After years of building on Sitecore, I still get asked: "Is Sitecore still relevant?" The honest answer is nuanced — it depends entirely on what you're building and who's going to maintain it.
Where Sitecore Still Wins
Sitecore's strength has never been raw developer experience. It's the content editor experience combined with enterprise-grade personalization. For organizations that need:
- Multi-site, multi-language content management with granular permissions
- Built-in personalization rules that marketers can configure without developers
- Proven scalability for hundreds of thousands of content items
- An ecosystem of certified partners and long-term support
...Sitecore remains one of the strongest options. The editors I've worked with consistently prefer Sitecore's Experience Editor over competing approaches, especially for page composition.
The Headless Shift
Sitecore XM Cloud and the JSS (JavaScript Services) SDK represent Sitecore's move toward headless. This is where things get interesting — you get Sitecore's content management backend with a modern frontend (Next.js, typically).
The trade-off: you lose some of the inline editing magic of the traditional Experience Editor, but you gain full control over the frontend stack, better performance characteristics, and modern deployment workflows.
When I Recommend Alternatives
Not every project needs Sitecore. I actively steer clients toward simpler solutions when:
- The team is small — Sitecore's operational complexity requires dedicated infrastructure knowledge
- Content is developer-managed — if the team is comfortable with Git-based workflows, a headless CMS like Contentful or Sanity is leaner
- Budget is constrained — Sitecore's licensing model works for enterprise budgets, not startups
- The site is primarily static — marketing sites with infrequent updates are better served by a Jamstack approach
The Composable Middle Ground
The most interesting projects I work on today use Sitecore as the content hub but decouple everything else. Commerce goes through Commercetools or Shopify. Search uses Algolia. The frontend is a Next.js application that consumes multiple APIs.
This composable approach gives you the best of both worlds: Sitecore's mature content management where it shines, and specialized tools where Sitecore's built-in features fall short.
Making the Decision
My recommendation framework is simple:
- Who manages the content? If it's a marketing team that needs visual editing → Sitecore is strong
- What's the scale? Multi-site, multi-language, complex permissions → Sitecore handles this well
- What's the budget? Below €50k/year for the CMS → look at alternatives
- What's the team's skillset? No .NET experience → the learning curve is steep
There's no universally "best" CMS. There's only the best fit for your constraints. After a decade of building on Sitecore, I know exactly where it excels — and I'm equally comfortable recommending something else when it doesn't.