Combatting Composable Regret in 2026

Filip Bech-Larsen is CTO at Umbraco and a CMS Critic Contributor.

“Regrets, I’ve had a few,” sang Frank Sinatra in My Way. It’s a sentiment expressed by many who’ve taken a composable approach to building digital experiences their way, to suit their particular business needs. 

Suite dreams?

The composable approach to building digital experiences promised to overcome the key frustrations with the major digital marketing software suites. 

Common complaints include vendor lock-in, lack of flexibility, and high software license costs. 

Software suites provide most of the tools that large enterprises need to create compelling digital experiences. But small to medium organizations often end up paying for baked-in enterprise-level features that they will simply never use.

Even for large enterprises, being tied to a single vendor’s tool suite can limit their ability to react quickly to changing consumer trends, new engagement channels, and emerging market opportunities. 

What did composable promise to achieve?

In contrast to the constraints imposed by software suites, composable approaches promised to give organizations the flexibility to combine best-of-breed software components that meet their specific needs. They only pay for the software that they’re using, and elements can be swapped out as the business grows and evolves. 

Composability brings the combined business benefits of increased agility, shortened time-to-market, increased ROI, and lower software costs.

The attraction of the composable approach led to the birth of MACH architecture, based on a blend of microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native SaaS, and headless technologies. 

Enthusiastic adopters of MACH included an impressive roster of enterprise architects, vendors, and digital agencies. In 2023, Forrester analyst Joe Cicman dubbed the MACH Alliance, “The coolest tech club in town.”

Why the disappointment?

In reality, some organizations have encountered more complexity than they anticipated with the composable approach. As an example, when going fully headless, many organizations have been forced to build a custom integration layer for their composable best-of-breed architecture, which has eaten into project time, budget, and developer resources.  

In contrast to the promised agility, owing to the integrations required, engineering backlogs multiplied, meaning that marketing teams have sometimes had to wait weeks for changes.

Some industry insiders have argued that project delays have resulted not from the composable approach itself, but from the failure to communicate with all stakeholders at the outset. Buy-in is required not only from IT, but also from business strategists, CFOs, marketing leaders, and content managers. They need to be included in conversations about the long-term transformation required to achieve agreed business goals via composability. Speaking solely to the IT team has created inflated expectations and reduced commitment from business leaders. 

Integration Frustration

Let’s take composable commerce as an example. This came with the promise of healthy returns on investment as retailers can select specialized personalization, A/B testing, analytics, and content generation tools to boost engagement with different segments of their customer base, while also shortening time to market. 

Conversely, some organizations have found that the complexity of integrating different elements of their composable stack has slowed their time to market, added cost, and reduced ROI. At worst, the lack of integration can result in a disjointed user experience across different channels.

Enterprises have become de facto system integrators, stitching APIs together, debugging data flows, and juggling multiple vendor relationships and software licences.

But let’s not forget, integrating with the big marketing suites is painful too.

Within the MACH community, a recent LinkedIn post by VTEX founder, Mariano Gomide de Faria, ignited debate about whether dogmatically applying MACH architecture was simply recasting rigid software suites in a new mould, with all of the old painpoints of reduced agility, increased costs, and missed business opportunities.

Can composability align with compliance?

Gomide de Faria also warns that juggling multiple software components increases risk owing to data being accessed by diverse third-party software repositories. In regulated industries such as healthcare and the financial sector, he worries that the integration of multiple digital technologies used within the customer journey could compromise an organization’s ability to prove adequate governance of data.

He believes that the management overhead required to achieve a highly customized digital experience platform could drain resources from an organization’s core business as it works to manage and maintain its composable software stack.

Gomida de Faria proposes that, rather than rigidly following existing MACH architecture, organizations need to focus on business outcomes. He believes that, where standardization simplifies the process of reaching business objectives, it should be embraced.

Is there another way?

Many have concluded that composability was a mistake. Far from it. However, there are lessons that can be learned from the first wave of composability. 

Organizations need to avoid composability for its own sake. Components need to be selected that not only meet specific needs, but that are also designed to integrate well. By taking this approach, organizations can build solutions that provide openness and choice, without adding technical debt. 

Our strategy is to provide an open-source CMS platform that allows organizations to build the way they want to build. We’ve included an API management layer to support that strategy. However, we recognise the challenges faced by many of the early adopters of composability.

We believe that orchestration offers a way to address the management overhead created by integrating multiple technologies and achieve the full potential of composability. 

But first, let’s look at some of the successful business outcomes that have been achieved using a composable approach.

What do successful composable experiences look like?

As mentioned, a major frustration with larger software suites is the requirement to pay for functionality that some organizations will never use. 

Combatting waste with composability

Umbraco partner, true Digital, demonstrated how it was able to deliver significant savings on software license fees by taking a composable approach when redeveloping the digital platform of leading UK waste management company, Viridor.

Viridor’s mission statement is “building a world where nothing goes to waste.” That includes its software license fees.

Matt Sutherland, head of technology at true Digital, has commented, “Previously, this client was using a monolithic DXP, which resulted in the organisation paying for more functionality than it was using. true selected Umbraco because its headless and composable architecture provided a cost-effective route to updating and improving Viridor’s digital presence with a platform that allowed true to integrate only the required technologies, namely OneTrust, Vimeo, Azure, and Site 247. Within 3 months, true had developed a new site which reduced annual license costs by £80,000, with more than 60 minutes saved on deployment process times.”

The new site has increased engagement 18% year-on-year, with 3% more conversions, and CO2 emissions 40% lower than average.

Gaining operational efficiencies

International offshore law firm, Harneys, operated three websites, resulting in duplication of effort and costs. 

Working with Novicell, Harneys consolidated its digital presence onto a composable, Umbraco-powered platform that allows content management to be streamlined across global teams. 

In addition to reducing the operational overhead of managing separate sites, Harneys also improved discoverability of its site and saw a 128% increase in organic traffic. 

Powering up the user experience

The rising number of powerful storms prompted UK Power Networks' migration from a DXP, which struggled to scale during major incidents. 

Working with Tangent, UK Power Networks successfully migrated to a composable, API-based architecture that combines best-of-breed components, and handles four times the number of concurrent users.

Tangent took a JAMStack approach, using JavaScript, APIs, and Markup, to pre-render webpages and distribute them on a content delivery network (CDN). This approach halved page load times, is more energy-efficient, shrank the carbon footprint by 86%, and reduced hosting and software licence costs by 66%. 

Andy Eva-Dale, CTO at Tangent, has commented: “Harnessing the power of a composable, decoupled architecture through Umbraco has delivered a stunning new website which enjoys slashed carbon emissions, increased user capacity and halved page load speeds – to name just a few benefits.”

The new site provides an improved user experience that is optimized for mobile. Customers affected by a power cut during a storm could previously search for their location by typing in their postcode. Now users can drop a pin on a map and be presented with a localised view of any incidents within a five-mile radius.

The innovative design keeps users updated with the latest news headlines during a major incident. UK Power Networks also invested heavily in text message sign-up features, making its website more accessible for people with disabilities.

Tangent’s approach demonstrates that when organizations focus on clear business objectives, a composable approach can deliver measurable ROI in terms of scalability, performance, user experience, and sustainability. 

Orchestration is the answer

To save organizations from having to build a custom integration layer for composable DXPs, in 2026, we’re launching a new SaaS tool that can compose content from multiple adjacent applications, such as the PIM, DAM, ERM, CRM, and CMS, and deliver it as one unified output. 

The core components are an ingestion endpoint, and a GraphQL Delivery API that links data sources, triggers webhooks, transforms content, performs debugging, and more. The new product will free developers from having to create custom integrations for each customer, and allow organizations to focus on driving exceptional digital experiences that deliver measurable business value.

As CTO, this is an exciting time for Umbraco as it’s the first time that we’ve built a product outside of the CMS.

This aligns with Forrester’s finding that the market has shifted from ‘Composable best-of-breed and turnkey integrations’ to ‘Composability with longer lists of turnkey connectors to adjacent applications’ and ‘wider adoption of GraphQL APIs’. 

Closing thoughts

Early adopters of composability might be singing from the heart when they reprise “Regrets, I’ve had a few.” And there have certainly been some strong voices joining that chorus. But, by removing integration frustration and maintaining a focus on outcomes and experiences, we can move on to the next line of the song and make those regrets “too few to mention.”

The future is about practical composability with solutions that provide the required openness, choice, and agility, without orchestration being an unnecessary burden.

With a laser focus on business outcomes, rather than specific architectures, coupled with the power of orchestration and AI, you can customise your DXP, deliver exceptional digital experiences, and do it your way.

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Composable architecture promised to simplify digital experience creation by giving organizations the flexibility to combine the technologies that met their needs. But for many enterprises, it’s done the opposite, which has led to complex integrations, spiraling costs, and what some are now referring to as composable regret. In this live conversation, Umbraco CEO Mats Persson joins Matt Garrepy, Chief Content Officer at CMS Critic, for a candid exploration of what went wrong in the first wave of composable and what needs to change. Register for the webinar.

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