Pros

• Flexible developer environment to create and manage content across multiple channels
• Ability to create and deploy tailored customer experiences quickly
• Ability to learn, change and iterate direction quickly
• Share content programmatically with other systems
• Create workflows and recurring processes that communicate with the platform and other systems
• Advanced security provided by simple interactions through APIs
• Improved performance, ability to create static content and have websites that are fast
• Scale, ability to handle peaks and large volumes of website content from a single source

Cons

• Have flexibility that may require developer involvement
• Manual application management
• Out-of-the-box functionality may be limited
• Flexibility in the presentation layer can be limited
• Setup maybe be more complex in terms of structuring data types, components and layouts
• Some systems are missing admin/authoring capabilities with features like preview, analytics and permissioning
• Site control can be split amongst a number of content systems
• Personalization may require more development
• Analytics capabilities can be limited

** Many of the Cons above have been solved within the Core dna platform as we continue to provide hybrid support for the traditional authoring environment.

Read this next: Hybrid CMS: A Headless CMS, But With a Front-End

A headless platform gives you a number of benefits. These include:

1. Ability to create your own custom content types that can then be used to build further complex content types that are independent of the original database design.
2. Freedom to develop interfaces based on your own standards without the constraints of your current CMS.
3. The ability for you to distribute your content to multiple channels. For example desktop, mobile, phone, interactive screen, digital banners.
4. A central place for all your content, rather than have it distributed across many different systems.
5. Ability to access content using application programming interfaces (API).
6. Ability to create custom publishing environments that are tailored to your admin requirements.
7. Remove the dependence of your systems on specific systems. You can use API interfaces to access what you need from systems and replace them easily if your needs change.
8. Ability to use microservices for speed and flexibility. 
9. Make changes quickly without the need to engineer your CMS; making it faster to get changes done.
10. Developer friendly, no big learning curves for developers to understand new CMS/eCommerce platforms. Easy-to-learn API interface that gives them the ability to create anything using multiple sources of information.
11. Ability to improve performance: by controlling exactly what you want to deliver to your visitor, without the overheads of a traditional CMS/eCommerce.
12. Improved security through access to distinct APIs that can be controlled by the admin.

Read this next: Headless CMS vs Decoupled CMS: The Ultimate Guide

A decoupled platform — a term that best describes Core dna — is a headless platform, and then some.

With a decoupled platform, your content and other objects like products, orders, blogs are managed separately and can be front-end agnostic, just like a headless platform. Yet, it has front-end delivery tools in the box, like templates, an admin for your staff and other features that can make adopting the platform easier than if it were just a headless platform. These additional tools are designed for people who don't have technical expertise and can simplify your development process. 

The difference is that the back-end and front-end are not “coupled” to each other through a database like with a traditional CMS. Instead, the front-end and back-end communicate to each other through calls to an API.

Learn more about headless content management.

A DXP or Digital experience platform is a central technogical foundation to be built upon and to support the entire, continuous customer life cycle across all digital channels.

• From one platform, one login, brands and business can manage content, assets, and interactions across multiple different channels.
• It allows multichannel delivery via APIs of digital interactions across all touchpoints, including Iot, AR/VR, digital assistants and kiosks.
• It helps efficiently and effectively create, store, publish and optimize content for any channel – whether it’s a website,
  mobile app, or social media page.
• It's a platform where business and IT with various skills and responsibilities work together towards the common goal of customer experience improvement.
• It helps tracks user behavior on your websites, monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) in real time.
• It integrates with your tech stack for increased personalization and engagement with customers, and gather
  customer insights from data analytics.

Gartner defines a digital experience platform (DXP) as, “an integrated set of technologies, based on a common platform, that provides a broad range of audiences with consistent, secure and personalized access to information and applications across many digital touchpoints. Organizations use DXPs to build, deploy and continually improve websites, portals, mobile and other digital experiences.”

An enterprise DXP gives a brand the tools it needs to manage the presentation layer of their digital presence. All great DXPs combine integration and aggregation, content management, personalization, collaboration, workflow management, analytics, multichannel support as well as search and navigation.

Unlike a traditional CMS/eCommerce, which combines content management and front-end delivery, a headless platform has a flexible front-end system to determine how the content is created and presented to the end user. It’s front-end agnostic, meaning that your content is created raw and can be published anywhere, through any framework, thanks to built-in APIs.

Coredna is not only a headless platform but also a hybrid headless Platform. We recognized that Marketers still need the flexibility of an easy to use administration, so we created a fully functioning DXP administration panel that allows the marketer to have a dashboard and the ability to manage multiple websites. With the Headless features of the Core dna DXP you can also create a customized publishing platform, this can be useful if you want to simplify administration functions or create a custom user experience.

Learn more about headless content management.