Two acronyms are reshaping the way businesses approach content and customer interactions: Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) and Content Operating Systems (COS).
While both aim to streamline content management and delivery, their approaches, capabilities, and purposes differ significantly.
What is a DXP?
A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is a comprehensive set of tools aimed at enhancing customer engagement across multiple channels. It streamlines how businesses manage, interact with, and personalise customer experiences throughout their entire lifecycle.
Read our deep-dive article on DXPs and How to Build One for a deeper understanding.
DXP comes in two flavours: monolithic and composable
Monolithic DXPs
A monolithic Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is a suite of pre-integrated tools centred around a Content Management System (CMS). These platforms often include features such as analytics, marketing automation, personalisation, and e-commerce. Examples of monolithic DXPs include HubSpot, Adobe Experience Cloud, and Optimizely.
In a monolithic DXP, the vendor builds the tools directly into the CMS, ensuring they function exclusively with that system. This design makes setup and maintenance straightforward, as everything is integrated out of the box. However, these platforms often lack advanced capabilities and tend to focus primarily on the web channel.
Monolithic DXPs typically operate on an all-or-nothing basis. Subscriptions usually include all integrated tools, whether or not they’re needed or used. While the bundled features might seem like great value, organisations often find they only utilise the CMS, with the additional tools falling short of expectations when implemented.
Composable DXPs
Next-generation DXPs are designed with a composable architecture, enabling teams to choose and integrate best-in-class tools tailored to their specific business needs and workflows. This flexibility ensures the resulting platform aligns perfectly with an organisation's unique processes.
For instance, you could combine Sanity as your Content Management System (CMS), Segment as your Customer Data Platform (CDP), Mixpanel for analytics, MailChimp for marketing automation, and HubSpot for Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
What is a COS?
A Content Operating System (COS) adopts a composable, modular approach to content creation and management. Instead of crafting content for a single channel, such as a website, it treats content as data, breaking it into reusable modules that can be deployed across multiple channels and mediums—including websites, apps, dashboards, IoT devices, TV news overlays, and more.
While this may sound similar to a headless CMS, a COS goes further by functioning as a complete operating system for content. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools for authoring, editing, and managing content, enabling seamless and versatile usage across platforms.
For a more in-depth exploration, check out our article: Content Opearting Systems and Why You Need One.
The COS is one element in your DXP
Your organisation’s DXP needs a method of managing content, and integrating that tool with the other aspects of your DXP.
As long as your COS is API-first, it to be integrated into third-party tools, data sources and frontend frameworks, including your DXP.
This is one of the benefits of a composable DXP. Your COS will be best-in-class for authoring and editing content, and it can focus on doing that really well. This goes for each element of your composable DXP, which then combine to give you a true best-in-class DXP.
As an example, Sanity is a fully featured Content Operating System. It has SanityCMS for managing your composable content, and Sanity Create for authoring it. These tools are connected within their Content Operating System, allowing for the fast creation of content in a rich editing environment.
It can mould to your organisation’s processes, such as automatically formatting content pasted in from a Google Doc, multiplayer collaboration (no more document locking!), real time previews, and click-to-edit anywhere on your website.
This COS can then be integrated with other tools in your DXP, such as Mixpanel for analytics, Shopify for e-commerce, or HubSpot for CRM.
With a brilliant team, these integrations can feel seamless. For example, when editing an article, we can show analytics next to it so editors can understand their content more deeply without leaving the CMS.
Hex are experts at building DXPs that work for your organisation. We’re certified partners of the big platform providers, such as Sanity, Vercel and Mixpanel. Chat with us to hear about how a composable DXP could work for you.