List of leading Headless CMS Solutions

What is Headless CMS?    
 
 HEADLESS = content.

What makes a real headless CMS? A headless cms is having a content first approach WITH full APIs to access the content in any way you want. Content first must be the approach behind Content Architecture. You start with looking at your content and structuring it and how it can be used now and in the future before you think of building anything UI wise. Its simple, Content First approach.

Below given a narrow list of headless CMSs in addition to AEM.

•     Agility CMS
•     Butter CMS
•     Acquia
•     e-Spirit
•     Contentstack
•     Contentful
•     dotCMS
•     Mura
•     Cloud CMS
•     Cockpit CMS
•     Core dna
•     Craft CMS
•     Zesty.io
•     Directus
•     Storyblok
•     GraphQL CMS
•     Gentics Mesh
•     Cosmic JS
•     Kentico Cloud
•     Prismic.io
•     Quintype
•     Sanity
•     Scrivito
•     Squidex
•     DNN Evoq Content
•     Strapi
•     Superdesk

AEM Leading to head less CMS?

Headless 
Now a days many goes with headless CMS. Here the content capabilities of a CMS are not used for rendering; the rendering output could be through any channel like websites, print, campaign or mobile apps. From Beginning AEM's one of the core module Apache Sling, allows to access the contents of the JCR through HTTP requests.

The DefaultGetServlet helps to render content in JSON format by using the json extension.
For eg: /content/site/en/page.infinity.json

In addition to the OOTB features, one can create Sling Servlet to expose content which ever format we want.

The latest AEM features:
AEM 6.3 is built with Content as a Service (CaaS) feature. Now AEM provides editor an aggregated view of content within the JCR called Content Fragments. This content can be assets, content fragments or pages, intended for external consumption.

Caas  = > content as a service
The CaaS way suggest that a CMS should only be used for managing content, not for controlling its presentation.

Caas features

• The CMS just hosts the content.
• Content structure here is highly customizable, which can be managed through a web framework.
• The content can be available through RESTful API in formats like JSON/xml.

Advantages of Caas

• Presentation is decoupled from content. The delivery channel could be websites, campaigns, print, mobile apps, and other devices and channels.
• Here content supports different variations which could be varying for devices. Content author is not aware of the display part of the system.
• Here the data is content centric and not page centric.

Some use cases of CaaS (scenarios when a content fragment to be used?)

Multi-channel approach: The same content can be used to render for websites or mobile which makes the system more flexible.
Mobile apps content backend: Real world want more latest content on mobile devices. This approach helps for pulling data from a live content system supporte by Caas.
MVC Front end support : Angular, ReactJS can be used to provide rich front end. Also the CMS front end has restrictions based on the architecture of CMS. Thus Caas model supports any MVC front end frame work.
Easy integration with existing services : There are cases where we need to use/ pull existing content to new system. Using the Caas API this is quite easy.

YouTube demo videos for Content Fragments:
AEM 6.3 Content Fragments Basics
Content Fragments AEM
View Content fragment output in aem

Related Posts

AEM Leading to head less CMS?
AEM Content Fragment output as JSON
AEM 6.3 Content Fragments Basics
How to create a Content Fragment? step by step tutorial
Create & Access the content fragment programmatically