Which headless CMS should you choose?

Now you know what a headless CMS is, you shouldn’t just choose a system at random. On the contrary, you really need to think it through: Why would you embark on Kentico? Or would it be better to opt for Drupal? Because the right CMS for someone else’s organization isn't necessarily the best one for yours. It all boils down to your strategy and your needs. In other words: you won’t find a sound answer here, as your choice would be tailor-made. So, what can we do? Illustrate with some examples to clarify the choices we made together with our clients!

A combination of a public website and a closed portal

We go ahead with child benefit fund Infino, who wanted to become the digital frontrunner in their sector. Therefore, they chose a solid content website where (future) parents could find the latest correct information. They wanted to make the website as relevant as possible by integrating an interactive multi-step form to calculate and request the allowances as well as a closed portal that allows parents to manage their information and check when to expect their next pay-out. No lack of ambition!

Next, we sat together to get a closer look at their technological needs. For the public content website, they required a rather classical content approach and a system that they could easily manage and update themselves. We decided to combine the Kentico back-end with the Kentico front-end. Choosing Kentico also allows Infino to make use of the marketing automation possibilities within the system, making it possible to automate emails based on the due date or even website behaviour.

On some parts of the website, like the multi-step form and the closed portal, there was no need to modify the content on a regular basis and no SEO purpose. There, we decided to integrate Kentico with the front-end framework Angular. In these dynamic and interactive parts of the website, in which we capture a lot of data, UX is extremely important for maximum conversion. We wanted to make sure that parents completed the flows. By building these parts in Angular, we created an in-app feeling within the website browser and drastically improved the user experience.

By closely analyzing Infino’s needs, we came up with a tailor-made solution that is both manageable at the moment and scalable for the future.

A multi-site set-up

Another example would be Febelfin Academy: they came to us with a triple question. They wanted to launch three websites: FinCompetition, TheFinChallenge and FinTalent. The million-dollar question was: How could we keep maintenance costs on three different websites as low as possible? We decided to go for a headless set-up and built a custom module in Drupal (that we can now also make available for other customers!) to do so. The choice for Drupal was self-evident, as the three requested websites were stellar examples of traditional content websites - something Drupal does very well.

So, how does the custom module work? Drupal has a headless module, but makes a different API call for each component in the back-end and, by doing that, returns a lot of data that front-end users don’t need. Think of time stamps, author details, internal node IDs ... We reworked it, so it only makes one API call for each page, with all the relevant content of that page. Resulting in a faster site experience and giving clients more technical freedom, as they don’t need specific Drupal Site Builders to build and maintain the front-end.

By implementing this solution for Febelfin Academy, we made it possible to have three separate Drupal websites, for which they can manage the content separately. Yet, when technical updates to the back-end are required, we can easily push the updates to the three systems at once. The best of both worlds!

Struggling with choosing the right CMS for your organization? Let us guide you to the right solution with this checklist!