Untangling the CMS market in 2024

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

“Straight talk” is a style of communication aimed at solving problems without blaming or defending. In that spirit, let me open this traditional annual marketplace update with the current state of affairs: 

• Few organizations are using a CMS to actually manage content
• More, but far from all, are using a CMS to store content
• Some, but probably less than you think, are using their CMS to deliver their digital experience

So if a CMS is not managing your content, perhaps not even storing it or delivering the content, does this mean that the innovative vendors or reputable digital agencies have failed? 

Or does it mean that we don’t need CMS any longer?  

That’s all far from the case. While demands have increased on content and delivering a better experience, these are the signs of an industry that’s confusing, to say the least. You could also call it a marketplace that’s going through growing pains – and it’s certainly very difficult to navigate, whether you are a customer, consultant, or some other digital change agent. 

In this post, I’ll attempt to untangle the CMS market as it looks right now. I’ll start with the need to move beyond the current blockers, I’ll cover why and how you need to turn content into success, and I’ll also dive into some of the current marketplace dynamics on the vendor side. 

First, let’s look at what’s driving change on the customer's side. 

It's time to leapfrog

A common pain among the many customers I talk to is the need for scaling. We are talking about scaling as in more content, more websites, more colleagues, a bigger budget, and also more tools. 

Gabriel Dillon from personalization vendor Ninetailed nailed the problem when he recently said:

“Scaling content is getting harder and harder to manage. It used to be the kind of problem only the large multinationals had, but with the growing need to differentiate a brand, and to target your content more finely, the problem is growing beyond just the multinationals. Headless and componentized content has also contributed to the problem because now we're not just thinking about swapping out a page, but the individual elements of the page, and we also need to consider they might not be on a ‘page’ at all.”

The solution is tricky, likely involves AI and automation, and certainly requires new organizational learning. In brief, you need better data practices within the organization, or as Brian Browning from Kin + Carta calls it, "data-driven optimization.” a

Beyond scaling, many customers continue to report the feeling of being “stuck” in replatforming. Here, the move to an orchestration era with a modern tech stack is a part of the solution enabling you to change individual parts, e.g. the delivery engine, without having to do a complete replatform. 

“We have scaling. We have tools that are holding many back. And we have constant tech innovations. Customers – particularly budget holders – have never had higher expectations, and that translates into a demand to move quickly. ”

Moving to marketing, there’s the current buzz around visual editing. Marketers have long wanted to perform full WYSIWYG editing of textual content. This has been a cool demo for at least two decades, but with the pendulum swinging between IT and marketing, it somehow went missing in the past years. Now it’s back with a vengeance, it’s a big deal if implemented right, as it dramatically improves the experience for marketers enabling them to become more productive. 

Looking to the very near future, Mark Ruddock, the industry outsider who became CEO of Kontent.ai, recently connected the voice trend from circa 2018 to the deafening AI hype that started in 2023. He said that customers will soon expect to be able to “talk to their CMS” – and, within minutes, have a landing page up and running on all desired channels! 

So, we have scaling. We have tools that are holding many back. And we have constant tech innovations. Customers – particularly budget holders – have never had higher expectations, and that translates into a demand to move quickly. 

Before we go deep on the vendor side, let’s look more at content. In 2022, I predicted that this would be the year when CMS is finally about managing content. I’ll leave others to decide whether I was right. We’ve come quite a ways since then, and the focus now seems somewhat shifted. 

Turning content into success 

The demands for content are rising – and this is driving yet another seismic change in the world of CMS.

Like industry analyst Cathy McKnight recently reminded us: “Content needs to be treated as a strategic function of the business."

Are customers treating content strategically? Increasingly so. With digital slowly but truly escaping the print paradigm, new long-form formats are also pushing this. 

“Listicles” (lists and articles) have been popular for a decade, yet traditional CMS vendors have been slow to embrace them. More recently, “scrollytelling” (long-form stories that include audio, video, and animation effects triggered by scrolling) is again pushing the needle – and customers once again have to resort to new tools to deliver. 

While the CMS market leaders are looking elsewhere, it’s the customers who are driving this. They need content to become successful and this is not just something happening in Silicon Valley or among the media giants who have widely embraced the format.

Recently, during a government digital leaders group, the Capital Region of Denmark shared how scrollytelling is a format they will use from time to time – and how they’ve created governance around it. 

Zooming out, it’s about content operations, or as it was recently referred to: Your content supply chain. Thinking about content as a logistical supply chain sends at least two messages inside the organization: 

• Similar to other supply chain challenges and issues, this one is important for the organization. You could go as far as calling content a “must-win battle.”
• Problems in the content supply chain will have a big impact on your organization.

Let’s move on and look at content from the inside perspective. 

Content authoring: The next frontier?

In my latest update back in November, I wrote about Content Production as The Next Wave for Digital Experience Platforms.

Since then, much has happened. We are clearly not done building content management systems that authors want to use. I’ll get to the vendor progress shortly, but I’ll start by highlighting the work Greg Dunlap is doing on his upcoming book, Designing Content Authoring Experiences. 

This is much-needed industry work because, as several of our peer group members have reminded us, some of these interfaces are worse today than they were 20 years ago. 

Further inflating the problem, Paola Roccuzzo from Foolproof in the UK reminded us that the content design and UX writing profession is either sidelined or cut out from the current means of production: Figma, design systems, and code repos. 

As she said: 

“None of them is a solution fit for content management anyway, so many companies aren't getting enough value from these disciplines: they just get what they often perceive as an expensive add-on for prototyping who can't even check what's in production until too late.”

When we had this conversation at the London meeting in the CMS Experts community, it was really an eye-opener around the table. It may start with content design being done in Figma, but really Figma is more widely used than expected, which is also why so many vendors are working on a connector. At the same time, other vendors are creating AI writing plugins for Figma, so even that can happen in the widely used collaborative interface design tool. 

In the session, Paola further stirred the discussion by stating: 

“The authoring experience is a misnomer: the problem is workflow, not writing, specifically how to locate what content needs attention for checking, revising, or modifying. I don't see much work being done to improve that.”

So what’s the response from the vendors? As promised, I’ll dig deeper, coming in the next chapter. But related to content authoring, I’ll highlight two examples:

• Adobe is widely considered the market leader, and just released a new Universal Editor – changing both how content creators and developers interact with the CMS.
• Hygraph is still flying below the radar of most analyst firms but has long been a rising star in the space. The company just released its new Hygraph Studio, which my fellow Critic Matt Garrepy wrote about: Hygraph Studio Sets Sail with Increased Content Velocity and New Asset Management Capabilities

Now, let’s look more closely at who “normally” attracts the most attention in our space: the vendors. 

What’s next in the marketplace?

As mentioned earlier, it's a confusing time to be a CMS buyer in the mid-2020s. Where did all the clarity go? 

Many of those headless vendors who have been heavily beating the marketing drum for the past decade have now dressed up as “traditional” CMS vendors and added delivery to their offerings. There’s indeed a move to the middle, a blurring of features and offerings by the vendors. 

My fellow critics Mark Demeny and Matt Garrepy have closely analyzed the recent updates for industry analysts Gartner and Forrester. There’s that word “composable” – which, similarly to headless, has been overused to the extent that it would be more helpful if they stopped talking about it. 

There’s also the ongoing discussion about DXP (digital experience platforms). Does it mean enterprise CMS, or is a DXP something you build? Are headless vendors like Contentful and Contentstack really platforms? Mark and Matt break down some of these questions and assumptions in their articles from earlier this year:

• Thoughts on the Forrester DXP Wave 2023: Don’t Judge an Analyst Report by its Infographic
• The DXP Kerfuffle: Finding the Big Chords in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant

There’s also the MACH Alliance, the initial gang of four that set out to compete together against the larger vendors. What another analyst firm called “The Coolest Tech in Town Club” after one year has since then grown with more interests to be served. 

As of writing, the Alliance is soon turning four years old and has more than 100 members (agencies and vendors). They’ve just proposed to expand their certification so that old-school vendors can get their products certified if they are on a modern tech stack and live up to some new “culture” requirements. While this might further drive membership, I’m also seeing it create further confusion. It looks like a clear move to drive membership from larger vendors with deeper pockets for the steep >$25k Alliance membership fee at the potential expense of smaller vendors who are considering their renewal. 

On the customer side, many have still not heard of the MACH Alliance, and on the vendor side, there’s an increasing debate about the viability of the Alliance. Clearly, it’s been valuable for many of the members in terms of partnerships and expanding the ecosystem. The Alliance also deserves credit for its work on educating the marketplace and making tech cool. The pendulum is swinging for the Alliance - between being helpful to buyers or a marketing alliance for some members. Time will tell how it works out.

What’s missing from both MACH Alliance and most of the work from the major industry analysts are the major open source vendors. The New Open Website Alliance was founded by Drupal, Joomla, TYPO3, and WordPress back in February, and represents the content management systems behind roughly 50% (!) of all websites online today. The message from this new Alliance to decision-makers is clear: always choose open source software over proprietary systems. As of writing, this new Alliance is invitation-only and they are still working out if there's going to be a membership fee. 

Going niche, but still worth mentioning, is the work happening around digital experience composition (DXC). A year ago, we heard loud and clear from vendors claiming this was an emerging market. What a difference a year makes. Today, it seems that the focus is rather on orchestration (DXO) – and still, there’s quite some explaining to be done. 

When Sitecore luminary John West joined Conscia.ai, he talked about how they provide infrastructure and features that enable composable solutions. I’ll say there’s a real experience challenge looking for a better solution, and I’m sensing early signs that orchestration is what’s next. 

The work on Gen AI is far from niche. As the industry moves from hype to reality, we are beginning to see what’s next: AI-assisted content productivity, finally fixing search, and more areas that drive value. As we’ve seen in Europe with privacy – and also in the US with accessibility – might it be legislation that truly drives key features? With the EU legislation just out, there’s both risk and safety that will have an impact on the models and data-driven processes we’ll rely on in the future. 

One final thing: Citizen developers are having a moment. CMS content editors can increasingly work with no-code or low-code solutions to improve their work. Some platforms, like Drupal, have had this built-in for a while, while other vendors are adding this at the moment. 

Again, there’s a missing consensus around the playing field: Is this putting templating control into the hands of the non-technical? Is it expanding the scope of automating content tasks? Is it enterprise-worthy? We’ll see, but there’s something happening here to help organizations meet the rising expectations. 

Have we untangled CMS in 2024?

Far from it. My key advice to buyers in these times is to do your homework when it comes to vendor selection. 

In particular, talk directly to references. You'll likely find useful information and connections that can help you on this journey. 

A clear trend is also that buyers are increasingly relying on their trusted agency. That's why vendors are investing so heavily in their partner programs, but to be blunt: Navigating the agency landscape is even trickier, with new ones arriving on the scene as Gold Partners of one vendor, constant M&A (Kin + Carta is now Valtech), and then there's the constant moving around of key staff that can make or break your project. We'll have to untangle that in another post. 

Vendors, alliances, analysts, and agencies share one thing in common: There's no consolidation in sight.

The good news at the end: There are plenty of vendors and agencies out there who would be keen to work with you – and not just sell you their software and services. 

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