Heads up! This article was written before Webiny 6.0 was released and may contain outdated information.
Webiny is the AI-programmable CMS that gives enterprises full control. Build, extend and automate your content operations with a platform designed to be shaped by both developers and AI agents.
We have struggled for a long time on the question of how to position Webiny as a product. From the start, it was clear that we we were building was a feature-rich product that didn't quite sit firmly in the camp of "Headless CMS", yet that is what the majority of our users focused in on.
As a result, we have doubled down on that particular marketing, building more features and explanation around the concept of Webiny as a Headless CMS. However, as I'm sure you realize, it's an extremely crowded space. And we still didn't quite fit in.
You see, Webiny isn't just one product. It's four fundamental ones:
In reality, it's actually more than even those products: Not every CMS can scale to tens of thousands of users, serve content for millions of website pages and application interfaces, and be as easily customizable as Webiny is.
We frequently hear about teams using Webiny in unique and different ways: from wealth management portals, to BitCoin exchanges, to online course providers, to customer service desks, to a no-code form builder. It's been amazing to watch different teams do all of this with Webiny and more.
Not every CMS can become all — or any — of these things.
But if we were to look at the terminology around the kind of tools on the market that have those features ... well, that's not what we want to be either.
Products that we could compete with that are more than a CMS are varied, but the basic premise is the same: allow large, complex, multinational organizations with content creators in different locations and languages to populate their websites with products, blog posts and other information on a regular basis. This might not just involve writing content, but also creating short-lived product launch pages, gaining feedback using a web-based form, or sharing product literature with vendors and potential contractors.
Popular acronyms in this space are WCM ("Web Content Manager"), and DXP ("Digital Experience Platforms").
These systems are often very clunky, with difficult-to-navigate interfaces. Customization options are very limited, and they often require hiring specialized individuals to manage them. Not to mention the fact that they're nearly always hugely expensive SAAS platforms that exist outside the organization's perimeter.
With the features we have, it would be possible to become a competitor in this space. But Webiny is much more nimble, adaptable and on top of that, is also self-hosted.
So we stopped and asked ourselves: do tools to manage content on the web really need more acronyms? CMS is a pretty good fit, and even the "headless" part seems to be on it's way to being generally accepted.
And, we thought, if we adopt that terminology, not only would we be alienating the fact that medium and small businesses can also depend on Webiny for their content, other teams might start to get the impression that we are also a clunky system that's prohibitively expensive, not customizable, and overall difficult to use.
No, we don't want to pigeonhole ourselves like that. Yet, Webiny is more than a CMS.
So we're sticking with "Headless CMS" as a description of Webiny. But opening a conversation on that front can sometimes present a problem: what if the organization approaching us doesn't have the requirement of a content store. Perhaps instead they're looking for a way to dynamically populating content from the CMS into a no-code page builder? Or Perhaps they need an advanced publishing workflow for their teams to be able to create, edit, update, approve, and publish their content?
Starting off the conversation "We're a Headless CMS" unfortunately leaves out all of the other cool features we've built, or are planning to build in the next few months.
These new features will enable organizations to build dynamic content quickly, ahead of the competition, without the involvement of technical teams past the initial setup, and do so at a fraction of the cost of other providers. And to do it at the scale that enterprise organizations require.
Yes, for those organizations who need that kind of power, Webiny is an all-in-one solution that might be able to replace several costly products that are strung together with digital duct tape, not designed to work together, and are also individually difficult to work with.
For those people, Webiny isn't just a CMS. It's a CMS Plus.
Plus.
It's succinct, minimalistic, but covers a lot of stuff. Webiny is still a Headless CMS. But it's a Headless CMS Plus all of the other features we've talked about.
Adding the word "Plus" to the business and enterprise products opens the discussion around Webiny's other capabilities. It allows us to showcase other features whilst not detracting from the core use that many of our users see value in.
It allows us to start more conversations around the functionality of the Page Builder and Form Builder tools, tools that are going to get some pretty interesting added features in coming months.
We're really hoping that this new initiative will allows us to open more discussions with organizations looking for, not just a Headless CMS, but something that can solve a lot of the issues around producing content in their business.
If this is you, please reach out to us! We'd love to hear about the difficulties you're facing. For our Enterprise customers we provide SLA support and consultancy services tailored to help your teams to build a solution that'll be designed around your workflow and specific needs. And we can build custom SSO implementations with your IDP of choice.
If you're an agency or a smaller business, Webiny is a great fit for you! Use it as a Headless CMS with multi-tenancy built-in, and pay a reasonable cost for each user seat. And add-on optional benefits such as our advanced publishing workflow and headless pages.
Remember, Webiny is an open-source, self-hosted solution: you can use it at no cost under our MIT license today. We hope this will help you to build smaller projects and thoroughly investigate it's capabilities before you make a decision.
Try a live demo today to get more background on the product.