Hybrid or headless – where to go?

The growth of headless CMS has boomed in the past few years, spawning countless gospels and startups. We're witnessing a sort of paradigm shift—where "everyone" wants in, regardless of their knowledge of the matter.

If you're working with internal stakeholders or clients who have been smitten by the headless craze, you're probably in a somewhat pressed situation. Should you advise to scrap the current traditional CMS to open up for the world of headless and digital experiences across a multitude of platforms and devices, or should you remain calm and consider all the options?

Everything you need to know about headless CMS:

Exactly what do you need?

The first question you have to ask yourself is whether a solution or technology fits into your customer's existing architecture. What are the real customer needs? Maybe you shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater and instead opt in for something called "hybrid CMS."

Now let's take a look at what this means and get straight to the point:

• If your project just requires a basic website, the good old traditional CMS is probably everything you need.
• If your project is focused on an app or IoT, with limited editorial requirements—a cloud native headless CMS might fulfill your needs.
• If your project involves rich web content, URL handling, extensive editorial requirements, special hosting needs, and reuse across different channels, a hybrid CMS might be the solution you're looking for.

This simple flowchart illustrates the essential needs and corresponding solutions:

Traditional CMS for websites

In a traditional CMS there is a tight connection between features for the editors and features for the developers, between the content layer and the presentation layer.

The editors have access to full preview, landing page editing, URL handling, detailed access control, and media repository, while the developers can code, test, and deploy both editorial and end user functionality bundled together. This is made possible by a tight coupling between the delivery layer and the CMS, hence its alternative name "coupled CMS."

Disadvantages with the tight coupling of a traditional CMS includes troublesome multi channel presence. A standard desktop web browser, a mobile app, and an Internet of Things (IoT) device cannot equally read and present the content when the presentation layer is made exclusively for the web. That's where headless CMS enters the scene.

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Headless CMS for apps

The rise of mobile apps, social media, smart watches, digital signage, self-service machines, robots, and countless IoT devices is changing the way we consume digital content. All these platforms have unique properties and different methods of presenting and handling content, which is what a headless CMS targets.

With a headless CMS the content stays the same, while each client—an app, a device, or a browser—is responsible for how the content is presented. Developers usually do not code in the headless CMS itself, but use the API and code in some other framework.

Disadvantages of a headless CMS include most of them being "cloud native," meaning they are only available as cloud services and not software. The headless-as-a-service approach simplifies scaling, monitoring, backups, and so on, but sacrifices flexibility and control.

Also, for each new client and device the developer must handle several issues, including:

• URL handling (internally and externally)
• Formatting issues and templating
• Caching and lazy loading
• Permissions
• Error handling
• Synchronisation between CMS and clients
• "Forced" updates from the cloud vendor
• No native previewing for editors
• No tree structure
• No inherent landing page editor

Hybrid CMS for mixes

With the astonishing rise of headless CMS, several traditional CMS vendors have added web-based content APIs to meet the competition from the pure headless vendors. Thus the hybrid CMS was born. A hybrid CMS comes with a presentation layer, but using it is optional.

Even if a vendor claims to deliver a hybrid CMS, the differences in the offerings are huge. Simply having an API does not make a properly hybrid CMS. Essential aspects you should be looking for in a high quality hybrid CMS are:

• Content oriented, rather than web-page oriented. This means you should stay away from solutions that focus on building pages rather than managing structured content.
• Supports rich media handling, such as serving images in custom sizes and formats.
• Rich and documented APIs with support for many different programming languages and access to the entire data model.

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Side-by-side comparison

Below is a comparison that outlines the typical features of the different CMS types. There might be systems that deviate from this, but this is a general overview.

Content management	Traditional	Headless	Hybrid
Content types	Maybe	Yes	Yes
Rich text editor	Yes	Depends	Yes
Image service	No	Yes	Yes
Web APIs	No	Yes	Yes
Tree structures	Yes	No	Yes
Content level access control	No	No	Yes
Workflow	Yes	Yes	Yes

Web and presentation	Traditional	Headless	Hybrid
Presentation layer	Yes	No	Yes
Landing Page editor	Yes	No	Yes
Page Templates	Yes	No	Yes
Preview	Yes	No	Yes
URL handling	Yes	No	Yes
SEO	Yes	No	Yes

Hosting	Traditional	Headless	Hybrid
Software	Yes	Maybe	Yes
Cloud hosting	Optional	Yes	Optional
Content delivery network	Optional	Yes	Optional
Autoscaling	Optional	Yes	Optional