What’s a digital experience platform? Get the scoop on DXPs, CMSes and where content platforms fit into the modern stack

Digital experience platforms first emerged as all-in-one solutions for delivering digital experiences across channels and platforms at scale. Today, the most recent Gartner and Forrester reports on DXPs include monolithic suites, headless options, composable DXPs, and hybrids.

This can leave people wondering what is a digital experience platform? How does it differ from modern content management systems? And what type of DXP do you need to deliver the digital experiences your customers crave? 

This post explains the difference between CMSes and DXPs, why all-in-one DXPs are falling out of favor and how leading companies are assembling customized, composable digital experience platforms with Contentful at the center.

What is a digital experience platform? 

First things first: what’s a digital experience platform? Gartner, who is primarily responsible for coining the term, defines a digital experience platform as an “integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery, and optimization of contextualized digital experiences.” In other words, digital experience platforms allow for the creation, hosting, and distribution of digital experiences across multiple channels and devices.  

Digital experience platforms solve an increasingly complex problem: meeting the growing expectations of customers. Three quarters of consumers (73%) are omnichannel shoppers, and 90% of consumers expect a consistent brand experience regardless of channel or device, according to statistics from CapitalOne Shopping. To meet these expectations, brands need to deliver relevant, connected experiences through a range of digital channels (web, mobile, social media) and digital devices (wearables, home devices, digital displays). 

Digital experience platforms evolved to make working with this enormous amount of content manageable. But as we’ll see later, traditional all-in-one DXP suites — single tools that try to do everything necessary to produce digital experiences — share the problems of their CMS counterparts. Companies are already pivoting to the next generation of digital experience tools: the composable digital experience platform.

Why do companies need a digital experience platform?

From the customer’s perspective, every interaction is part of one continuous brand experience. They expect their digital experience to be cohesive across an increasing number of channels on all their devices with consistent content and meaningful touchpoints at every stage of the customer journey. This requires coordination and collaboration across multiple teams and technology within the enterprise. 

Digital experience platforms enable brands to build and deliver cohesive digital experiences, faster and with greater consistency. These seamless, engaging digital experiences capture greater revenue and increase customer loyalty. To create them, brands need to go beyond content management. Digital experience platforms integrate content with other core technologies to deliver personalized, localized, and interactive experiences across channels, devices, and the customer lifecycle.

In the race to deliver digital experiences that are relevant and better than the competition, the only sustainable advantage is the ability to build faster than the competition. 

Speed or “time to value” is the critical measure of success. Brands need efficient tools to build digital experiences that scale. Relying on heroic efforts to overcome system shortfalls is no longer a viable option. People can fill in system gaps for one-off experiences and give the appearance that a CMS or digital experience platform is working, but the true test comes when you need to redesign over 100 websites in a few months or want to enter a new channel like voice content. 

See more examples of what it means —  and what it takes — to build better digital experiences.

What is the difference between a digital experience platform and a content management system?

A traditional content management system is designed to manage content, typically for a single channel such as a website or app. CMSes may deliver content to a webpage, but you can’t use a single CMS to create and manage digital experiences across channels. Companies end up with a sprawl of siloed CMSes that make it impossible to deliver the connected digital experiences customers want. 

Headless CMSes decouple the content and the presentation components of a traditional CMS. They enable companies to separate how content is created and managed from how that content is delivered and displayed. In this way, a headless CMS can deliver content across multiple channels. Learn more about the differences between traditional, decoupled, and headless CMSes.

Digital experience platforms take the flexible delivery of a headless CMS a few steps further.  With a digital experience platform, digital experiences are structured, easily machine readable, and extensible, enabling integration with a variety of tools. Brands can build, deliver, and scale deeply engaging digital experiences faster. Digital experience platforms empower companies to build digital experiences such as chatbots, IoT, AR/VR, and digital assistants in a way that is replicable.

What digital experience platform is right for you?

The DXP market has expanded from traditional all-in-one suites to include headless, composable, and hybrid options. While the term “platform” might sound like you’re purchasing an all-in-one product or stand-alone package, most digital experience platforms are composed of a collection of technologies. 

Some companies choose DXPs that are predetermined bundles of technology packaged as an all-in-one digital experience platform or monolithic suite. Others opt to build their own digital experience platform or digital experience stack, choosing the technology that best fits their needs. 

What’s the difference between an all-in-one DXP suite and a composable digital experience platform?

You can buy an all-in-one digital experience platform that provides a suite of tools, but these options take the limitations of a monolithic suite with them. To make matters more confusing, many monolithic DXPs are adding capabilities through acquisitions and styling themselves as “composable.”

The result is a suite of tools that weren’t created to work together, and that haven’t been chosen by you to match your business needs. The suite-based approach requires customization, which can lead to a mess of integrators, workarounds and, eventually, a digital product that isn’t ideally suited to your needs. 

In contrast, a truly composable DXP lets you choose capabilities from different vendors and connect them via APIs. Composable digital experience platforms that are API-based from the ground up give brands more options and flexibility so they can meet current business needs and adapt to whatever the future brings. 

Composable digital experience platforms deliver the functionality of a traditional DXP with greater speed and flexibility

More and more companies are assembling their own digital experience platforms with the exact tools and capabilities they need. This often starts with an API-first, extensible content management component such as a composable content platform that enables brands to unify content and deliver consistent experiences across brands and channels.

Composable DXPs build on the proven benefits of MACH architecture — microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, headless solutions. This modular architecture has several advantages over traditional DXPs:

• Orchestration on the back end improves customer experiences across brands, channels, and regions.

• Seamless technology integrations increase agility and scalability.

• Flexibility and automation increase speed and productivity.

Curious about composable solutions? Check out this blog post about the benefits of composable digital experience platforms and how to implement a modern DXP strategy.

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