Announcing The Forrester Wave™: Content Management Systems, Q1 2025, And The Upcoming CMS Buyer’s Guide

According to Forrester’s data, in 2024, 90% of global technology decision-makers anticipated increasing their budgets for consumer–facing digital products and services over the next 12 months. Vendors — whether small or large, new or old — are racing to beef up product features to help businesses elevate customer experiences. The Forrester Wave™: Content Management Systems, Q1 2025, reveals a transformed field of third-generation content management systems (CMSes) that are delivering new business value by 1) generating AI-powered content variants at scale and 2) using AI agents to enhance content teams’ interactions with digital content.

The following is a preview of some of our takeaways from the evaluation and our upcoming CMS buyer’s guide:

  • Generative AI (genAI)-powered content generation is impacting customer experiences — as digital properties are consolidating. Reference customers shared that time to market is now the primary growth driver for their businesses and that digital properties consolidation was a big efficiency driver. Additionally, genAI-powered content authoring is beginning to drive quantifiable growth for customer acquisition.
  • Visual editors, personalization, and collaboration features are center stage. Businesses are distributing content to more geographies and channels than before, which is driving demand for even more intuitive management and collaboration tools like seamless integration into Microsoft Teams and Slack. Simultaneously, data generated from content variants are raising the bar even further for personalization features. Several reference customers indicated interest in experimenting with genAI capabilities to beef up experimentation and personalization for their customers.
  • Headless delivery and composable architecture were building blocks for the reimagination of AI-powered digital content management. Reference customers shared equal preference for composable pure headless solutions versus template-based CMSes. AI is taking over core user functions — think assistive authoring experiences with specialized AI agents to manage your content model, as well as content agents that automatically learn by generating variants based on analytics and interaction data. CMS features are being reimagined with AI to redefine how content is managed in enterprises.

How To Determine Which Solution Is The Best Fit For Your Business

If you are assessing the content management capabilities of your organization, please get in touch with me to schedule an inquiry or guidance session so we can explore the right technology for your business.

Forrester clients can interact with the full Wave scorecard and dig into the wealth of evaluative information in the scores and scales via our new digital experience. Some of our recently released reports provide additional detail to help guide your decisions, including revenue/cost drivers, embedded solutions, and the larger CMS landscape of vendors: