With headless, the brains of the operation are in the delivery environment. That website (or mobile app or whatever) is pulling content from a “dumb” CMS as it needs it. (The CMS might not actually be “dumb,” but it can be, because all it needs to do is store content and serve up what it’s asked for.)
Headless architecture became popular as customers wanted to use content in more and more places, so they needed a CMS that wasn’t bound to any particular channel.
Additionally, JavaScript frameworks like React have become so powerful that raw data can be pulled into a web browser and templated there, rather than doing this at the CMS. And by separating management and delivery, customers can develop their delivery architectures using a different technology stack than what their CMS runs on.
A system can be pure headless, that never does any templating and only serves raw data to some other system. Alternately, a system can be hybrid headless that can operate in a traditional coupled architecture, but also has tools to serve content headlessly. You can have both architectures in one system.
Where they intersect
I’ll repeat what I said earlier – I basically wrote two unrelated blog posts above.
I hope it’s now clear that the hosting model and delivery architecture of a solution technically have nothing to do with each other.
However, in practice, the market is trending in certain directions and combinations, which is where the confusion has come from.
- Most all vendors are moving away from anything on-premise. You don’t buy enterprise software anymore; rather, you lease it.
- Most vendors building pure headless systems have embraced the software-as-a-service model. Given that their systems are performing a reduced set of functionality, these systems are easier to run as configurable services.
- Hybrid vendors trend towards the platform-as-a-service model. These systems lend themselves to more complex integration scenarios, so the ability to write code is a key benefit.
Exceptions exist. Some open-source headless systems can be installed on-premise. And there are traditionally coupled vendors who sell their software as a service. And while it’s rare, there are some hybrid headless SaaS vendors.
And, it’s particularly worth mentioning, Optimizely is a PaaS platform with all sorts of headless capabilities. So you can have headless, and still build and deploy your own integrated solution.
The key point: pick and choose how you want these two models to intersect. If you want more control over your implementation, don’t settle for a SaaS hosting model or a headless delivery architecture just because you think “Headless SaaS” is a sealed package deal.
It’s not. It never was.