Is a composable DXP the right fit for everyone?

What is a composable DXP?

With a composable DXP approach, you are building a DXP yourself from the best-of-breed tools. You are integrating them between each other yourself via the APIs or out-of-the-box integrations. You can choose different parts of your DXP based on your specific needs.

This approach has its benefits, but it also requires a big IT department, creates dependencies of marketers on developers, costs more than other approaches, and has longer time to market.

Be aware of an Integrated DXP approach because many integrated DXP vendors call themselves composable DXP vendors. To understand the difference - watch our video.

Digital experience maturity – journey to the answer

To properly answer the question, if a composable DXP is the right fit for you, we recommend assessing the level of your company’s or team’s digital experience maturity. Digital experience maturity is a scale that tells you how sophisticated and experienced you are on the digital experience journey and its orchestration based on the tools and techniques your organization needs.

Digital Experience Maturity Model – a tool for the answer

There is plenty of models that can help you asses your digital experience maturity level. We use our own model to help our customers to understand their current state in the digital world, plan their strategies and tactics, and fully utilize our own platform.

We use the analogy with housing and settlements to make it simple to understand. The starting point is a single Home, which we liken to a small business. If that’s you, you are still happy with just a single website and some presence on social media. In other words, you really don’t need a DXP at all.  

Between Hamlet and Metropolis levels, we believe you can benefit from an approach other than a composable DXP. You need more than just a simple CMS, but you don’t need a custom-built solution just for you or for one specific digital experience channel. You may appreciate a unified standalone product, which covers all or most of these needs. The important thing is, is that you have the possibility to grow with this product. We call the right approach a unified DXP.

If you are at a Megacity level, every single piece of your digital customer experience needs to be customized to meet the exact needs of your business. And you probably have an appropriate budget for it. At this level, a composable DXP may be the right approach for you.

What is a unified DXP?

A unified DXP is a solution with all the core tools to cover your digital customer experiences in one unified platform. It is a great foundation for growing your digital experience maturity in all parts of it. It offers great ROI with quick time to market, lower infrastructure costs, quicker onboarding, and higher efficiency of your marketing team thanks to the unified development and user interface.

A proper unified DXP should also be easy to decompose so you can replace any part of it later in the process in case you outgrow that piece of functionality. 

In our opinion, that is the best approach for the majority of companies from the Hamlet to Metropolis level of our digital experience maturity model.