CMS Showdown: Do you need a page builder or a data modeler?

this is Tim from HRA and in this video we will be talking about the big CMS showdown of 2024 because we did a survey for a lot of users of CMS implementers developers and we asked a bunch and bunch of questions um there's a link in the description to the results of those surveys if you want um and what we found is that not every CMS is created equal a lot of folks are looking for data modelers and then another big group are looking for page Builders and so there are quite distinct differences in those in the fender space and also how you use them and so to explain that to you I want to introduce you to Gregor and greguar our two French Bakers and so yes cms's are like bake shops or cake shops however you want to call them and so of course I live in France we're going to talk about baking and so um those two types of Bakers Gregor and greguar actually represent these two different cms's so like Gregor here Gregor is the cake baker and so cake bakers actually put together all the ingredients for the base of the cake so they're creating um not how it looks exactly but very much the basics and so when you think about it in CMS terms they are dealing with something we call domain content and so the main content is something you kind of take with you over the years and you keep keep it super clean and super meticulous so you can use it in any sort of way and so what you get in CMS is that focus on domain content is things like complex custom content types that are super flexible right they have lots of different types of data modeling capabilities things like content versioning workflows permissions things like that um they tend to integrate with super well with external systems maybe of Legacy data or something that is you know additive to the richness of these Dom main models or content models and they tend to have super flexible apis because you have to then query this stuff from any sort of front end so they don't really care about the front end it's much more this is the best we can give you this data deal with it so that's the cake bger that's grear for you and so then we have gregar who is the cake decorator so if you think about cake decorating they get the cake from Gregor and then do something nice about it and so they decorate the cake and so that means this is much more about the design content and so the page builder type which this means is Page Builders and design content related cms's they take the base data and they do something with it so it looks like a beautiful website at one point right so they tend to have a less technical interface they have a bunch of like drag and drop like things to just make make things easier for people who are focusing on design and so what that of course needs if you want to design something you really need a real time preview and you might want to just in context edit all that stuff so your page looks exactly like you want it and you can see it before you publish and so they also have Integrations with external systems but in slightly different ways perhaps a design system and so they have a lot of customization options added to them to be able to say okay this title needs to be that one it's bigger or smaller or whatever you want to be doing and so essentially we have Gregor for domain content and then we have greguar for the design content and you know this is the fun thing that I want to talk about first before we talk about how you can actually match these to make them the best CMS the domain content Greger actually is the content that you're going to use right and then the design content is actually grear who is dealing with stuff about the content how will I show it so Gregor creates the cake greguar decides how it looks and so of course there's a little bit of overlap because the the decoration will make it taste slightly differently right and so how this was made by Gregor also informs how gregar deals with it so there's always a bit of a cross pollination right and so let's talk about the intersection because this is where you start to get success right you're going to have to get the best of both worlds and so what I see personally as the best cms's is you choose one of the two you are either Gregor or gregar you either bake the cakes you make the domain model really really solid or you're gregar and you love decorating it making it the best story for the enduser in the design and so the most successful CMS as I see tend to have a bit of both right if you look at a CMS like High graph is where we are fully focused on this Gregor stuff we're baking the cake but we also add things like um you know High graphs component system so you can drag and drop things around and you can you don't always have to hard content model stuff and you can make a page and do stuff like that we also have live preview coming for example and so isn't the cake nicer if you have it baked with a with and you can also do a little bit of um you know decorations or isn't the cake nicer if you have really nicely decorated but your data is actually kind of nicely usable going towards the edges will make it hard for most people to choose but actually intersecting a little bit by choosing one lane of where you are best that's how you diversify and find your product Market fit so that's what I wanted to talk about about cms's and how I see that difference and so um happy choosing feel free to reach out or join our slack community at slack. hyra.com so you can ask all your questions about all this stuff cheers