect to your existing martech platforms or scale to others you might have on your roadmap. Look for API-driven platforms or vendors with strong martech partnerships that fit your existing architecture.
Be wary of “unlimited flexibility” claims. There’s a fine line between feature sets that are “fully customizable” and “totally undefined,” and some vendors blur those lines to the point of deception. Keep in mind that the more customization you have to plan for, the more dollar signs you should be seeing. Look for a vendor that offers solid out-of-the-box features that support your core requirements, including relevant widgets, component sets, and design patterns that can keep you from having to build everything from scratch.
Take a test drive. Make sure your marketing team demos the authoring features of a CMS with all your top-choice vendors. The folks who will be responsible for the hands-on work will often be the first to flag potential issues or barriers. Similarly, if your vendors allow, get your developers hands-on with sandbox versions of the platform before taking the final leap. Not only can your dev team test the waters, but a sandbox can also serve as a playground for your marketing team to push the limits of the platform’s features.
Core CMS Decision Criteria
The results from your internal requirements and customer needs inform the evaluation criteria you’ll use in considering possible platforms. While your business likely has some unique needs, most mid-market companies draw their evaluation criteria from eight key categories, choosing from sub-categories or adding their own:
- Content flexibility
- Does the platform include modular templates and components?
- Does it have WYSIWYG and drag-and-drop capabilities?
- Does it support your existing design patterns (unless you’re also doing a full redesign)?
- Marketing capabilities
- What type of reporting does the platform allow?
- How much personalization is possible?
- Does it include marketing automation features?
- Is there an integrated email function?
- Is there any AI or ML functionality built in and/or supported?
- Out-of-the-box vs customization
- How much out-of-the-box support can you expect for common website functionality like on-site search, forms, blog posts, list management, ecommerce, structured content, or databases?
- Does the platform allow gated content or portals?
- Does the platform include headless support for custom apps?
- Integration capabilities
- Are there built-in third-party support features?
- How many and what type of connectors and extensions are included?
- What are the platform’s API capabilities for content and code?
- Will you need an additional integration platform?
- Ease of migration
- Does the product have built-in accelerators?
- Are there bulk upload capabilities?
- Does the platform share code language or content structures with your existing CMS?
- What does the base configuration look like? What level of effort should you expect to integrate it into your current architecture?
- Is this an all-in-one package solution, or will you be piecing together a solution out of plugins and third-party add-ons?
- Governance and workflow
- What level of complexity does the solution support in terms of permissions?
- What does content staging and preview look like?
- Is there a dev ops environment, and what does code management look like?
- What types of workflows are supported?
- Cost
- Does the vendor offer straight pricing, or will you need to negotiate a right-fit solution?
- What licensing fees should you budget for?
- How many add-ons and plug-ins will you require, and what will they cost to purchase, license, and maintain?
- What level of hosting is included or required?
- Since CMS vendors don’t handle implementations, can you find a partner to help you customize, migrate, and implement the solution, and what will that cost?
- Support
- What types of support options does the vendor offer? Are there multiple tiers?
- How robust is the vendor’s partner network?
- Is there a community of users you can call on for off-the-books troubleshooting?
Your business will weight and prioritize different factors within those categories, but they should provide a solid starting point for your analysis
Which CMS to Choose: Evaluating CMS Platforms
When it comes to CMS platform evaluation, many businesses struggle to apply the criteria they generate. Much of the available research is written or funded by particular platforms, demos only tell part of the story, and getting the features you want without bloating the budget when you’re in between the startup and enterprise tiers.
To make the best decision, it helps to start with a defined list of options, a simple rating scale, and general agreement on how your company wants to manage CMS control. Here are some ideas to get you started.
Common CMS Platforms
While not a comprehensive list, this table covers many of the key players that mid-market to enterprise companies consider when choosing a CMS.
| Open Source or Small Fees | Mid-Tier: | Enterprise Tier: |
|
No or limited licensing fees; community-driven support |
Licensing fees typically range in the $10k – $50k range; provide support and hosting options for businesses |
Licensing fees can exceed $100k; provide deep suites of tools, support, hosting options, partnerships with major martech players |
| WordPress | Sitefinity | Adobe Experience Manager |
| Joomla | Kentico | Sitecore Experience Platform |
| Drupal | CrownPeak | Episerver |
| Ubuntu | Contentful | SharePoint |
| Shopify | Magento | Oracle CX Content |
| BigCommerce | Salesforce CMS | |
| WooCommerce | Liferay | |
| Wix | Acquia | |
| Blogger | HubSpot CMS Hub | |
| Square Space |
CMS Platform Evaluation Rating Scale
When you conduct your own evaluation, you may need to define a more granular scale, perhaps with a 1-10 range, but many companies find that a simple scale gives enough clarity to cut through the noise and lead to strong decisions.
| Rating | Description |
| Excellent | A strong suit of this platform |
| Good | On par with industry standard |
| OK | Some notable drawbacks, but they can be managed |
| Poor | A weakness of this platform |
Balancing Flexibility and Control
Even organizations with high martech maturity can struggle to define guardrails for content management that free marketing teams to do their best work while also ensuring good governance. For many organizations, the need for a new CMS first arises with the awareness that marketing is blocked by the platform. Here are some key symptoms and work-arounds to explore:
| Problem | Work-Around |
| Vendor-maintained environment: no need for your internal team to manage licensing or handle on-prem hosting. | Ongoing subscription fees: whereas an on-premises setup can have a major upfront cost to stand up, the cost of a cloud-based option gets spread out over time and can add up for your business. Watch for increased pricing tiers if your company is planning to scale. |
| Components and widgets are locked down; styling and display options can’t be changed | Permissions: There are instances where the solution really is as simple as “turn it on!” Limited permissions may need to be discussed by an IT and marketing governance team in order to limit risk and build trust between the groups. |
| Components and widgets are locked down; styling and display options can’t be changed | Platform limitations: Depending on your choice of platform, you may need to explore customizations and enhancements to open those doors. For example, the choice of a headless platform is going to majorly remove control of front-end layouts from the hands of the day-to-day marketers. |
| Marketing can’t manage personalization or A/B testing of site content without knowledge of advanced code or syntax | Feature limitations: Some platforms simply don’t support the advanced functionality that today’s marketing tactics demand. If your team is consistently blocked by feature limitations, it might be time to consider a new CMS. |
Finding the Right CMS Implementation Partner
CMS vendors typically aren’t in the business of building websites – and even if they are, the needs of the mid-market will quickly out-scale their in-house capacity. That’s why most CMS vendors have partner networks that can manage migrations on their behalf. They don’t always publish an official directory of partners (Drupal, HubSpot, and Sitecore do publish their lists) but your vendor contact should be able to make suggestions.
Partner networks typically tier their partners based on their experience – often based on both projects completed and certifications – and categorize partners based on different areas of expertise. When you decide on a new CMS, search for an implementation partner with expertise in that platform. Your previous vendor – or even your own in-house IT team – may not have the background to get the most out of your new tool.
Finding the right CMS for a mid-market use case can be complicated, and most companies can benefit from a little bit of outside perspective. Along the way, a team of vendor- and platform-agnostic CMS experts can be helpful. Third-party consultants often know the ins and outs of platform discovery, rationalization, building use cases, and facilitating productive tech discussions across the business.
Take the Right Next Step
After reading this page, you may be well on your way to rolling out a new CMS by next week.
But, if you’re like most mid-market companies and enterprise-level businesses, that’s probably not your story.
We get it. As a central hub for your digital marketing activities, the decisions you make about your content management solution can help drive (or stall!) your digital transformation progress. With more options than ever, and new and evolving industry trends to navigate, you might need help to identify and take the next step.
Dig Deeper
Explore CMS decisions in greater detail in our free guide. We talk through particular issues mid-market companies face and provide an example analysis of four popular CMS platform choices. Get the download with no strings attached — no email required.
Get Some Free Advice
Have a specific question or need an inside scoop on a particular platform? We can help. Set up a 30-minute consult with one of our CMS experts to get your question answered — free.
Develop Your CMS Scorecard
If you’re ready to get more concrete about your CMS selection, you might be ready for our CMS Scorecard Workshop. Schedule a half-day workshop or two shorter working sessions to kick off your CMS project. Depending on where you are in the process, we can help you and your key stakeholders:
- Solidify your business case for a new CMS
- Identify and prioritize key requirements
- Create a custom scorecard for CMS vendors based on your prioritized requirements
- Make the case for your platform of choice
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