In today’s world, information and consumer trends are propagated at lightning speed. Marketers who hope to stay ahead of the curve and keep their content relevant and impactful need to be able to react quickly, and reach their audiences across multiple channels.

Both headless and decoupled content management systems (CMS) have gained popularity in recent years due to their superior support for multi-channel experiences and marketing agility.

While both headless and decoupled CMS architectures have their advantages and proponents, the debate actually illustrates why a hybrid, best-of-both-worlds approach is the superior solution.

The rise of headless and decoupled CMS

The explosion of new channels for the delivery of digital experiences in recent years has presented marketers with both new opportunities and a technological challenge: Traditional, monolithic CMS platforms have a difficult time delivering content to these new channels and devices. These legacy systems have inflexible, tightly coupled back-end, front-end and delivery architectures. That makes it difficult, if not impossible, to use outside development frameworks, and to distribute content via multiple, disparate channels.

As a result, many marketers have moved to headless and decoupled CMS architectures, which are specifically designed to address the shortcomings of monolithic CMS.

The first generation of headless systems dispensed with a front-end altogether, retaining a back-end to generate and store content that can be delivered to any channel or device using an API.

While dramatically increasing content distribution scope and flexibility, the lack of front-end editing and delivery capabilities has a significant downside: It prevents non-technical marketers from being able to make content display adjustments directly, without support from IT. As a result, decoupled CMS have gained prominence in many quarters, because they can support today’s multi-channel environments while also preserving marketer control and agility.

While decoupled CMS have an advantage when it comes to marketing autonomy, proponents of headless systems might cite the lack of a front-end as a benefit to organizations that have a deep bench of programmers who can make rapid changes on the back-end.

The debate over the two architectures is important to marketers and marketing organizations looking for a CMS to enable them to develop and deploy content quickly and efficiently.

To fully consider the pros and cons of both types of architecture, we will take a closer look at the specifics of their design and the types of use cases associated with them. You can also download our handy summary guide for an overview of both approaches:

Get the guide: Headless Vs. Decoupled CMS at-a-Glance→

Headless architecture

Headless CMS addresses the issues of limited content creation ability and restrictive distribution scope by consisting of just back-end content creation and storage functionality; front-end distribution and presentation is missing in these systems. Content is delivered via API, allowing for a much wider scope of delivery than is the case with legacy CMS.

Headless architecture consists of the following:

Front-end:

• Content publishing via API to all API-eligible devices and channels
• Can connect to any applicable front-end technology for publishing content
• Editing is limited to out-of-context data entry and forms without live preview

Back-end:

• Storage of digital assets such as content and code
• Management of content creation

Decoupled architecture

The lack of a front-end in headless content management systems and the difficulties this poses for non-technical marketers has led to the adoption of decoupled CMS.

Decoupled architecture consists of the following:

Front-end:

• Content management support for multiple sites, languages,and workflows
• Best-in-class solutions have WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) content editing and preview capabilities
• Capable of publishing to any channel using any front-end technology

Back-end:

• Full content management environment
• Data, code, and experience storage and control
• Collaboration and coordination

Pros and cons of headless and decoupled architecture

Headless pros

• The ability to choose programming language enables developers to design content using their favorite tools and frameworks, promoting design innovation and higher quality content
• No front-end distribution restrictions enable wide delivery of content across channels and devices
• Delivery via API future-proofs content by enabling distribution over new and updated channels
• API usage supports rapid, seamless content delivery without additional programming requirements
• Select the front-end technology you prefer
• Enables a high level of control over the look and feel of your content and where it appears
• Enables secure integrations with third-party solutions
• Ability to create all your content in one location and deliver it widely from there

Headless cons

• Lack of built-in WYSIWYG preview and editing functionality
• Making changes to content presentation requires developer assistance
• Can be expensive when paying for developers and infrastructure to run the app in addition to the CMS
• Extremely reliant on IT and developer resources
• Previews without developer assistance are not available
• Rendering the front-end requires separate developer skillsets and depends on separate technologies
• No delivery mechanism, so companies have to create their own rendering/publishing/delivery infrastructure
• Generally weaker content support (such as multi-site, multi-language, translations, workflows, etc.)

Decoupled pros

• Programmers can use the languages of their choice
• WYSIWYG functionality enables non-technical marketers to make changes to the presentation of content without developer assistance
• More rapid content delivery than legacy coupled CMS because of system architecture
• Greater security due to lack of a direct link between back-end and front-end as with traditional CMS architecture
• Greater website uptime as upgrades to back-end functionality don’t impact the front-end
• Can share content over various sales and marketing applications or integrate with enterprise tools for data analytics, communications, etc.
• Ability to create all your content in one location and deliver it widely from there
• Allows for smoother deployment of content and rapid design changes
• Less IT dependency
• Offers the best features of CMS functionality: Flexibility on the front-end and a structured framework for content creation and storage on the back-end

Decoupled cons

• Requires the CMS to render experiences so IT must work with the CMS’s framework instead of their own. (Crownpeak’s code-first SDKs eliminate this problem.)

The best of both worlds with Headless 2.0

While the debate over headless versus decoupled CMS architecture rages on, Crownpeak offers a breakthrough hybrid headless approach. It features both front-end flexibility and design adaptability, while retaining the back-end development advantages of headless systems. We call it Headless 2.0. By combining the advantages of a headless back-end with a traditional front-end, Crownpeak enables marketers to deliver powerful, beautifully designed content widely and rapidly. This helps them keep their content relevant and appealing in a world in which trends shift on what can seem like a day-to-day (or even hour-to-hour) basis.

Crownpeak’s cloud-native Digital Experience Management (DXM) is a hybrid solution that provides headless CMS flexibility along with full-featured content editing tools for marketer autonomy. It offers enterprise-grade capabilities such as support for multi-site, multi-language, workflows, collaboration, content retention, translation, brand standards, and more. All of these features enable you to deliver content to any channel using your favorite tools and frameworks.

DXM allows marketers to make front-end changes without losing time due to order ticket requests. And our code-first SDKs for popular front-end frameworks (like Angular, React and Vue) automatically create the configurations to support inline editing, drag and drop, and real-time preview. The result is that marketers can construct and assemble experiences while the development team is freed to focus on new capabilities.

Why think about it in terms of this vs. that, when you can have both and enjoy the benefits? Request a demo to see for yourself what Crownpeak's Digital Experience Management (DXM) platform can do!

Tags: Digital Experience Management SaaS Web Content Management