Digital experience platforms change the way global organisations interact with their customers. Both Gartner and Forrester have introduced reports to help digital leaders understand the benefits of DXPs. But the emerging market has left some people scratching their heads: what is a digital experience platform? How does it differ from a content management system? And what do you need to deliver the digital experiences your customers crave?

This post explains the difference between CMSs and DXPs, and how digital-first companies are building their own digital experience platforms with a CMS at the center.

What is a digital experience platform?

First things first: what’s a digital experience platform? Gartner, who is primarily responsible for coining the term, defines a digital experience platform as an “integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery, and optimization of contextualized digital experiences.” In other words, digital experience platforms allow for the creation, hosting and distribution of digital experiences across multiple channels and devices.

Digital experience platforms solve an increasingly complex problem: meeting the growing expectations of customers. Customers expect relevant, connected experiences through a range of digital channels (web, mobile, social media) and digital devices (wearables, home devices, digital displays).

Digital experience platforms evolved to make working with this enormous amount of content manageable. But as we’ll see later, DXP suites — single tools that try to do everything necessary to produce digital experiences — share the problems of their CMS counterparts. Companies are already pivoting to the next generation of digital experience tools: the digital experience platform.