How DXPs look today for many organizations
For years, many businesses delivered digital experiences through a single, fully integrated platform—a monolith. These suites combined everything under one roof: content management, commerce, personalization, analytics, and customer data.
And for a long time, this approach made sense. It offered structure and simplicity, reduced the complexity of managing multiple vendors, and provided a centralized system that large teams could rely on. It made digital experience delivery manageable and predictable.
What's no longer working with this approach
But the digital world and customer expectations have changed.
Customers now expect seamless, personalized journeys across every channel. Marketing teams need to launch campaigns quickly and adapt in real time. Product and IT teams are tasked with integrating new tools, experimenting with new experiences, and keeping up with rapid innovation.
Today's market moves in weeks, and success usually depends on:
- Launching fast and learning even faster
- Personalizing at scale across every touchpoint
- Connecting tools that work best for your business today
And this is where traditional, monolithic platforms are beginning to fall short.
What once felt like a streamlined solution is starting to show its limits. For many teams, the day-to-day reality looks like this:
- Weeks of waiting for seemingly small changes
- Campaign delays due to development or release bottlenecks
- Lengthy (or impossible) integrations with modern tools
- Personalization strategies blocked by technical constraints
Monolithic systems weren't built for this level of agility. They can be hard to change, slow to scale, and often include features you don't use but still pay for. As digital demands become more complex, these all-in-one platforms can stifle innovation.
So, what are the options?
Let's take a closer look at the architecture options available today and how they shape what your DXP can do.
Monolith: All-in-one, built for ease of management
A traditional platform where content, commerce, analytics, and personalization live in one tightly connected system
Pros:- Familiar: Widely adopted, easier to hire for and onboard teams
- Centralized: One vendor, one contract, one support team
- Less to manage: Fewer moving parts and integrations
- Predictable ROI with up-front license costs and standard upgrade cycles
- Limited flexibility: Harder to tailor or extend beyond the vendor's roadmap
- Vendor lock-in: Pace of innovation dictated by a single provider
- Slow innovation: Dependent on major release cycles rather than incremental updates
- Lengthy and expensive upgrades: Migrations can stall business initiatives
- Higher long-term TCO: Paying for bundled features you may not use, costly to pivot away later
Composable: Decoupled, built for scalability
A modular approach where you choose best-fit tools and connect them through APIs. CMS, commerce engine, CDP, search, analytics—all working together, and each replaceable or scalable on its own terms
Pros:- Agile and flexible: Adapt quickly to new business needs
- Scalable: Grow or swap components without replatforming
- Future-ready: Avoid vendor lock-in, adopt new tech as it emerges
- Better long-term ROI: Invest only in what you need, optimize spend over time
- Requires orchestration and governance: Complex integrations need strong architecture and DevOps maturity
- Mindset and culture shift: Teams must adapt to new workflows and responsibilities
Where does headless stand?
We bet you keep hearing "going headless." But let's clarify:
Headless isn't an architecture; it is a way to deliver experiences. It means your back end (where content lives) is separated from the front end (where users interact), connected via APIs.
- You can have a headless monolith
- You can have a headless composable stack
So what's the difference?
Headless helps you publish content wherever it's needed—web, mobile, kiosks, apps—without rebuilding every time. It's a powerful enabler of omnichannel experiences.
But headless alone doesn't solve challenges like vendor lock-in or slow integration.
That's why headless shines brighter inside a composable architecture, where content is fully flexible. Combined with other modular services, headless becomes part of a truly agile DXP foundation.
Composable DXP in action
A composable platform may include:
Headless CMS (e.g., Contentful)
API-first commerce engine
CDP for real-time personalization
AI-based search and recommendations
DAM, PIM, CRM integrations
Each component plays a role and can evolve independently, without disruption.
The executive view: What migration means to each stakeholder
Below, we break down what each role experiences today, what composable architecture makes possible, and what typically enables the decision to migrate.
CTO
Legacy limitations:- Rigid architecture
- Tech debt
- Slow release cycles
- Difficulty integrating modern tools
- Lengthy and expensive upgrades
- Flexible, API-first architecture
- Faster development cycles
- Modular infrastructure
- Agile release management
- Clear migration roadmap that minimizes risk and avoids full replatforming
- Long-term scalability and governance control confidence
CMO
Legacy limitations:- Reliance on IT to launch campaigns
- Limited personalization across channels
- Slow hypothesis testing and rollout cycles
- Site crashes during sales campaigns (e.g., Black Friday)
- Marketplace integration delays
- No clear social analytics despite high spend
- Faster campaign launches with direct control over content
- Real-time personalization across channels
- Peak event scaling for events like Black Friday
- Quick marketplace activation with API-first commerce
- Connected analytics for social and web
- Faster testing and iteration
- Accelerated time to market and marketing agility
- Revenue growth through personalization and new channels
- Reliable peak-season performance protection
CIO
Legacy limitations:- High total cost of ownership
- Vendor lock-in
- Data compliance and security challenges
- Lower long-term cost through modular services
- Improved data security
- Better vendor control and flexibility
- Reduced operational overhead and TCO
- Multi-vendor environment security and compliance
Ready to rethink your DXP?
Moving from monolith to composable is a journey. Each stage brings new clarity, from understanding what's possible to proving business value and planning the right migration path.
No matter what stage you're in today, we've built resources to guide you:
Still exploring whether composable is right for you?
Start with our Composable Decision Kit to assess fit and risks.
Need to make a business case?
Dive into our Composable ROI Playbook to forecast costs and returns.