Fabián Herrera
Top 9 Best Headless CMS for 2023: Choosing the right solution
Headless CMS platforms are becoming increasingly popular as businesses look for ways to deliver personalized content across multiple channels. In this blog post, we compare the top 9 headless CMS platforms and highlight their key features and benefits. No matter what your needs are, there is a headless CMS platform that is right to help you achieve your business goals.
1. Expresia
In the digital era, brands need to be agile, adaptable, and future-oriented, that's where Expresia, an all-in-one SaaS Digital Experience Platform (DXP), comes into play. From startup to enterprise, Expresia empowers brands to create robust digital assets while offering them a sustainable competitive edge. If you are wondering which CMS to use because you have outgrown yours, we suggest you switch to a DXP. Learn about the main differences between DXP and CMS.
Expresia's goal is to de-risk digital transformation and accelerate time to market while supporting continuous iterations, ensuring a long-term investment that fosters business growth. Thanks to the elegant RESTful API at its core, developers are given immediate access to Expresia with a powerful Integrated Development Environment that leverages standard web languages, like HTML, CSS and server-side Javascript. This helps to reduce technical folks’ learning curve.
Expresia’s headless architecture enables smooth operations for all types of unique experiences, built on a robust, scalable network infrastructure. Expresia also creates hourly, daily, and monthly backups for easy recovery when needed. With multi-tenant options and a 99.9% uptime SLA, users can rest assured that their digital operations are always up and running.
One of the top trends in DXP is collaboration, and Expresia takes this seriously. As a collaborative hub, it empowers developers, content creators, and marketers to streamline processes and deliver powerful digital experiences to customers while its browser-based IDE boosts development productivity with portable code containers in the Bundle workflow, version control and branching.
Marketers can look forward to Headless CMS and visual, no-code content creation. Expresia also includes complex eCommerce functionality, ensuring a truly seamless customer journey, which is vital in today's competitive digital landscape. Get to know all the benefits you can obtain by implementing a DXP for your e-commerce.
Expresia, with AI-driven personalization capabilities, seamlessly integrates with your current tech and marketing frameworks, offering complete transparency, and insightful data to elevate your decision-making.
2. Agility
Agility CMS integrates with other tools, allowing content to be published directly from the platform, but for optimal integration, users may need to install third-party add-ons. Through its API capabilities, it is designed to work with different technologies, giving users multiple deployment options so they can decide where to place their content or use existing frameworks such as Gatsby or Next.js.
The CMS provides users with a workspace to create and collaborate on digital content with integrated page management, version history, and local management, allowing users to create content without the need for a development team.
As a cloud-native and API-centric Content Management System, Agility supports customizable content and content models that can be adapted to meet changing business needs. Finally, for content security, the system includes single sign-on (SSO), SLAs, encryption, and data storage features, ensuring that users can focus on content creation without worrying about security and storage.
3. Contentful
Contentful provides a content management interface coupled with a set of tools for developers. It does not ship with predefined content models, instead it allows users to design their own models. This capability is supported by the provision of APIs, SDKs, and custom applications.
The platform emphasizes content management, ensuring that users can create and distribute content. Using a RESTful API, to facilitate the distribution of content across multiple channels, giving users the autonomy to develop content models to meet their specific needs.
This Content Management System is designed for reusability and scalability, its API supports rapid content delivery, and all content created within Contentful is ready for deployment to other digital touchpoints, be it mobile, web, or other platforms. This setup promotes content recycling and fine-tuning to deliver appropriate content to the intended audience.
Expresia and Contentful are two leading headless CMSs. A detailed comparison between the two could help you narrow down your choices and select the right platform for your needs.
4. Bloomreach
Bloomreach is a platform designed to support both B2C and B2B eCommerce capabilities, structured in a way that allows both developers and marketers to collaborate, with the goal of streamlining the process of bringing product content to market, using an API-first strategy combined with data analytics to deliver consistent and contextually relevant product information to customers across multiple channels.
This Content Management System provides marketing automation tools. These tools, based on pre-set algorithms, help improve the shopping experience for customers by suggesting additional products to customers based on patterns such as top-selling items and trending products. In addition, Bloomreach has a customer data engine that delivers tailored omnichannel experiences, this feature serves as a centralized customer data platform that serves all facets of eCommerce activities.
5. Kontent
Kontent.ai is a headless Content Management System that delivers content as structured Application Programming Interface (API) output, specifically in JSON format. While it was designed primarily with developers in mind due to its integration-centric nature, its setup does require developer involvement.
One of the core features of Kontent.ai is its support for multiple production environments, allowing users to replicate environments and transition between non-production and production statuses as needed. Kontent.ai uses "content types" that act as templates for content elements; once the development team has created these content types, other team members without technical expertise can use them as a basis for content creation.
In addition, this CMS is built-in workflows for the content creation and publishing process, allowing non-technical users to use these workflows to move content from draft to published stages. Similar to collaborative document editing tools such as Google Docs, Content.ai provides a commenting feature to discuss and annotate directly within the platform.
6. Butter
Butter operates as a headless CMS platform, working the incorporation of content APIs into diverse tech stacks. It's structured to accommodate developers, integrating with website codebases via API calls for content management. This setup provides an interface for users to add Content Management System functionalities to their existing technology infrastructure.
Among Butter's functionalities is a blog engine that offers formatting tools for content meant for blog posts. A distinct feature is its split-screen preview, which displays content adjustments in real-time,and a scheduling tool inherent in Butter helps organize the publication schedule of content and related activities.
7. Zesty
Zesty is a platform that offers a range of products that include headless digital experiences, or a mix of traditional and headless setups. One of its features is Parsley, Zesty's proprietary templating language, which is designed to allow developers to streamline their coding processes for rendering pages and integrating external tools.
Zesty has integrated Content Insights, a feature that provides an understanding of how specific algorithms process and perceive content, which can help optimize content for keyword alignment and improve organic engagement. Also, Zesty is working on creating specific content models that, once set up, can be selected and populated with the desired content.
Another aspect of this CMS is the Activity Log feature, which allows users to analyze the overall activity of their platform. By providing detailed data on individual assets and the actions associated with them, users gain an overview of their content and its interactions. These logs can be used to generate reports on selected resources.
8. Strapi
Strapi operates on a plugin system, allowing users to customize its functionalities and integrations according to their needs. It does not require a technical team for its setup and ongoing management, allowing the integration with various third-party technologies suitable for different digital outputs, including static websites, mobile applications and e-commerce platforms.
For content creation, the technical team can design dynamic components that are reusable to simplify the process for content creators and work for rapid page creation.
Since Strapi is compatible with a wide range of front-end technologies. It allows users to develop custom plug-ins or extend the existing ones, while its code editor provides developers with the means to modify and customize the code to meet specific API requirements. This editor lets users define the schema, models, and controllers for their API.
9. Prismic
Prismic is a Headless CMS designed to work on website creation and maintenance. The approach involves constructing reusable website segments, then combining these segments to formulate content. The content is then disseminated via Prismic's API.
The platform's Headless API structure permits developers to utilize common tools, aiming to expedite content distribution, since Prismic supports an extensive number of API calls, working on integration with various platforms and devices. The software also provides mechanisms for scheduled content releases and enables connections with existing product databases and external APIs.
