How a Headless CMS Powers a Best of Breed Tech Stack

The marketing technology landscape has become a vast sea of options to consider when building a best of breed tech stack. In fact, 27% of CMOs were concerned with staying ahead and taking advantage of these digital technology trends. But with the falling barriers to integrations, these options have become an opportunity to continually adapt to market changes.

In order to leverage the latest MarTech, however, digital adaptability is paramount. That’s why suite solutions have been going out of favor in recent years as organizations realize that a best of breed approach is becoming more feasible, and even more effective, in the long run. With this in mind, let’s look at the benefits of building a best of breed tech stack, and why a headless CMS is essential for doing so.

The Benefits of a Best of Breed Tech Stack

When it comes to building a modern tech stack, the best of breed approach has numerous benefits over massive suite solutions these days. Here are some of the primary advantages companies should be aware of:

Team-Specific Functionality

The best of breed approach means choosing specific niche applications and software to fulfill particular business requirements. With this approach, therefore, each team or department within an organization can look for and utilize tools with highly useful functionality to meet their goals. This differs significantly from the suite approach, where software decisions are made at the organizational level, and many teams are left with generic capabilities that are satisfactory instead of an ideal solution. Organizations, therefore, can bring software decisions closer to end-users and put a focus on team-specific functionality when selecting applications to integrate into their tech stack.

Digital Adaptability

Small, API-driven applications are substantially easier to integrate into a tech stack than monolithic suite software. That’s because suite software is meant to be an all-in-one solution, so they don’t offer high-quality integration points. Most best of breed applications, however, provide REST APIs — and even GraphQL support — out of the box. That means organizations will have the agility to switch out applications as necessary and can avoid the SaaS trap that’s a frequent concern with suite vendors. With an API-driven tech stack, you won’t become reliant on proprietary integration points with a particular vendor and can avoid vendor lock-in.

Innovative Features

Best of breed applications focus on being the top solution for a highly specific niche. This narrow scope means these vendors will continue to innovate within their chosen space or risk losing customers. Suite solutions, on the other hand, are often bloated and slow to innovate. Oftentimes, suite vendors are more concerned with meeting the needs of the broader market than bringing new features into the mix. Organizations that want to leverage modern technologies, therefore, need to look towards building their own best of breed tech stack.

Customer-Centric

With digital adaptability and highly specialized niche software comes the ability to become a more customer-centric organization. Companies with a best of breed tech stack can quickly respond to a changing marketplace to better meet customer demands. For many organizations, this means adding new digital touchpoints to reach customers on their terms. With suite software, however, you’d have to wait for the software vendor to update their software— possibly until it’s too late to keep up with competitors.

How a Headless CMS Enables The Best of Breed Approach

One of the major challenges with building out a best of breed tech stack is content and data sharing. If organizations don’t seamlessly integrate their tech stack, content and information can become fragmented. Leveraging so many different applications that each generates its own repository, therefore, can lead to content silos — unless organizations integrate a centralized content hub.

A headless CMS can aggregate content from a variety of disparate systems using APIs or other integration points to unify the tech stack. Marketers, therefore, can seamlessly find and retrieve information that originated from many different systems — CRMs, DAMs, or nearly any other applications — and deploy it to fulfill their omnichannel content strategy. That means there are no content silos, and in turn, no lost or hidden content.

In addition to content integrations, most headless CMS solutions recognize that companies will require extensibility to meet their business requirements. That’s why headless CMSs often have a microservices architecture for maximum flexibility. This enables organizations to implement deeper integrations that bring functionality from third-party systems into the centralized CMS, beyond just external content. That means a much more seamless user experience for marketers and other CMS users.

CrafterCMS Powers Best of Breed Tech

CrafterCMS, an open source headless CMS, enables the best of breed approach with its robust APIs and flexible integration points. Integrations are often resource-intensive, but with the platform’s native GraphQL support and powerful REST APIs, the development time and cost with connecting to a multitude of external systems is dramatically reduced.

When acting as a content hub, many CMSs struggle to organize a variety of content types necessary for each external system. CrafterCMS, however, has a powerful taxonomy system with flexible content modeling and content inheritance, so that all content can be easily stored as structured markup within its Git-based repository. CrafterCMS also leverages leading open source search platforms (Elasticsearch is embedded, and support for Apache Solr is also provided) to make it straightforward for marketers to search for and retrieve the content they need.

Beyond the ability to integrate systems more easily, CrafterCMS also enables organizational agility. Using a modern DevContentOps process, companies can quickly add or replace applications within their tech stack to optimize the technologies that they’re leveraging. That’s because DevContentOps streamlines enterprise development, in part, by enabling content authors, software developers and IT operations to work seamlessly, and to keep content and code synced easily across all environments -- from development to production environments.

The best of breed approach — in conjunction with a headless content hub — enables a truly modern tech stack. And an API-first solution with powerful taxonomies and extensibility further fuels this integrated tech stack. CrafterCMS, therefore, facilitates digital adaptability so organizations can remain competitive well into the future. Power your best of breed tech stack with CrafterCMS.