For today’s enterprise businesses, it’s sink or swim. Your company’s success depends on your ability to make strategic decisions, act urgently to seize new opportunities, and maximize new technologies to streamline your business processes.
However, many organizations get bogged down by menial tasks that threaten to slow progress and innovation. A Slack study found that desk workers spend 41% of their time on activities that are “low value, repetitive, or lack meaningful contribution to their core job functions.”
This highlights a clear opportunity for businesses to make better use of technology, including CMS platforms. These tools automate or streamline low-value, repetitive website tasks, allowing your marketing team to focus on the bigger picture.
This guide covers everything you need to know about choosing the right enterprise CMS for your business’s needs, including:
- Key Considerations Before You Start
- Core Features Your Enterprise CMS Must Have
- Questions to Ask Before Choosing an Enterprise CMS
- Comparing Popular Enterprise CMS Platforms in 2025
- How Kanopi Can Help You Choose the Best Enterprise CMS
With these essential considerations and tips, you’ll be able to find a solution that not only meets your needs today but also propels your success into the future.
Key Considerations Before You Start
Before we discuss the benefits and features of an enterprise CMS, you should understand a few key differences between the types of tools you may encounter in your search.
Proprietary vs. Open-Source CMS
CMS platforms are available in various formats to serve different organizational needs. One of the most important distinctions is the difference between proprietary and open-source platforms.
A proprietary CMS is a platform built and maintained by a single company. Examples include Adobe Experience Manager, HubSpot, and Optimizely. These solutions are “closed,” meaning users can’t view or change the source code.
Proprietary CMS platforms offer advantages such as dedicated support from the software provider. If your organization already uses other tools from the provider, then they also provide familiarity and instant integrations. However, these solutions are less customizable than open-source software.
In contrast, open-source CMS software allows anyone to review and manipulate the source code to create a fully customized website based on their unique needs. Examples of these platforms include Drupal and WordPress.
Open-source solutions are free to use and give users more control over their data and website development. Although they often require more technical expertise to get a website up and running, they offer a high degree of flexibility and community support to simplify the process.
Both open-source and proprietary software offer benefits for enterprise organizations. To make the right call between these options, meet with your marketing team, assess your current technology solutions and capabilities, and see how your CMS will fit into your tech stack. You can also review our roundup of popular enterprise CMS software below to explore specific examples of these tools.
Headless vs. Traditional CMS
Another consideration for the CMS selection process is whether your team is interested in a headless or traditional CMS.
A headless CMS separates the content creation and management processes from the front-end delivery layer, which is the version of your website that visitors see when they click through.
This offers greater flexibility for delivering content across multiple channels and devices. Plus, these solutions enable advanced customization, allowing you to create a website directly tailored to your business needs. However, headless configurations usually require a greater investment of time and resources up front as you work with a developer to design a custom solution.
Traditional CMSs, on the other hand, couple the front and back end, providing a unified system that is often easier for non-technical teams to use and manage. These CMS platforms usually don’t require as much custom configuration or support from an external developer. However, they offer limited gains when it comes to interactivity or customization.
The Kanopi team typically recommends that enterprise organizations use open-source, headless CMS platforms to manage their complex, multichannel needs. These solutions empower businesses with the maximum flexibility and customization they need to stand out from the competition.
Core Features Your Enterprise CMS Must Have
As you explore enterprise CMS options, you’ll notice that all platforms offer a variety of bells and whistles to distinguish themselves from other options. It’s essential to look past the flashy offerings and ensure every CMS you consider has the core necessities your organization needs to build a reliable, flexible website.
Specifically, ensure every CMS on your shortlist has the following vital features:
- Scalability for multi-site management and global teams. Your business may have multiple offshoot sites in addition to your core website, or localized resources for international teams. Your CMS should allow you to incorporate these sites into an organized, multisite architecture.
- API-first architecture: An API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of rules and conventions that enable software applications to communicate and exchange data with other applications. When your CMS takes an API-first approach, it’s easier to integrate your site with other applications, such as your eCommerce store, payment gateway, or social media. This unity creates a seamless customer experience.
- Customizable workflows and user permissions. Your business has unique digital needs that your CMS must account for. You should be able to set up customized workflows for content creation, management, editing, and publishing. You can set different user permissions to enhance site security and minimize content errors.
- Integrated security and compliance. Keeping up with data security threats is the number one challenge reported by businesses. Your CMS platform should maintain data security by offering encryption protocols such as SSL and HTTPS and PCI-compliant payment processing.
- Accessibility compliance. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that organizations with publicly available websites make their sites accessible to people with disabilities. Your CMS should enable you to build a fully accessible website with features like alternative text for images, clear site hierarchy, simple navigation, and keyboard accessibility.
- Multilingual capabilities. If your business caters to an international audience, communicating in multiple languages is essential. Choose a CMS that supports multilingual capabilities. This can be achieved by creating separate websites for different audiences or by enabling translation of your main website into various languages.
- Innovative personalization. A customer service study found that 81% of customers prefer engaging with companies that offer a personalized experience. Your website should exceed customer expectations by facilitating a personalized user journey. This journey could include personalized calls to action based on past browsing habits, product recommendations, or customer loyalty programs.
- High performance. Your customers have multiple other organizations vying for their attention, meaning they won’t want to wait around if your website is not quick to load. Studies have shown that 47% of users won’t wait longer than two seconds for a website to load. Therefore, your CMS must facilitate fast load speeds via features like browser caching, image optimization, and minification.
- Continuous innovation to support future-proofing your digital presence. Before you choose a CMS, check the product log to ensure the system you select undergoes continuous feature and security updates. Continuous improvement allows your organization to take advantage of the latest and greatest content management features.
As you browse through software options, use this checklist to verify that your top choices offer all this functionality. Take additional notes on any extra features each platform offers and decide whether your organization would make the most of these features, or if they’d be an unnecessary add-on or additional expense.
Questions to Ask Before Choosing an Enterprise CMS
Beyond just understanding the right features to look for in an enterprise CMS, ensure your team is aligned on the purpose of your search. By answering the following questions, you can understand which type of solution to prioritize in your research:
- What are our organizational goals?
- Examples: Grow our online customer base by 50%, retain 60% of customers year over year.
- What type of CMS platform will help us reach our goals?
- Example: A headless, open-source CMS will help us execute a multichannel digital strategy with the flexibility and customization we need to stand apart from competitors.
- What specific content challenges are we trying to solve?
- Examples: Outdated asset management process, maintaining content quality across multiple subsites, lack of design flexibility
- What pain points have we experienced from legacy systems?
- Examples: Slow loading speeds, lack of support, complex user interfaces
- What is our budget?
- Remember, CMS costs don’t stop at platform fees. Assess your solution’s total cost of ownership (TCO) over time, considering expenses such as developer, maintenance, and hosting fees.
- Which internal teams will use the CMS, and what are their technical capabilities?
- Example: The content marketing, branding, and SEO teams will use the CMS, along with a handful of freelance content writers. None of these teams has a high level of technical expertise, so we need a user-friendly back-end content management environment.
- Meet with team members who will interact with your CMS regularly to ensure their voices are heard throughout the selection process.
- What integrations with our current tech stack are essential?
- Examples: Integration with social media, digital asset management, email marketing, eCommerce platform, and CRM.
- Should we conduct web development internally or partner with an external expert?
- Example: Our organization doesn’t have a web developer on staff, so we’ll work with an external partner to help build a functional CMS instance.
- What’s our expected growth trajectory over the next 3-5 years?
- Example: Our business wants to expand into international markets and add new product lines, so we want to choose a CMS that enables us to scale up our website without sacrificing performance or a streamlined user experience.
- How will we evaluate success for the CMS selection process?
- Set goals and track progress regarding the speed of implementation and the quality of the user experience for backend editing.
Comparing Popular Enterprise CMS Platforms in 2025
To refine your search, we’ve compiled the top enterprise CMS tools your organization should consider. All of these solutions support both headless and traditional configurations, except Storyblok, Contentful, and Strapi, which are solely headless solutions.
1. Drupal
- Open source or proprietary: Open source
- Headless or traditional: Can be either
- Key features: Taxonomy system, user role customization, custom workflows, multilingual functionality, robust media management
- Pros: Powerful for complex content structures, highly customizable, enterprise-level security
- Cons: Steep learning curve for non-technical team members, higher development costs
2. WordPress
- Open source or proprietary: Open source
- Headless or traditional: Can be either
- Key features: Vast plugin ecosystem, SEO-friendly, intuitive editor, broad community support, user access controls, simple media management library
- Pros: Straightforward backend editing process, flexible and intuitive for non-technical users, cost-effective, scalable, secure
- Cons: Overuse of plugins can lead to slow load speed, and poorly designed plugins can lead to security issues
3. Contentful
- Open source or proprietary: Proprietary
- Headless or traditional: Headless
- Key features: Content model flexibility, GraphQL and REST APIs, SDKs for multiple languages
- Pros: Developer-centric, scalable, highly flexible
- Cons: Less intuitive for marketers, relies heavily on custom development
4. Craft CMS
- Open source or proprietary: Proprietary
- Headless or traditional: Can be either
- Key features: Live preview capabilities to show content edits in real-time, detailed user groups and permissions, robust plugin ecosystem
- Pros: Intuitive authoring experience, effective scalability, comprehensive localization capabilities for international audiences
- Cons: Users must pay for a license to use the platform, and developer support is required to build a robust enterprise website
5. Optimizely
- Open source or proprietary: Proprietary
- Headless or traditional: According to the Optimizely site, Optimizely PaaS (Platform as a Service) CMS is typically used as a traditional CMS or a hybrid of conventional and headless, while Optimizely SaaS (Software as a Service) CMS is headless.
- Key features: Built-in A/B testing, What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor, personalized audience interactions, multi-site/multi-channel management
- Pros: Excellent experimentation tools, powerful integrations with CRM, translation, and SEO software
- Cons: Steep learning curve, higher price point
6. Storyblok
- Open source or proprietary: Proprietary
- Headless or traditional: Headless
- Key features: Performance tools, multiple integrations for eCommerce, SEO, CRM, etc., ideation room to support brainstorming
- Pros: The headless approach provides more content management freedom and flexibility
- Cons: Cumbersome editing process, challenging setup with a steep learning curve
7. Adobe Experience Manager
- Open source or proprietary: Proprietary
- Headless or traditional: Can be either
- Key features: Omnichannel content delivery, audience personalization, seamless eCommerce integration, automated workflows
- Pros: Simple content customization, seamless integration with other Adobe apps
- Cons: Costly, resource-intensive setup, complex user interface
8. Sitecore
- Open source or proprietary: Proprietary
- Headless or traditional: Can be either
- Key features: Personalization, A/B testing, multisite functionality
- Pros: Versatility and scalability
- Cons: High complexity and costs
9. Strapi Enterprise Edition
- Open source or proprietary: Strapi itself is an open source solution, but Strapi Enterprise Edition is a packaged offering built on Strapi.
- Headless or traditional: Headless
- Key features: Single sign-on authentication, simplified content history, dedicated support
- Pros: API-first approach and robust customizability
- Cons: Less comprehensive features when compared to more established CMS platforms
How Kanopi Can Help You Choose the Best Enterprise CMS
For over 15 years, Kanopi has partnered with ambitious enterprise organizations to develop and design effective websites that maximize strategic growth. Our corporate website design and development services are tailored to align the technical aspects of a website project with your business’s long-term goals.
We offer the following research and strategy services to find the right enterprise CMS solution for your organization’s needs:
- Stakeholder workshops
- Competitor analysis
- Content audit
- Technical audit
- Sitemapping
Plus, after you choose a CMS, the Kanopi team can support site migration, web design, and ongoing maintenance. Watch this video for insights into how our team approaches support through a continuous development mindset:
Wrapping Up
Whether you work with a web consultant or approach CMS research independently, your chosen solution should support your business’s unique purpose, goals, and audience. With a scalable and flexible platform, you can achieve your current goals and set even more ambitious digital objectives in the future.
Explore these additional resources to learn more about popular CMS platforms:
- Drupal vs. WordPress: Which One is Right For You? Drupal and WordPress are two of the most popular CMS choices for enterprise organizations. Use this guide to compare the solutions and understand their strengths.
- 12 Business Benefits of Using WordPress for Enterprise. WordPress is a flexible, customizable option for businesses seeking a user-friendly CMS. Learn more about the business benefits of WordPress for enterprise-level companies.
- Choosing a Content Management System: Proprietary vs. Open Source. Deciding between a proprietary or open source CMS is an essential choice during your CMS search. Explore these options in this detailed resource.
- How to Choose the Right Healthcare Content Management System. If your enterprise organization is in the healthcare space, there are a few unique considerations to work through as you choose the right CMS for your needs. Explore those key points in this guide.
