Hybrid CMS vs. headless CMS: Which is right for you?

Highlights

You'll learn:

• Headless CMS is ideal for businesses delivering dynamic content across connected IoT devices. It offers increased autonomy, agility, and developer empowerment.
• Hybrid CMS combines the benefits of a traditional and headless CMS. It's suitable for businesses prioritizing the authoring experience, offering familiar interfaces for content delivery.
• Key Considerations: consider your business objectives, assess the importance of the authoring experience, and avoid piecemeal solutions to prevent future content debt.

Is your business ready to provide experiences to billions of connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices? Companies with any digital presence will need to answer that question effectively as the popularity of connected devices continues to grow. From wearables to smart speakers and smart homes, the customer’s experience and buying journey is increasingly shaped by the content they receive via these connected devices.

Businesses and governments are responding to the rapidly expanding ways citizens and consumers expect to interact with content, products, and services. The examples abound: Cities like Barcelona and Seattle are becoming “smart cities” by embracing IoT technology that boosts energy efficiency, enhances infrastructure, and improves security. Amazon recently launched a new range of connected devices, including clocks and microwaves.

Back to the question: Is your business ready to deliver experiences of that caliber at breakneck speed? If you’re figuring out how to deliver high-quality experiences to the growing number of connected devices, you first have to determine how you’re delivering content to consumers.

Let’s parse some jargon around content management systems (CMS) to help you decide which type of CMS best suits your organization and its unique needs.

What is a headless CMS?

A headless CMS is different because it does not have a proprietary front-end system that predetermines how content is shared with the end user. Content is not only decoupled from the front-end delivery layer but also front-end agnostic. Headless CMSes store content in raw form, acting as a content repository.

For content managers, this means a lack of WYSIWYG editors or templates. Instead, the system interacts with the content and various APIs that allow the content to be delivered to any device.

So why (and how) is a headless CMS solution great for enterprise marketing teams? First, decoupled content allows marketing teams to move with autonomy and agility, which is huge in beating competitors to market. It also helps businesses avoid “vendor lock.” With headless, a brand’s IT team can develop front-end applications using any framework they prefer.

At the same time, the “stripped down” back end that many headless solutions possess can create some challenges regarding the authoring experience. To solve this, IT buyers should look specifically for an enterprise-ready headless CMS platform equipped with marketing user features.

Advantages of headless CMS

Here’s what you have to look forward to when adopting a headless CMS:

• Get to market faster: Allow content creators to work independently of developers — drastically speeding up your time to market.
• Write once, distribute everywhere: A headless CMS is the best content management solution for publishing dynamic content to any IoT device. It enables organizations to achieve a content-first approach where they can optimize and re-distribute valuable content modules across many different channels and experiences.
• Easily integrate key tools: Easily integrate with other best-of-breed applications (think SEO tools, CRM platforms, translation services, analytics, multimedia, and more) to empower content creators and marketers to optimize business content.
• Serve personalized experiences in real-time: Marketers can use some of the integrations mentioned above to automatically configure and display personalized content based on the viewer’s historical data and preferences.
• Unleash your developers’ skills: Built on intuitive APIs, a modern headless CMS empowers developers to use the languages and frameworks of their choice.
• Live in the cloud: Your platform will be cloud-based (or at least cloud-ready).
• Save time and money: Reduce the traffic jams a traditional CMS generates when updating or distributing content. The ability to easily and quickly distribute content boosts productivity and saves salary dollars.

Disadvantages of headless CMS

If you’re going headless, you should also be aware of one of the most common disadvantages:

• There’s a learning curve: While some headless CMSes come equipped with an intuitive interface (they do exist!), beware that there are many that require marketers to get a lot more well-versed in code before they can manage the content.

Now, let’s look at another kind of CMS, hybrid CMS, to see how it differs from headless.

What is a hybrid CMS?