Every few years, the tech world loves tossing around a brand-new acronym. We’re picking a shiny one today called “DXP,” which is short for Digital Experience Platform. Sounds cool, but does it mean every business should ride this wave? After all, who doesn’t want seamless digital experiences and happy customers, right?

But here’s the truth - A DXP is a great choice when your organization needs multiple integrations, personalizations, omnichannel deliveries, and complexities that a CMS alone cannot handle. But otherwise, it could be overkill. 

So, how do you tell if your organization is ready for a DXP? First, let’s find out what a DXP is in detail and then dive into reasons why it is a good (or bad) choice for you.

What is a DXP

Put simply, a DXP is a unified approach to managing all your digital experiences, from websites and apps to personalization and data. Everything in one place. 

Let’s simplify it further. 

Imagine a large online travel agency that has tons of content like travel guides, destination blogs, customer reviews, deals, and itineraries. Now, customers will interact with them through their website, mobile app, email campaigns, and even a chatbot that helps with bookings. They also might want to show different offers to adventure travelers vs luxury seekers. To make smarter decisions, they will need all customer behavior data in one place. And of course, it’s extremely crucial that their content feels consistent across every channel.

With a DXP in place, this travel agency can manage content, tailor experiences, and keep everything connected, without duct-taping a dozen tools together.

Popular DXPs available in the market today

Not going by any particular order, listed below are a few well-known DXP brands that offer customers a connected experience:

Adobe Experience Platform 

This DXP is best suited for large enterprises with deep pockets and a need for an all-in-one solution. It does everything, content, personalization, analytics, AI, wrapped into one powerful (and pricey) platform. It’s expensive, complex, and not the most agile. You’ll need a big team to manage it and a bigger budget.

Sitecore

It is great for industries like finance and healthcare that need personalization and strict compliance. Sitecore DXP offers strong content and marketing automation capabilities, tightly integrated. However, it is not very budget-friendly, and it’s known for being developer-heavy with a steeper learning curve.

Salesforce Experience Cloud

This DXP is meant for Salesforce-first companies that want to tie digital experiences to CRM data. It provides customer data and content under one roof, with seamless integration across Salesforce tools. If you’re all-in on Salesforce, this is a great choice, but limiting if you’re not.

Oracle Content & Experience Cloud

Like the Salesforce Experience Cloud, this one is also meant for big enterprises already deep in Oracle land. It offers centralized content and digital assets with integrations across Oracle’s massive suite. However, it is not known for user-friendliness or agility. Also comes at a high cost with low flexibility.

Acquia DXP (Built on Drupal)

This DXP is great for content-rich organizations that want flexibility, scalability, and open architecture. It is a modular DXP built on open-source Drupal, which means it is customizable, API-friendly, and great for complex content needs. Having said that, it requires development expertise and is not a plug-and-play solution out of the box.

Liferay DXP

This one is best suited for Governments, enterprises, and intranet-heavy organizations. It is open-source, with strong portal and access control capabilities. The catch is that it is less appealing for marketing teams and more of an IT-driven platform.

Contentful + CDP 

This open DXP approach is great for teams building their own custom DXP stack with best-of-breed tools. If you're using Contentful along with a Customer Data Platform (CDP) like Segment, you're essentially assembling your own custom DXP, instead of buying a full, bundled one like Adobe or Sitecore. Basically it’s not a DXP out of the box.

Drupal CMS as a DXP

Now that you know what a DXP is, do you also have a burning desire to find out if Drupal can be used as a DXP? The straightforward answer is - YES, it can!

Drupal started as a content management system (CMS), but because of its flexibility, modularity, and API-first approach, it’s more than capable of functioning as the core of a Digital Experience Platform. How?

Let’s say you’re a large university with multiple departments, hundreds of content editors, student portals, and marketing campaigns running across web, email, and mobile. Here’s how Drupal plays out as a DXP in action:

• Centralized Content Management: Drupal serves as a shared content management layer across sites, enabling consistent branding and structure.
• Multisite Strategy: Each department can have its own Drupal instance while sharing components, templates, and governance.
• Personalization & Targeting: Some of the university sub-sites can use behavioral data to customize the experience for prospective students, faculty, or donors.
• Multichannel Delivery: Content is repurposed across web, mobile apps, social, and internal tools, thanks to Drupal’s API-first architecture.
• Integrations: Drupal integrates with CRMs, event systems, internal databases, and analytics platforms.

So instead of buying a monolithic, closed DXP, you can use Drupal as the core and build a modular DXP around it. This way, you’re not locked into one vendor’s ecosystem.

Final thoughts: So, how do you know if your business actually needs a DXP?

As I’ve mentioned before, not every business requires a full-blown DXP. Some do exceptionally well with a great CMS (like Drupal) and a few integrations. If you don’t need real-time personalization (yet) or you’re not delivering content across every channel, your CMS might cover all your digital needs.

But, if not, here are some signs that you might need a full-blown or a modular DXP:

• Your content lives in one system, your CRM in another, your emails come from a third, your analytics somewhere in a spreadsheet, and you're using five different platforms just to launch a campaign. 
• Your customer reads a blog on your website, clicks an email a week later, then opens your app, and each experience feels like it’s from a different company. 
• Your team talks about “tailored experiences,” but all you’ve got is one-size-fits-all content and a list of customer segments gathering dust. 
• You’re growing at a fast pace, but your digital tech stack is slowing you down. 

Many organizations today are building their own modular DXP stacks by mixing a powerful CMS like Drupal with best-of-breed tools for personalization, analytics, CRM, and more. You get the flexibility to choose what works, swap what doesn’t.

So, is it time for a DXP for your business? Maybe. Maybe not. But if you’re starting to see these signs, we can help build modular, scalable, and cost-effective DXPs using Drupal at the core, so you get the flexibility, performance, and control you need. We could also help you find out if your business is ready for a DXP or not. Let’s get in touch!