An Overview of Content Management System (CMS)

Updated 25 Oct 2023
Published 29 Sep 2023
Satyam Chaturvedi 1569 Views
An Overview of Content Management System (CMS)

Being an enterprise, you need to manage and deliver content that can work as a touchpoint for your customers. The right CMS can make it easy for you. Over 78 million websites use CMS, and enterprises leverage it to stay updated with their website and content.

It is one of the required things that you need to reach potential customers and make a connection with the target audience.   

The scenario is- when it comes to choosing a CMS for a business website, it is a challenge to find the right option as multiple enterprise CMS platforms are available.

If you are also in the process of finding a content management system, here we have created this article that will help you as a step-by-step guide to choose the right option.      

Let’s start with basic information.

What is CMS?

A content management system is a software solution for an enterprise to manage digital content, such as texts, documents, images, videos, and others. Another application of CMS is assisting in web development with no-code experience.

Using templates, themes, and tools, you can have complete control over the user interface, for example, publishing website content in a user-friendly way. CMS also helps in boosting online marketing and branding efforts.

A CMS’s key components empower it to accomplish its purpose, and these are:   

  • Content Management Application (CMA)

As its name implies, it serves for actual data management, such as storage, creating, removing, and editing the content of a website or an app. It allows users to manage the content without any coding experience related to HTML or any other coding language.   

  •  Content Delivery Application (CDA)

The prime task of a content delivery application is to handle the publishing, showcasing, and distribution of the content. It works as a backend for CMS. 

The CDA and CMA, in combination, form a complete CMS for use. In addition, there are types of CMS platforms that exist. Based on their qualities, you can decide on a CMS accordingly. So, let’s read what these are.

Types of CMS

There are four types of CMS that a business can choose for a purpose. These are as follows:

Types of CMS

  • Open-Source CMS

The open-source CMS is free for use, and there is no licensing fee, contracts, or upgradation fee associated. The only cost associated with these types of CMS is purchasing add-ons, templates, and plugins and hiring CMS experts to implement them.   

Examples: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento   

  • Proprietary CMS

When you need CMS software for specialized needs and find that another CMS doesn’t fit your purpose, then a CMS you will develop for your company is called a proprietary CMS. It takes time and money to build it.   

  • Commercial CMS

Off-the-shelf software, which you can purchase and customize as per your need, is called Commercial CMS. Including purchase costs, you also need to pay for licensing and updates. These are also called COTS solutions.   

Example: Kentico Xperience, SharePoint, IBM Enterprise Content Management, Pulse CMS  

  • Software as Service CMS (SaaS CMS)

The SaaS CMS is a cloud-based commercial content management solution that you can use after purchasing its subscription. With it, you do need to be concerned about the storage. However, storage may depend on the subscription plan.     

Example: Acrobat.com, Box.net, Google Docs  

Read Also: How is Kentico the Best CMS for eCommerce?  

Some Interesting CMS Market Stats

Before you proceed to read the other sections of this blog, it would be best to know about some key stats related to Content Management Systems. It will give you a brief insight into the CMS market and help you understand the trends. Let’s see what these are.

  • By 2026, the content management software market’s revenue is expected to reach $50.5 billion.    
  • WordPress is a top CMS, and 44.62% out of the total number of websites on the internet are WordPress Websites.    
  • 43.6% of websites are using custom-made CMS.  
  • In upcoming years, AI and Machine Learning will rule in the CMS market.   
  • Kentico is recognized as the top CMS used by high-traffic websites.   
  • The USA is on the top in using Kentico Xperience.

Content Management System development

Why Choosing the Right CMS is important?

Every business’s content needs are different, so there is a CMS available for that, but a common solution doesn’t work here. Especially if we are talking about an enterprise, then there is a need to handle the data in bulk, so the CMS must be accordingly.

Example: One of the top examples of the best enterprise CMS platforms is Kentico, which offers the best experience of Headless CMS. It is flexible for enterprises with high content management needs.

It supports managing and storing content in reusable modules and helps developers create seamless workflows for delivering content to dynamic web pages and creating the best digital experience.   

It is just a real-time example; here, you need to understand why it is beneficial to choose the right CMS. Here are the top reasons:  

  • The right enterprise CMS can help you to fulfill specific business needs.   
  • Whatever industry it is, a CMS helps in communicating with the customers in a better way.   
  • It improves the search engine presence that, in –turn, drives more traffic to the website.  
  • The right CMS is required to curate the content in the desired way, and its features help in improved productivity.   
  • It offers enhanced security and customization tools.   
  • Enterprise CMS offers business analytics and business intelligence tools to help an enterprise make informed decisions.   

Overall, the right CMS can help you cater to the requirements of the target audience, resulting in customer retention and loyalty that every enterprise needs now to survive in the tough market competition.   

Top – 5 Enterprise CMS Platforms to Consider for Your Business

It is a challenge to choose the right CMS, as there are multiple options available. So, here are the examples of top-5 enterprise CMS that you can consider for your business.

These enterprise CMS platforms offer multiple tools and features that can help you create and manage the content per your business needs.

Top-5 Enterprise CMS Platforms to Consider for Your Business

Let’s go through the list of these. 

1. Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)

Adobe Experience Manager is one of the top names from the list of top 5 enterprise CMS platforms. It offers an extensive content management solution to deliver the best digital experience.

Its powerful set of features and tools cater to the needs of large-scale enterprises.   

Its benefits are:   

  • AEM simplifies content creation by offering drag and drop interface. It enables us to create web pages for websites and mobile apps seamlessly.   
  • AEM’s key feature is DAM (digital asset management), which helps retrieve and organize media files.   
  • Using its certain set of tools, you can segment the audience’s target customers based on user behavior, demography, and others.      
  • It comes with a translation management system that makes it multilingual.   
  • AEM is easily integrated with other Adobe marketing cloud solutions.  
  • SSO (single sign-on), role-based access control, and data encryption are its other benefits.

2. Kentico

Kentico Xperience is one of the CMS platforms considered the best enterprise content management system for all large-scale business needs. It works as an all-in-one digital experience platform that offers powerful features for content management, digital marketing, eCommerce, and customization capabilities.

Its inherent qualities make it one of the top enterprise content management systems. Microsoft’s .NET framework powers it; that’s the reason behind its robustness and security. If you want to create an engaging and personalized experience, consider Kentico as the top choice.   

The benefits of choosing Kentico Xperience are:  

  • It comes with drag-and-drop functionality and a user-friendly interface that allows a business to create web pages quickly, edit and manage the content in an easy way, and perform all content management activities with no-code experience.   
  • If you compare Kentico vs WordPress, then in terms of enterprise content management, Kentico is the best. Conversely, WordPress is suitable only for SMBs (small & medium size businesses).    
  • Kentico offers a bucket full of digital marketing tools including e-mail marketing tools, lead generation & scoring, marketing automation, A/B testing, and more.   
  • The key specialty of Kentico is ecommerce integration. If you are looking for an eCommerce CMS development platform, then Kentico is the best. Using it, you will have the best experience in product management, cart customization, headless ecommerce, order management, payment integration, and others to create a robust and secure ecommerce store.        
  • It is based on Microsoft’s ASP.NET framework, making it compatible to handle high web traffic without compromising scalability and performance.   
  • Kentico Xperience is a global content management system that supports more than 70 international languages. You can create content in different languages and reach a wider audience base.   
  • You can integrate third-party tools like Salesforce, Dynamics 365, Marketo, SiteImprove, Bynder, and others hassle-free.   

3. Sitecore Experience Platform

Sitecore is one of the top names when it comes to considering an enterprise CMS for business. It’s a powerful CMS solution that helps businesses to handle content management tasks with ease. The Sitecore enterprise platform can help you to deliver the ultimate digital experience.   

Its benefits are:   

  • Sitecore’s ability to content personalization for each visitor separates it from other CMS solutions. It aggregates data from profiles, interactions, and activities and provides a 360-degree view of each customer to offer a cross-channel personalization experience.   
  • Its machine learning capability makes it generate actionable insights based on collected interaction data.  
  • Sitecore offers a simplified content creation experience via the WYSWIG editor. Its drag-and-drop editor is easy to use, and anyone can use it with no code experience.   
  • For security and compliance, it offers built-in security measures.

4. Oracle WebCenter Content

Oracle WebCenter Content is a legendary content management platform for enterprises. It is designed and developed to cater to the demands of large-scale businesses. Automated form recognition, image capturing, and data extraction are its key features. Its wide variety of features helps streamline content creation, distribution, and management.   

Oracle WebCenter Content platform’s benefits are:   

  • Comprehensive content management capability makes the Oracle WebCenter Content platform unique from others. An enterprise can handle documents and multimedia files in one place.   
  • It supports seamless integration of CMS with other Oracle applications and third-party systems. Oracle content management supports the smooth collaboration of diverse departments within an organization.   
  •  It offers advanced search functionality that facilitates users to easily locate files, such as based on metadata, full-text search queries, custom attributes, and others.   
  • Digital asset management is very easy with WebCenter Content as it offers real-time collaboration, rich media support, and media-auto configuration.

5. Drupal

Drupal is an open-source CMS that offers easy customization for a website’s look and improves content modeling, editing, flexibility, scalability, and security. It provides multiple features for content management that make it the best compared to the other CMS available in the market.   

Drupal’s benefits are:   

  • Supporting high-level customization is one of the top benefits of Drupal.   
  • Its robust architecture makes it a secure CMS.   
  • Its advanced caching API facilities enable developers to create performant websites and apps.      
  • Drupal offers multiple built-in SEO tools to enhance the visibility of Search Engine Result Pages.   
  • Drupal has a large community size that makes it easy to access resources like technical documentation, tutorials, and forums.   

Read more: Benefits of Drupal that make it the most popular CMS

Tips to Choose the Right CMS for Your Business

A CMS can help you in multiple ways, such as efficient content management, improved SEO, increased collaboration, scalability, security, and more. The whole thing depends on your selection of what CMS you have chosen for your business.

Tips to Choose the Right CMS for Your Business

Here are some tips that can help you to choose the right CMS in a reduced time.   

  • Requirements

The first point you need to take care of is – Business requirements. The CMS you are going to choose must be able to cater to your business requirements. Make a concluded list of all requirements and match them with the CMS specifications.

For example- the CMS needs to help the marketing team with digital promotion, support for creating the best user experience, capability to handle the content requirements, help content editors manage the business content, and more.   

Note: Including the existing requirements also reserves space for future requirements. It will reduce the maximum chances of CMS replacement in the future.   

  • Scalability

From the business point of view, whatever technical implementation you are planning to implement, scalability is a top priority. Here, you are going to choose a CMS for your business, so it must be scalable.

It must expand with the pace of your company or be scalable in all terms. Here, the best option is Kentico, which also works as a headless CMS. Headless CMS has multiple advantages, such as multi-site management, support of multi-site strategy, and role and permission-based use.  

Note: Kentico is a scalable CMS, and to create the best experience it you can rely on a certified Kentico development service provider.    

  • Performance

Performance is one of the biggest factors in deciding whether a CMS is good to use. The CMS must perform according to the user’s perspective. For example, – mobile sites take 5 seconds loading time and can generate revenue up to 2X times.

On the other hand, if it is delayed, more than 53% of the visitors abandon the site. The responsibility of CMS increases when your business website needs to load multimedia content, webpages, and content fast.   

Note: One of the criteria for SEO is that webpages must be light and should take less time to load, whereas a CMS platform Like Kentico can help you.   

  • Security

Business information is one of the high targets of Cybercriminals and is more vulnerable to data leaks. In case anything happens to the data and information, it will be an extreme challenge for an enterprise to recover.

The best idea is to choose the CMS for an enterprise that ensures the best security mechanism. An enterprise contains the sensitive information of countless customers, and it is the responsibility to keep their data safe from cyber-attacks and leaks. So, choose a CMS that offers the best security mechanism.   

Note: The CMS offers high data encryption, connection security, complex password management, two-factor authentication, automatic backup, compatibility to a firewall, and more.   

  • Content Management

The key functionality of CMS is content management. Usually, a large-scale business or an enterprise may have several websites, applications, services, online stores, and multiple departments, and it will be difficult to manage the content for all segments.

Here, you need a CMS that can support all. It must be an Omnichannel CMS. If you have similar requirements, then a headless CMS is the best option. There are multiple options available, such as Kentico, Drupal, Magnolia, Prismic, and more.     

Note: It is okay that a headless CMS is the best to create the Omnichannel content management experience, but every CMS has its pros and cons, so compare all before use.   

  • User-Friendliness

One of the most important conditions for choosing a CMS is its user-friendliness. In an enterprise, there are multiple teams with diverse expertise, and no one can be perfect in all tasks, so whoever uses it must find it easy to use.

Here, you must choose a CMS that offers an intuitive interface, an easy editing process, options that diverse teams find easy to use as per their tasks, effective tech support, and a similar experience of tools that a team has already used.  

Note: Most of the top-rated CMS allow customization that you can leverage to increase user-friendliness. For example – Kentico, Drupal, or more.

Overview of Content Management System

Final Thoughts

Now you have information about the CMS and what factors you need to consider while choosing a CMS for your enterprise. CMS is important in the current scenario as there is tough competition between enterprises and the need to cater to the demands of huge target audiences.

Here, a content management system can help. Remember that a CMS is not limited to the content; it also helps implement user-friendly web pages, streamlines communication among the teams or departments, and more.

So, choose a CMS that fits your enterprise requirements and key objectives you want to incorporate into your business practices.   

As a Kentico development company, we can assist you at our best level, from consultation to implementation. We can help you with all queries related to the CMS implementation for an enterprise.

Satyam Chaturvedi

Satyam Chaturvedi is a Digital Marketing Manager at Arka Softwares, a leading app development company dealing in modern and futuristic solutions. He loves to spend his time studying the latest market insights.

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