Magnolia: The Fastest Enterprise CMS

At Magnolia we’ve doubled down on the best-of-breed approach, front-end development, and capabilities that accelerate large projects and lower the total cost of ownership for enterprises.

Let’s look at why implementation speed is crucial, value in open source solutions, how best of breed is faster, and why Magnolia is the fastest enterprise headless CMS.

When it comes to implementing enterprise-grade projects, speed is crucial for meeting tight budgets. Whether software development work is done in-house or by implementation partners, it’s usually the most significant cost of migrating to a new CMS platform.

Implementation tasks also disrupt the normal workflows of developers, marketing teams, and other stakeholders. The longer IT teams spend working on an implementation project the less time they have to work on innovative projects that have a greater impact on company success. Slow CMS implementations, therefore, put a substantial burden on enterprise organizations.

There are tools for building websites fast but they lack the features necessary for large enterprises such as omnichannel publishing, personalization, and data analytics. Many enterprise CMSs on the other hand lack modern architecture and developer tools for fast implementations. In most cases, this means that open best-of-breed CMSs are faster than proprietary suite solutions.

The cost of development is high, especially when highly specialized technologies and proprietary CMS software knowledge is required. That makes securing buy-in at large organizations more difficult and makes finding the developers necessary for the project more costly and time-consuming. That’s perhaps why, according to a survey of 950 executives conducted by Red Hat, 68% of organizations have increased their use of enterprise open source and another 59% plan to continue that growth.

Finding an enterprise CMS that has a fast time to market is challenging, and this means software that relies on common technology and open standards may be the best option for many organizations. Java and popular front-end frameworks have larger and more affordable talent pools than other less common programming languages. That means it takes less time and fewer resources to build an in-house development team or outsource the implementation development work.

Further reading: Why choose an open source headless CMS?

The typical enterprise suite solution takes months or even years to implement. That’s because they’re meant to be comprehensive solutions that meet the needs of all departments across the enterprise. CMS implementations usually require additional customization to fit business requirements, and most suite systems don’t have streamlined tooling for integrations. They’re meant to fulfill company-wide needs out of the box.

The best of breed approach with smaller individual components leads to faster implementations because you can stage the rollout over time. Companies can prioritize the systems they need most and integrate less essential applications later. In addition, best of breed CMSs rely on APIs and other tools that reduce the development requirements for systems integrations. Magnolia, for example, has a multitude of Connector Packs that significantly reduce integration costs.

Magnolia is built for speed. Its decoupled architecture and low-code approach lead to fast installations, shorter development times, and easy deployments.

Many enterprise CMSs require a variety of databases, libraries, and tools to be installed before the CMS can be installed. Additionally, they often have complicated configuration requirements before they can be run. Suite solutions specifically have higher learning curves that slow installations for IT teams.

Magnolia has a simple command-line interface (CLI) tool that lets developers quickly download, install, and start the CMS on a new server in a matter of minutes. Any changes to configurations are instantly detected and applied on the server without recompiling or restarting. Magnolia makes it straightforward to get started and remain productive.

With Magnolia, back-end developers, front-end developers and authors can work in parallel. The completely decoupled architecture of Magnolia allows front-end apps to be designed and developed while the platform is still being integrated on the back end. Light development features also empower front-end developers, and even non-technical users, to take on much of the work that’s typically handled by back-end developers such as creating new API endpoints.

Working in parallel means implementation time is significantly reduced. With Magnolia, back-end developers can have the platform ready for authors and front-end developers to start working within minutes. Simple text files (YAML) can be used to configure the setup quickly from the authoring environment to a headless or hybrid-headless project faster than nearly any other CMS.

As demands for new and innovative features increases, companies need the ability to deploy their projects easily and frequently. Continuous deployment makes you more digitally adaptable. Many enterprise CMSs, however, have monolithic architectures and complex deployments that don’t integrate well with CI/CD pipelines.

Magnolia’s decoupled architecture makes it simple for IT operations to integrate the software with automation tools that reduce deployment times. Light Development makes deployments even more straightforward.

When using Magnolia's low-code approach, everything (configuration, templates, apps etc.) is simple text files in a directory. Pushing this directory to the production instance using a version control tool like Git is all it takes for changes to go live. Magnolia detects the changes and deploys them automatically. Straightforward deployments make Magnolia great for continuous delivery and allow companies to push innovative features fast.

An enterprise CMS that’s fast has a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) in the long run. Development is usually the most significant cost when it comes to migrating a new CMS, so light development, best of breed, open source, and many other factors reduce the implementation burden on IT staff.

If you’re looking to accelerate your digital transformation, we’ve got a detailed guide on how to move from Suite to Best-Of-Breed DXP with Magnolia, the fastest enterprise CMS.