Exploring CMS and DXP costs: Highlights from our higher education report

This blog is part of a broader report exploring how UK universities are investing in their digital platforms and online presence. We’ve analysed the types of CMS and DXPs adopted across the sector, looking at how institutions choose between traditional, headless, and hybrid solutions. Our findings highlight the evolving digital strategies within higher education, and this report is designed to help institutions make informed decisions about the tools they use to manage their digital estates effectively.

An enterprise content management system is essential for creating, publishing and maintaining web pages and other digital content on the scale required by large organisations such as universities.

The digital transformation of all aspects of modern life, and the large investment in customer experience made by large e-commerce and streaming platforms, mean that today’s customers expect more and more sophisticated digital experiences. As a result many organisations, including universities, are turning to digital experience platforms, or DXPs, to power their digital estates.

DXPs normally include enterprise CMS functionality alongside other features required to deliver the kinds of digital experiences expected by modern audiences. As a bare minimum this usually includes the ability to gather user information through web forms, track interactions via web analytics, deliver personalised content and integrate with other systems such as CRMs.

However, with the constant growth in new channels such as voice search, organisations are increasingly looking for a single platform to manage all of their content in an effort to deliver a consistent experience across all of their digital channels.

One response to this has been the emergence of headless CMS platforms. Unlike traditional CMSs, which are built on a monolithic architecture encompassing both the content management and presentation layers, headless CMS platforms separate these two functions, treating content in a platform agnostic way. This allows for greater flexibility in front-end development as the content can be delivered through APIs to any device or platform. However, building a headless website requires more planning and expertise than a traditional CMS website.

With this in mind we wanted to find out what proportion of UK universities were using these three different categories of platforms.

While most institutions report using a single CMS or DXP to manage their web estate, some use at least one extra platform.

The table below lists all of the platforms used by the 76 institutions included in this report, along with the number of institutions that use each product, and the market share that product has among the respondents.

There are two institutions that provided expenditure information but whose CMS details are either undisclosed or cannot be obtained through publicly available information. These are listed as 'Not known'.

As anticipated, no single solution is employed across higher education. Of the 76 institutions that provided expenditure information, at least 15 CMS and DXP platforms are being used. Clearly, there has never been more choice in managing your digital estate.

The three most popular platforms hold just under 50% of the market share, with Contensis and Terminalfour both holding 18.28%.

Contensis is a proprietary headless CMS with a tailored higher education feature set. It is also widely used in local government and the private sector, and its position as one of the top content management systems demonstrates growth in the market for solutions which allow flexibility for editors and developers and the separation of content and code.

TerminalFour is a proprietary monolithic digital engagement platform, and its popularity likely stems from being tailored for and marketed specifically to the HE market.

Wordpress is the third most popular platform with 15.05%

Drupal comes in next with 11.83%, which increases to around 15.05% when considering Acquia provides a managed cloud version of the platform. Acquia was founded by the original developer of Drupal. As an open-source product, Drupal can be sold by a third party, such as Acquia, as a managed service, but is also used directly by institutions. It has a large, active user community. Its strengths and weaknesses both arise from its ability to be customised and adapted to many purposes.

Other notable mentions in the list include companies with a strong presence in the private sector such as Sitecore and Umbraco. It is possible that as web professionals migrate from one sector to another, their positive experiences with a CMS go with them and gain traction in the new sector.

Interestingly, only two headless CMS platforms – Contentful and Storyblok – feature in the list.

Based on the data received, we saw that while all institutions have a dedicated CMS for their main content, some also use various additional systems.

The most common additional systems are Wordpress microsites, which are separate from the institution's main higher education marketing activities. These microsites serve a range of purposes, from practical functions such as room bookings and electronic signage to specific branches of academic subjects. For instance, they may be created by lecturers for ongoing projects or to provide niche information.

This raises some interesting questions about the reasons for their separation from an institution's primary platform and the expected benefits that would come with shared hosting, maintenance, life-cycle management, and security. We hope to explore further in future iterations of this report.

We have analysed the data and compared the average overall spend based on an institution’s primary CMS or DXP platform. This average overall spend includes any additional CMS or DXP products used by an institution, as not every institution responded with a detailed breakdown of their expenditure.

However, we believe it is a useful indicator of the budgets of the institutions using each platform as well as the completeness of functionality and value for money offered by each platform.

Again, Contensis, TerminalFour and Drupal are the three most widely used primary CMS or DXP platforms among our respondents. When we add in the next most popular platform, Sitecore, then these four providers account for 68% of the market share.

On face value, the institutions using Drupal as their primary platform look to be spending far more than those using Contensis or TerminalFour.

However, as in other areas of the report, this number is skewed by a single institution spending over £1,000,000. With this outlier removed, the average spend on Drupal is reduced to £62,632.33, which is more in line with the average spend of the institutions using Contensis and TerminalFour.

Interestingly, just one institution reported using a pure headless CMS – Storyblok – as its primary platform.

This is a surprise as the web industry has been increasingly heading in the direction of headless architecture over recent years, especially in the private sector. This is partly due to the ability of a headless CMS to deliver content to any digital platform, but also because decoupling the back-end content management technology from the front-end presentation layer lets teams build websites and apps using any technology they like. This decoupling also means organisations can work on the front-end without affecting content operations, making it possible to continually improve the customer experience and quickly adapt to specific needs across different channels.

Some of the other CMS and DXP products listed, such as Drupal and Sitecore, offer some kind of headless or API-first content delivery, but they are primarily monolithic systems. In other words, while they can deliver content to any platform through content delivery APIs, they are designed to be used to build websites using a particular technology stack, such as PHP or .Net.

Contensis is slightly different, as while it is a headless platform – with all the advantages that brings in terms of multichannel content delivery and technology agnostic development – it also includes a deployment platform for hosting the code that runs front-end websites and services. In this sense it occupies the ground between a pure headless system, which requires additional platforms and services to run websites, and a monolithic platform, which provides the ability to host websites, but normally requires the use of a specific framework.

We suspect there are several reasons that headless CMS platforms such as Storyblok or Contentful haven’t proved more popular with UK higher education institutions. The first is their lack of a hosting platform. Institutions looking to use one of these systems would need to procure separate systems and services to host their websites, which would entail a more complicated tender process. This might not be a problem for institutions looking to self-host their website, however, because of their complexity – each feature of a headless CMS generally runs as a microservice with its own API – almost all headless CMS platforms are software-as-a-service (SaaS) products and aren’t available for on-premise use.

Finally, the greatest strength of a pure headless CMS, its flexibility, can also be one its biggest weaknesses. While you can configure a headless CMS to store any kind of content and deliver it anywhere you like, you must set it up from scratch. Most headless CMS platforms don’t come with features that most universities will need, such as a form builder, URL management or front-end search capabilities. Developers are expected to implement these features themselves when they build the front-end applications that receive content from the CMS. This can be an asset for organisations that want the ability to quickly swap out parts of their technology stack so they are using the best solutions on offer for things such as forms and search, but it also means that these CMS platforms are unlikely to be able to compete in a tender that requires these features out of the box.

• Two of the most popular platforms, Contensis and TerminalFour, are both proprietary products aimed at the higher education market, but approach content management in different ways, with TerminalFour being a more traditional DXP that offers content deliver APIs while Contensis is a headless DXP with a deployment platform for building and hosting websites.
• While the third and fourth most popular platforms, Drupal and Sitecore, are also primarily intended to be used as monolithic systems, they also have the ability to power headless websites.
• Surprisingly, only one institution reported using a pure headless CMS (Storyblok), despite the wider web industry's shift towards headless architecture for its flexibility and multichannel capabilities.
• Headless CMS platforms like Storyblok and Contentful may be less popular in UK higher education due to their lack of a hosting platform and other DXP features such as forms and search, which complicates procurement and implementation processes.

To dive deeper into how UK universities are investing in their online presence, download our full report, Digital investment at UK universities. This report analyses the digital investment patterns of more than 70 UK universities, highlighting the spending trends on content management systems, digital experience platforms, and hosting solutions. Access the complete report to gain valuable insights that can help shape your institution's digital strategy and enhance engagement with prospective students.