Forrester Report: The content management systems landscape, Q4 2024

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Read the Forrester Report to:

  • Dive deep into CMS. Learn how content management systems reduce time to market with digital experiences, drive better customer experience and simplify content ops through continuous innovation.
  • Get up to speed on market trends. Discover how new technology, rapid market growth, common challenges and top disruptors impact the CMS market in today’s business landscape.
  • Review a comprehensive breakdown of top vendors. Get a detailed look at the top CMS platforms on the market, weigh their strengths and capabilities, and learn about the most common CMS use cases.

Forrester Report: The content management systems landscape, Q4 2024

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Key findings

Content management systems play a pivotal role in determining the digital success of an organization. There are various ways a CMS drives business value, including:

  • Reducing time to market with efficient digital experiences, accelerating growth: Consumers expect optimized digital experiences, and businesses are using robust edge architectures bundled with CMSes to deliver digital performance at a global scale. This enables teams to boost their impact on customer engagement, acquisition and share of wallet growth.
  • Driving better customer experience and brand consistency, reducing costs. CMS platforms enable consistent digital experiences and continuous calibration of storage costs associated with outdated sites, landing pages and apps while adhering to global compliance, regulatory and sustainability standards.
  • Smoothing content operations through innovations, increasing team velocities. CMSes significantly reduce development time to bring new digital experiences to life via features like content planning tools, visual builders, live experience previews and self-learning experimentation.
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CMS platforms offer businesses benefits that influence growth and operational efficiency. They deliver brand consistency and streamline content operations. But to realize these benefits, you’ll first have to select from a diverse set of vendors that vary by size, type of offering, geography, and use case differentiation. Digital and technology leaders should use this report to understand the value they can expect from a CMS vendor, learn how vendors differ, and investigate options based on size and market focus.

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Recommendations

CMSes continue to evolve as a mature market that sees steady innovation. For organizations in the process of selecting a CMS, this report includes important dynamics to prepare for, including:

  • Main trend: Demonstrate value. Leaders face pressure to demonstrate business impact due to genAI innovations in digital experience technologies. This requires executives to present roadmaps to company boards, showcasing business value generation.
  • Primary challenge: Know the tradeoffs. Buyers must understand the tradeoffs of composable solutions vs. platforms and “pure headless” vs. “hybrid” solutions. This is prompting longer conversations about business value in the short term (impacts to business operations and ROI) versus the long term (TCO and vendor lock-in).
  • Top disruptor: Keep genAI in mind. GenAI-powered apps and experiences are changing how content is consumed and managed in CMSes. For content “management,” this means enterprisewide taxonomies and metadata will play a crucial role in generating the right content variants in real-time rather than storing content in a repository.