Over the past few years, the CMS market has seen a growth of headless CMS. However, headless CMS solves only the technical limitations of traditional CMSs. That’s why we believe organizations need to embrace a new paradigm—Content as a Service—that builds upon headless and focuses on how to scale content strategy. This new approach to content management offers an alternative to conventional CMSs. Although both these approaches let you create, store, and deliver content, CaaS is far more versatile.

One of the distinctive features of CaaS is its flexibility. Although not every organization that publishes content online requires flexibility, most of them can benefit from having more freedom to address their unique requirements. Together, let’s compare CaaS with conventional CMSs:

Freedom to Execute Whatever You Want

In contrast to a web CMS, CaaS doesn’t entail buying a software license or hosting hardware. When using web CMSs, organizations often need to deploy a separate CMS for each website or project they are doing. If they try to host many websites or projects using a single CMS, content management gets complicated, and projects become difficult to execute.

CaaS provides cloud-based services that are available on-demand, freeing organizations from having to license and maintain a CMS on their premises—or licensing many such CMSs, as is often the case. With CaaS, organizations get a comprehensive range of content management services. The subscription fee for these services is based on the amount of content the organization works with. These services support any number of projects, not just a single website.

Unlike web CMSs, CaaS is not a monolithic, one-size-fits-all solution. Web CMSs and Digital Experience Platforms have evolved into all-encompassing solutions that combine lots of functionality, including Marketing Automation, E-commerce, and others. For organizations that already use best-of-breed solutions in some of these areas, choosing a CaaS solution that focuses just on content can be a better choice. Too often, decisions associated with the technology setup in a web CMS will get in the way of the quick execution of a new project or the trial of a new idea.

Employing the CaaS approach, organizations can decide how to design and manage the content based on their specific needs. They don’t have to buy extra functionality from a specific vendor. They have the freedom to integrate their content management operations with tools they already use or own and can decide in the future to change their setup.

Freedom to Grow

CaaS empowers organizations to make decisions for themselves about their publishing priorities. They don’t have to decide in advance to buy a specific “tiered” license package offered by a vendor.

In addition, CaaS can scale up according to your needs. Organizations can start simple and enhance capabilities over time. In fact, many of them adopt the CaaS approach because they want to try out new ideas on a small project. As they validate these ideas and see the benefits of CaaS’s flexibility, they expand their use of CaaS to manage their content across their organization.

With CaaS, size is no limit. CaaS is infinitely scalable. Handling a few thousand or many millions of content items, it can grow as your needs do.

Freedom to Unite and Remix Your Content

Conventional web content management systems are oriented toward web pages. It is important to realize that CaaS is focused on content, not web pages, and that’s why organizations gain much greater flexibility with what they can do with their content. It becomes “portable”: the content can be easily used by other systems and in other applications. When a piece of content is ready to be published, it can be smoothly delivered to different channels, used in various apps and websites, and integrated with diverse external services and internal IT systems.

CaaS can unify everything that has been stored in separate, isolated content management systems. In consequence, CaaS provides access to content that was previously accessible to only a limited group of users, which enables organizations to make full use of it.

Freedom with CaaS

The best way to appreciate the freedom that CaaS offers is to try it. Even though every organization has unique requirements, CaaS is ready for all of them. So, if you struggle to manage all your content, consider CaaS as an alternative to your existing content infrastructure.

In this blog post, we explained the major differences between CaaS and web CMSs related to flexibility. Next time, we will take a closer look at who benefits most from CaaS.