Despite everyone's best intentions, the business and digital landscapes are becoming more complicated. Paired with the pace of technical evolution, many organizations are facing the need to upgrade, enhance, or even migrate their website platforms in the next 12-18 months. As technical and marketing teams embark on that journey, there is a high probability that they will run across opaque terms like DXP, Composable, Monolithic, and/or Headless. With the complexity of these technical solutions, how do you know what matters and which approach is right for your business? Let’s explore that.
A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is a software platform that enables organizations to deliver personalized, seamless, and consistent experiences to their customers across different touchpoints and devices. These touchpoints include but aren’t limited to websites, mobile apps, social media, email, chatbots, and more. By centralizing and integrating various digital technologies and data sources, a DXP can help organizations improve customer engagement, increase conversions, drive revenue growth, and enhance brand loyalty.
This is one of the biggest buzzwords across various platforms today. It is often used to indicate “maximum” flexibility and lower upfront costs. It is almost always compared to the term “monolithic,” which refers to a more boxed-in solution. Unfortunately, that comparison is not so simple. At its core, a composable DXP (Digital Experience Platform) is an approach to building a DXP that emphasizes modular architecture and the ability to compose a digital experience from various pre-built components. By comparison, a monolithic DXP is often characterized as a platform that provides a suite of tools and functionality for managing content, delivering digital experiences, and engaging with customers, all within a single, integrated DXP. So, what does that really mean?
That's where things get complicated. Almost all DXP platforms today offer some level of composability, e.g., they offer a series of APIs for content integration, ingestion, and delivery. This allows the platform to seamlessly integrate with external tools and systems in a scalable and modular way. Furthermore, some platforms, like Optimizely, which has historically been considered monolithic, are extremely composable. The big difference is that many of the add-on items are also owned by Optimizely rather than a third party. This most certainly helps with integration and support from a single technology vendor as these add-on products are utilized in your digital solutions.
Other platforms like Umbraco, which bills itself as a composable DXP, require third-party vendors to fulfill its more robust DXP capabilities, such as personalization. This, of course, translates to a much lower initial software investment but may later lead to a variety of software vendors to manage as you scale your digital properties. This isn’t necessarily a negative but should be considered when evaluating the right long-term solution for your business. Lower upfront costs rarely translate to a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
There is often a lot of confusion between headless CMS (Content Management System) platforms and composable DXPs. Notice the key difference, CMS vs DXP. A headless CMS is a content management system that provides an API for managing and delivering content, but it typically does not provide the full range of tools and functionality required to create and deliver a complete digital experience. Instead, a headless CMS is designed to work with other systems and tools, such as a front-end framework, to create a custom digital experience. In contrast, a composable DXP is designed to provide a range of pre-built components and tools that can be selected and combined to create a complete digital experience. While a composable DXP may include a headless CMS as one of its components, it typically offers a more comprehensive set of tools and functionality for creating and delivering digital experiences.
Choosing between a composable DXP and a monolithic DXP depends on several factors that are unique to your business needs and goals. Here are some criteria that can help you determine which approach is better suited for your organization, keeping in mind that most DXP platforms labeled as “monolithic” are, in fact, extremely composable.
Regardless of whether your organization is considering a composable DXP, headless CMS vs hybrid, or monolithic DXP, there are several operational things you should do prior to jumping into your decision process.