Not All Heroes Wear Capes. Here's Why CMS Is Your 'Unsung Hero' in 2025

Janus Boye is the host, lead, and coach at Boye & Company and a senior CMS Critic contributor. 

We live in a year where the yearning for a “superhero rescue” is very real for many of us. 

When it comes to digital leadership, including CMS, the projects and the people I’ve talked with are not immune to what’s happening in the world. Policy changes, tariffs, and uncertainty are also impacting those working with digital experiences in a big way. 

Right now, investments are being put on hold, teams are being cut, license costs are being slashed… the list goes on. Might this be the “software apocalypse” as foretold by Scott Brinker years ago?

The change fatigue is real, but we must carry on. 

There's also good news: CMS investments are increasingly paying off. Marketing is being empowered to do better, and digital sovereignty is finally on the agenda. As we begin to look closer at this market in 2025, I would say that superheroes actually come in many different shapes and forms. 

Before I get to that, I want to open my traditional annual CMS marketplace update somewhere else…

A creative “origin story”

It was one of those cold yet beautiful sunny spring days in my hometown of Aarhus back in March. I felt fortunate to be among a special cohort of superheroes, leading a peer group meeting of in-house design leaders. 

Aarhus has the distinction of being Denmark's second-largest city, and we were assembled in a fancy skyscraper overlooking the skyline. This one had 20 floors, but what makes it different is that it’s the tallest wooden building in our little Kingdom.

We met on the 17th floor with an amazingly clear view of the bay, the city, and the royal castle. Hosting us in their new offices was Vipps Mobilepay, the dominant mobile payment provider in Denmark. An established fintech that's focused heads-down on making things better for its customers. 

Sitting there for a work day, surrounded by smart and experienced design leaders, I heard their stories of how 2025 had started—and they all left a big impression on me. 

One design leader from a large retailer had just introduced a crude star labelling system to indicate which goods were from Europe. Another told about how an ERP implementation left much to be desired in terms of the user experience. Another shared how their various data storage systems had both a steep learning curve and almost a non-existent UI for non-technical users.  

Besides the usual interesting project updates, a memorable theme from that peer group meeting was a focus on creativity: What hurts your creativity, and what helps? How do we become more creative? It’s clear that management plays a part in the answer, but it’s also clear to me that creativity is under pressure at the moment. 

As these lines are written, the world seems busy using AI to create collectible figures of themselves in clamshell packaging. And it’s all a little sad to me. We’ll get back to AI later, but needless to say, creativity is both what makes us human, and also what you need to stand out and not just copy all the others. 

So, CMS, content, design, AI, and more. Where is it all headed? Let’s stay creative for a little while longer. 

Design is the next frontier

Talking about creativity is not just something for design leaders in a wooden tower in Denmark. Design changes everything – and when it comes to CMS, we need more effort put into transforming and improving those everyday tasks. Vendors have always claimed that their CMS (or actually any digital system) is easy to use, but is that really the case?  

Newer vendors like Contentstack (founded in 2018) have shown that design makes a difference when it comes to catering to marketing. Meanwhile, Storyblok (founded in 2017) is also known for a modern user experience and is even investing heavily in accessibility. 

The more established generation (e.g., the whole 1998 - 2003 cohort) is also making progress in solving the existing problems, as demonstrated by Drupal CMS this past year and WordPress in recent years with its Gutenberg initiative. 

In other words, content creators, marketers, comms folks—really, whatever role—can now do more with less. Less, as in without IT. The meta-metaphorical “easy button” has been added in some places but is still missing in others.  

The crowded and confusing CMS marketplace could use more creativity to move things forward, and design is the next frontier. During the early days of 2025, we’ve seen several initiatives to further improve the user experience. 

Some vendors have started to talk about "UI obsession," while others are describing it as "a race to usability." In live demos, we're seeing faster progress towards truly remarkable, good user experiences. Clearly, there is increasing competitive pressure for improving the user experience.

With new vendors continuously arriving on the already crowded scene, you could make the case that customers are still looking for better solutions to their content problems. To name just a few recent notable arrivals on the marketplace:

• Polish-based Flotiq (2019)
• Italian React Bricks (2020) 
• Czech-based Kontent.ai (2022)
• Canadian SimpliCity CMS (2022) - they won the CMS March Madness!

I’ll cover more about vendors later on, but let’s just say that to make progress in this industry, design standards would also be useful.

Oh, and one other question to consider: Will we have more time for creative tasks in the age of AI?

In summary: Fast and cheap might still rule (unfortunately), but design is a real differentiator. Design can be the superhero we are waiting for, and I’ll certainly be out there watching.

Shifting from tomorrow to today, we also need to talk about money. 

Digital investments are paying off

In the abstract for his presentation at the upcoming CMS Summit 25 conference in Frankfurt next month, Maximilian Steudel, MarTech & Digital Engagement Lead at Dr. Oetker, writes:

“No one has ever been promoted for introducing a new CMS. That has to change. The CMS is without a doubt the hidden hero of every MarTech stack. The silent worker, the secret architect in the background, and the DNA of our digital presence.”

Yes, your CMS might actually be cooler than you think—and I’m sensing a shift here that’s gone largely unnoticed: Digital investments in CMS are paying off in a big way. 

You might not be impressed by the recent personalization initiatives, or some other money sunk into a notable digital project. DXP and MACH projects have been more unpredictable, and dramatic overruns still happen. But by and large, investments in CMS perform really well. CMS is not as risky as it used to be, and CMS is indeed the hidden hero of the stack. It also helps that buyers have become more experienced, and they know how to reduce fixed and unnecessary costs. 

While you might think that an area such as licensing is now mature and transparent, that’s unfortunately far from the case. We keep hearing stories of heavy discounting from commercial vendors, and also many of the big agencies are very hungry for work (and new logos).  

To make the investment really work, you also need a winning team. Internal digital teams are going through big changes at the moment. Some are being heavily cut, others are still growing, and some are being moved around as digital experience still finds its place. 

Building a team is a little easier than it used to be, as the pool of experienced people is growing. And in the current market, the pressure for high salaries is also not as high as it used to be. You can actually find good people on the market, but what I’m hearing from recruiters is that the whole sourcing process is being badly hit by AI. Job applications use tools like ChatGPT or Gemini to generate CVs and cover letters, and the candidate experience has taken a nosedive. 

Long story short: If you're on the hiring end, put effort into making recruitment work. It will help you get a better return on your digital investments. And who knows? Perhaps your next hire will be the digital superhero you’ve been looking for. 

Let’s go now to marketing, a department that tends to get cut quickly when times are tough… 

CMS enables a new era for marketing

I’m not an expert on branding. But as an activist consumer, I am sensing a growing “relevancy crisis.” 

Trustworthy, the 2021 book by Margot Bloomstein on how the smartest brands beat cynicism and bridge the trust gap, is more relevant than ever. And from what I can see, it feels like marketing teams are drowning, even more so than digital teams. 

When it comes to digital marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) has also been a big topic for the past few decades. But here, something is also shifting. Google is now more widely recognized as an advertising platform than a search engine. People are resorting to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar AI tools to search. 

In our community, we've started hearing about how SEO is transforming into answer engine optimization or something similar. The jury is still out on creating a new three-lettered acronym for this, and don’t be mistaken—SEO is not going away. But it is definitely changing, and this calls for a change in how you manage content, and a bigger change to cater to the new era of marketing. 

Again, we are seeing CMS vendors respond. Optimizely, largely built on the roots of Swedish CMS vendor Episerver, is now more focused on the entire marketing lifecycle, with CMS only being a part of it. Still, I see CMS as the hidden hero (I agree with Maximilian from Dr. Oetker on this).

A much smaller yet still notable vendor is Uniform, which came into the field from another angle and really only released their CMS capabilities less than 18 months ago. Now, they're recognized by industry analysts as a vendor that empowers marketers (and tech) to deliver scalable, personalized experiences that drive business.

Looking beyond vendors, this new era is also about data-driven strategies and a customer-centric approach. To win in this evolving landscape, you need authentic, credible, and freshly updated content. Whether created in your CMS or outside, groundwork like content design, taxonomies, and content operations is needed to orchestrate everything. 

My advice: Make content management the foundation of your system, and you’ll find that content is your superhero!

AI has become a “boardroom conversation”

Last year, the shift in artificial intelligence was from hype to value. Now, we're one step further, as many companies expect to use large language models (LLMs) in their business strategies. 

Irrespective of what’s really happening under the hood (more on that shortly), another big shift is that AI is now a “boardroom conversation,” and that also impacts investments in digital teams, across the stack, and in content management. It’s still easier to get funding if you sprinkle some AI into it, but what’s interesting is the apparent lack of a leading vision. 

I’m a fan of experimentation (thanks to Makram Mansour at Intuit for your regular reminders), but what are we iterating towards besides better short-term conversions? To put things in perspective, AI has been compared to big leaps. It's like when the PC was introduced, and the vision was to put the power of personal computing in households. Or the World Wide Web, where it was the ubiquitous access to information. 

Someone tell me, what’s the vision for AI? It has to be more than creating collectible figures of ourselves in clamshell packaging. 

And then there’s the entire question of AI & ethics, which deserves much more attention

So let’s look just a slight bit under the hood: Most of the time, when the talk falls to AI in the CMS marketplace, it's referring to LLMs and the ability to generate text and understand and process it. LLMs can do a lot, and CMS vendors have been spending time and money training them to do clever things. 

Expect more to come on AI agents, better prompt engineering, and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). And keep in mind what Tobi Stadelmaier, VP Engineering at CoreMedia, said in a conference presentation late last year: “Testing and QA is a completely new game."

In summary, I’m actually not so sure if AI is your superhero. It might actually be the villain, but let’s see. 

Finally, let’s talk about what's happening in the open source realm—and what's ahead.

On open source, open choice, and sovereignty

Let me begin by saying that open source is still very big in CMS. If you add WordPress, Drupal, and TYPO3, you have more than 50% of all CMS-powered websites. While these tend to fly under the radar screen of some industry analysts, I think it’s always worth a closer look at what is going on in open source, as the decisions in their communities have a broader impact. 

Here's an ultra-brief summary of the state of the open source CMS union:

• WordPress remains by far the biggest and most widely used. But the lawsuits at the top of the ecosystem (WP Engine vs. Automattic) are like a nasty “family feud” in public. It's pushing customers away from WordPress, and, perhaps most concerningly, it is also pushing talent away from engaging in the community
• Drupal has now released Drupal CMS with their new product strategy. It's a big shift from the edge cases of the original Drupal by catering more to communication and marketing departments. This community is also very big in the government sector, so with funding being cut and a major new product out, it looks to be interesting times.
• TYPO3 seems to be continuing the slow and steady progress that has characterized this project over the past decade, in particular in the German-speaking part of Europe. Winning the contract to be the engine behind the Government Site Builder in Germany was big, but it seems yet to have made its partner ecosystem busy. Government projects take time, and so winning new partners is the key. 

It seems a low-hanging fruit for open source CMS projects to align around industry terminology. As I said on the slide during the TYPO3 Conference earlier this year: Speak the language. Don’t make your own. 

Still, the talk at the conference was about those so-called “TYPO3isms” that were familiar to most in the room. It's like “speaking URLs,” but doesn’t make much sense to outsiders. Back in October 2023, Canadian commercial CMS vendor Agility led the way when it updated its terminology to align with industry standards. Also, there was a call-to-action from 2023 on the Drupal site to locate “Drupalisms” that might create confusion among users, so perhaps work is being done, slowly, but truly. 

As always, recognizing the problem is the first step towards solving it.

A big part of the “how” is also a clear product strategy. Drupal seems to be chasing a solid vision for its Drupal CMS, but what about the others? Customers expect more than a product strategy in a document. They are looking for clear action that the strategy is being executed.

One key strength for open source is the ability for customers to have control of the data they generate, including where it can be stored, who can access it, and how it can be used. There’s quite some hype around digital sovereignty at the moment, and it’s all about the ability to act independently on all digital matters without undue influence from third parties. 

European CMS vendors are having a field day as EU buyers are looking at alternatives to US-based market leaders. The question for all is now: What can we do as businesses, organizations, and even individuals to achieve digital sovereignty?

As TYPO3 Project Ambassador Mathias Bolt Lesniak said in a recent call, we've seen a fair share of “open source-washing” over the past few years, and now we're beginning to see a wave of “data or digital-sovereignty-washing." Similar to AI, you need to confirm that you're talking about the same things and keep the focus on solving your requirements. 

So here’s the real superhero for you: Being able to act independently on all digital matters.

Even without a cape, CMS saves the day

As 2025 flies by, we're bound to see more challenges to growth. Trade wars aside, there are plenty of headwinds, and businesses are more focused on capturing value from their investments—AI or otherwise.

Despite these villainous realities, I think we can expect great things from content management in the year ahead. And if we focus on creativity, it can guide our next steps in truly rewarding ways, from improving UX to harnessing AI in ethical ways that enhance our quality of life. 

I also believe that the voices of open source platforms are more important than ever as we face a shifting commercial and regulatory landscape. These communities can help inspire the next generation of content and experience creators to freely build and explore.

CMS may not be able to leap tall wooden buildings in a single bound, but it still shows up whenever it's needed. And like a superhero, it can be a force for good—and even save the day.

Good luck with your initiatives!

Upcoming Events

The Composable Conference 2025

April 22-24 – Chicago, USA

Experience the future of composable and MACH principles in “The Windy City” and dive even deeper into the innovative world of MACH architecture and its benefits for your business. Building on the momentum of MACH THREE, this conference will provide your teams with the expert, impartial guidance needed to craft a winning transformation strategy and leverage the latest advancements in automation and Al to maximize efficiency and drive your organization forward. This event is ideal for executives, business leaders, technologists, and everyone in between who is looking to harness the power of composable. Secure your spot today.

CMS Summit 25

May 13-14, 2025 – Frankfurt, Germany

Don't miss the first European edition of our prestigious international conference dedicated to the global content management community! CMS Summit 25 will bring together top-notch speakers, our renowned learning format, and engaging social events. Hear from leading practitioners like Deutsche Bahn, Dr. Oetker, and more – and join customers, agencies, and CMS vendors as we discuss current trends and what's ahead for the content and digital experience fields. Connect and network at the only vendor-neutral, in-person conference focused on CMS. Space is limited for this exclusive event, so book your seats today.

CMS Connect 25

August 5-6, 2025 – Montreal, Canada

We are delighted to present the second annual summer edition of our signature global conference dedicated to the content management community! CMS Connect will be held again in beautiful Montreal, Canada, and feature a unique blend of masterclasses, insightful talks, interactive discussions, impactful learning sessions, and authentic networking opportunities. Join vendors, agencies, and customers from across our industry as we engage and collaborate around the future of content management – and hear from the top thought leaders at the only vendor-neutral, in-person conference exclusively focused on CMS. Space is limited for this event, so book your seats today.