DEV Community

Cover image for Pros and Cons of Headless CMS
Prathap Rathod
Prathap Rathod

Posted on

Pros and Cons of Headless CMS

A Headless CMS is a backend only content management system which works as a content repository and gives access to this content via REST (or GraphQL) services.

In traditional CMS, you have the following core subsystems:

  • Content creation and management.
  • Publication workflow.
  • Content delivery.
  • Analysis and monitoring.

Headless CMS focuses just on content creation and publication workflow. It is your application's responsibility to get the content and display it in an appropriate way based on your users' needs, devices they use, and the channels they operate on.

Advantages of Headless CMS:

  • No tight coupling between business applications and CMS, resulting in flexibility that allows you to choose whatever technology and framework you like for your application.
  • Headless CMS are usually much easier to deploy and use.
  • Ability to easily integrate new channels, as we are not blocked by the functionalities available in a CMS.
  • Nicely fits into microservice-based solution landscapes.
  • Improved scalability and security due to dividing responsibilities of authoring and delivery, delivery can be separately scaled, and the authoring part can be completely hidden and not accessible to the outside world behind company firewalls.

Disadvantages of Headless CMS:

  • Content authors are not able to preview how created content will look in the applications from the inside CMS.
  • The analytical capabilities and content personalization features of a full blown CMS cannot be used and must be developed somewhere else.

Top comments (2)

Collapse
 
amarachiamaechi profile image
Amycruz πŸ‘©β€πŸ’» πŸ‘©β€πŸ’» πŸ‘©β€πŸ’»

Contrary to a traditional CMS, a headless CMS is entirely decoupled from the presentation layer or frontend, which referred to as the β€œhead”, while the backend is your content repository and content management system, known as the β€œbody”.Read more about it hereπŸ‘‰agilitycms.com/resources/guide/wha...

Collapse
 
emanuelgsouza profile image
Emanuel Gonçalves

Hey, I like your post, it was simple and concise. But, if you permit me, I would like to share a tool that resolves the first point in "Disadvantages of Headless CMS": the Storyblok Headless CMS. You can check this analysis from Bejamas where it shows the Editor Interface. With this feature, you can view a preview from website before that it lives.

So, great post!