What is a Composable Digital Experience Platform?
At its core, a composable DXP is a group of independent but integrated applications that are used together to create, manage, deploy, and optimize digital customer experiences.
Composable DXPs allow you to easily integrate applications that perform one or several functions and swap them out for different applications if the need arises. The core functions a DXP contains vary depending on the needs of the customer but can include:
Content Management System (CMS)
Marketing Automation
Customer Data Platform (CDP)
Product Information Management platform (PIM)
Analytics
Personalization & Content Orchestration
Search
There are a few additional aspects of a composable DXP that make it greater than the sum of its parts:
An integral part of composable DXP architecture is a composable CMS, which allows you to create and deploy front end applications using any coding framework and seamlessly integrate that front end with the CMS to access content. Advanced composable CMS’ will have integration tools that allow you to easily render your headless applications inside the CMS for visual editing, preview, and access to other tools like A/B testing.
The personalization feature of a composable DXP should allow you to deliver personalized experiences all along the customer journey and orchestrate them across all the channels you use. This capability is oftentimes built into the CMS or the DXP platform itself, but it should be able to access outside data sources and allow you to construct complex rules that are accessible over all your channels.
Good composable DXP architecture contains some kind of workflow engine that enables and automates processes across the platforms that make up the composable DXP. This facilitates processes such as getting content and digital assets through creative, approval, and publishing workflows for delivery on any channel, content analytics events that drive personalization to be captured and stored in a CDP for access by the personalization and marketing automation features.
Why the trend in composable digital experience architecture?
As the analyst company Gartner pointed out in 2024, the trend toward composable architecture continues to gain momentum.
"By 2026, at least 70% of organizations will be mandated to acquire composable digital experience platform technology, as opposed to monolithic suites, compared to 50% in 2023."
In the age of AI and rapidly evolving capabilities across the digital experience suite, having an architecture that allows you to easily swap out components for best of breed applications makes a lot of sense. Why settle for a monolithic, restrictive DXP with poor search or commerce or digital asset management, when you can easily integrate separate applications that specialize in the capabilities you need.
Why build a composable DXP architecture instead of buying a monolithic DXP?
When considering a DXP, several factors are critical to deciding which approach to pursue. It is important to understand your company’s technical abilities, budget, and what capabilities are important to meeting your goals. With that in mind, there are a number of reasons a composable DXP architecture may be a better strategy than a DXP solution from one vendor.
Expecting one platform to be great in all the functional areas you need is unrealistic. A composable architecture lets you choose best-of-breed vendors for the specific functions that are most important to you or that best fit your business needs.
If Time to Market is important for your business case then constructing a composable DXP infrastructure starting with the components you need most can be a much less daunting task than getting a monolithic DXP up and running. When it comes to launching new features and products too, the nimbleness of a composable architecture can greatly reduce the TTM for getting new products, services, and content to market.
When it comes to Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), starting with a composable architecture with just the components you need, from the vendors that best fit your needs, reduces not only your initial implementation costs but also lowers your long-term costs as well. Being able to measure the performance of specific components, swap them out for better-performing ones, or get rid of the ones that are not critical, will reduce time, expense, and complexity over the long run.
Distributing risk across several vendors, instead of being dependent on just one, enhances your business continuity. Not only does this insulate you from a vendor experiencing financial distress, but it can improve security by having dedicated security layers per each service that are specific to that service. If you are in a compliance-led industry, having separate composable services allows you to adapt to compliance regulations per region, per channel, and per service, avoiding system-wide changes that are complex and time consuming.
A real world example of a composable DXP architecture for an eCommerce site:
Content Management System: dotCMS to manage content and digital assets for the site, including AI image generation, approval and publishing workflows, visual editing, and site preview.
Image and Video Creation: Adobe Premiere Rush to create and edit imagery and video, integrated with the CMS for approval, tagging, and publishing to the site.
Commerce: Shopify Plus to provide the cart, checkout, and payment functions.
Product Information Management: Apimio to manage the product catalog and inventory.
Marketing Automation: Klaviyo to manage email marketing and an abandoned cart.
Customer Data Platform: Twilio to aggregate customer and visitor data.
Front End: Next.js, Astro, or any other coding framework that meets the needs of the front end design and functionality.
Search: dotCMS AI-enabled search and chat experience.
Personalization: dotCMS personalization integrated with the CDP and Front End to provide personalized product recommendations.
Analytics: dotCMS Content Analytics and Mixpanel for content, site, and product analysis.
Hosting: Vercel or Netlify for the eCommerce site.
Why dotCMS is a great choice for your composable DXP architecture
dotCMS is an open source, composable CMS. Which means it has an API and Cloud first architecture, allowing seamless integration with all types of systems and platforms.
dotCMS has ready-to-use tools such as SDKs, Plugins, Examples, How Tos, and pre-built custom integrations for many applications that make integrating across platforms quick and easy.
dotCMS is a Headless CMS with an industry leading Universal Visual Editing tool that allows content teams to visually edit and preview content in context for any experience no matter what front end coding framework the developers have chosen.
dotCMS’ Content Optimization suite includes a Personalization engine that can use first and third party data to customize digital experiences across channels. Coupled with our A/B testing functionality you can deliver the optimal personalized experience for every visitor.
Customizable workflows that can orchestrate and automate processes across multiple platforms and teams, helping users get digital assets and content from conception to deployment quickly and securely.
dotCMS is an enterprise-grade content management system that specializes in compliance-led industries. Customers in industries such as Healthcare, Finance, Government, and Telecom depend on dotCMS to deliver multi-channel, multilingual digital experiences at scale worldwide.
dotCMS: The Best Foundation for Your Composable DXP
Building a composable DXP architecture with best-of-breed solutions can deliver greater flexibility, lower costs, and reduced vendor risk compared to restrictive monolithic DXP platforms.
dotCMS is an ideal foundation for your composable DXP architecture, offering enterprise-grade content management with seamless integrations, industry leading visual editing capabilities, and built-in content optimization tools that deliver personalized digital experiences at scale.