Composable MACH solutions in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms Report

Contentstack had its beginnings as a pure-play CMS vendor, but “has a strong vision of what ‘the new spine’ of a composed digital experience platform needs to contain”, in the words of the Forrester report. The goal would be to enable other MACH-compliant vendors to connect to the CMS and to share events and content in a way that creates a more cohesive experience for developers and marketers alike. Contentstack refers to this spine as the Automation Hub and it leverages this approach to drive automation between platforms and applications. For example, as content is authored, the Automation Hub can automatically pass the content to external providers of translation services or back up to an Amazon S3 location.

In this way, Contentstack becomes not just the core CMS in a MACH solution, but also the central hub that drives communication between itself and other MACH solutions, saving developers valuable time and effort compared to other composable solutions. In addition, Contentstack has also invested in the release of Contentstack Launch, which dramatically simplifies the entirety of front-end hosting, from builds to scalable deployments. It’s another way in which Contentstack seeks to differentiate itself in a crowded marketplace of MACH vendors.

Contentful builds upon its reputation as a MACH-compliant, developer-centric solution that reference customers call “a developer’s dream”. Its heritage as a powerful CMS is well known in enterprise cloud applications as it has a growing footprint in that segment of the marketplace. Contentful seems focused on expanding its core CMS capabilities and allowing other vendors to focus on their own best-of-breed models, which fully aligns with the MACH Alliance’s principles for composable architecture. The result is an expansion of its editing capabilities, with a no-code layout editor and greater support for multi-tenancy, both of which are important especially in enterprises which house multiple lines of business or brands and often have multi-geographical needs, as well.

Contentful is also investing in AI/ML to drive personalization natively within the platform in the future, augmented by LLMs to generate audience-specific flavors of content. Combined with GenAI tools, it may be a significant step toward delivering more scalable forms of personalized content experiences across disparate channels. Contentful’s approach to the marketplace will be interesting to watch as it evolves, as the developer’s dream increasingly seeks low-code / no code augmentation of its platform.