The Most Comprehensive Independent Scorecard for DXP and CMS Platforms
Every platform on your shortlist, held to the same 184 criteria, with the reasoning behind every score published in the open. Free to use. No sponsored rankings, no paid platform inclusion, no analyst briefings from vendor marketing teams. The implementation partner network is sponsored and is kept separate from scoring.
What This Report Is, and Who It's For
What is the DXP Scorecard?
The DXP Scorecard is the most comprehensive independent evaluation of the digital experience platform and CMS market available anywhere for free. 43 platforms are scored against the same 184 criteria across 10 weighted categories, which works out to roughly 7,912 individual published judgments, each one carrying its own reasoning, its evidence and a confidence level. It is three tools in one: an analysis of what each platform is genuinely good and bad at, a comparison engine that works criterion by criterion rather than logo by logo, and a decision tool that scores platforms against real business use cases such as marketing sites, commerce, intranets and multi-brand estates, instead of a generic feature checklist. Capability is only one axis. Every platform is also scored on what it costs, how hard it is to build on, and how much it takes to keep running, because those are the numbers that decide whether a project succeeds after the contract is signed.
Who is the DXP Scorecard for?
It is for anyone researching, shortlisting or defending a CMS or DXP decision. Marketing and digital leaders building the business case and the budget. Product owners who need to know what a platform will actually let their team ship. Architects and engineering leads comparing headless CMS options, integration effort and API quality. CTOs and CIOs validating a vendor shortlist. Procurement and finance teams pressure-testing licensing, implementation and total cost of ownership. Agencies and systems integrators recommending a platform they will have to live with. If you are investigating features, functionality, integrations, migration effort, compliance posture, AI readiness or cost, and you need a defensible answer instead of a vendor's, then this was built for you. No technical background required to read it, and enough depth underneath it to survive a technical review.
Who is the DXP Scorecard?
The DXP Scorecard is a collaboration of senior integration experts, technical architects and solution consultants from across the industry. These are practitioners who build, migrate and rescue real implementations on these platforms for a living. Rather than each carrying a private opinion into their own client conversations, they pooled it: one shared framework, one set of definitions, one bar that every platform is held to. Think of it as a brain trust rather than an analyst desk. That collective experience is what makes the scoring comprehensive, accurate and genuinely unbiased. The people who wrote the criteria are the same people who have had to make these platforms work in production.
What it is not is a feature checklist. A checklist tells you a platform has personalization. It does not tell you what turning that personalization on will cost, how long it will take your team to ship it, or who will still be maintaining it in year three. That is the gap this report was built to close.
Start wherever your question is: the full scorecard, a side by side comparison, who leads each category, or The Decider, which narrows the whole field to a shortlist in seven plain-English questions.
Why Is This Free?
Agencies and consultancies charge tens of thousands of dollars for this kind of deep analysis and scorecarding. So why is this free?
Because the founding members have each spent more than three decades working around incomplete analysis, biased analysis and paid analysis, and we decided it was time to give something back to the community instead of leaving it locked behind expensive paywalls and billable hours. Every team choosing a platform deserves the same quality of research, whether or not it has the budget for a six-figure selection engagement.
Is giving it away a smart business idea? Probably not. But we feel good about the mission, and we would rather be useful than exclusive.
Methodology
Every platform is scored using the same structured framework (currently v2.0): 10 weighted categories holding 184 individual criteria. Scores run 0 to 100 and reflect real-world capability, not theoretical maximum. Every score carries a reasoning statement and a confidence level, so you can disagree with a specific number instead of having to accept or reject a position on a chart. The complete framework, including weights, score bands and composite formulas, is published at the scoring methodology.
How a score gets made
Evidence sources
Scoring is based on technical merit and real-world performance data. Primary sources are public GitHub repositories, technical blog posts, and official product technical documentation including API references, developer guides, release notes and architecture documentation. Secondary sources include community resources, developer forums, independent benchmarks, and practitioner experience. Scores derived from secondary sources are marked with lower confidence levels in the scoring data, so the record of how sure each score is never gets lost.
Confidence levels
Scoring categories
Independence & Bias Policy
The DXP Scorecard is an independent evaluation built by a collective of consultants, architects and engineers with hands-on implementation experience across enterprise CMS and DXP platforms. The scoring is based on technical merit and real-world performance data, drawing from public GitHub repositories, technical blog posts, and official product technical documentation.
No platform vendor has paid to be included, excluded, or ranked favorably. No platform vendor has reviewed or approved scores prior to publication. Scores are not influenced by commercial relationships, referral agreements, or partnership status. Where a contributing consultant has a commercial relationship with a platform vendor, that relationship does not influence scoring; all 43 platforms are evaluated against the same criteria by the same methodology.
How this is funded
The report is free to read, so it is worth being explicit about where the money comes from: advertising, a directory of implementation partners, and an opt-in vendor program that lets a platform publish its own clearly labeled response beside its scorecard. That content is stored separately from the scoring data, is always marked as coming from the vendor, and is never read by any scoring, ranking or recommendation logic on this site. Buying a listing buys a voice on the page. It does not buy a point on the scorecard.
This is the opposite of how most analyst firms operate. Traditional analyst reports are funded by vendor inquiry fees, placement in quadrants, and briefing cycles where vendors present curated demos to analysts who may have limited implementation experience. Platforms with larger marketing budgets and more aggressive analyst relations programs tend to score better in those reports, not because they are better platforms, but because they are better at marketing to analysts.
That is a structural difference in funding model, not a criticism of any individual analyst, and analyst research is still worth reading for what it does well. We wrote up the comparison in detail: what the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms measures, and what it leaves out.
What We Actually Evaluate
Evaluating a platform properly means assessing the full lifecycle, not just the demo. Every criterion rolls up into one of these:
Freshness & Updates
A platform evaluation is only as good as its last look. This one is re-run continuously on a rolling schedule: the largest and fastest-moving platforms roughly twice a month, most of the field monthly, and the smallest platforms every other month. The whole set turns over on a regular cycle rather than being published once and left to age.
Every scorecard shows the date it was last evaluated and keeps a changelog of what moved, in which direction, and why, so you can watch a platform improving or stalling instead of guessing. Platforms that were weak three years ago may have genuinely turned a corner, and platforms that were leaders may have coasted. The record shows which.
If a score is more than 12 months old, treat it as directionally useful but verify against the platform's current documentation before making procurement decisions.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does the DXP Scorecard differ from Gartner or Forrester reports?
Traditional analyst reports are funded by vendor inquiry fees, placement in quadrants, and briefing cycles where vendors present curated demos to analysts who may have limited implementation experience. Platforms with larger marketing budgets tend to score better in those reports, not because they are better platforms, but because they are better at marketing to analysts. The DXP Scorecard is an independent evaluation built by consultants, architects and engineers with hands-on implementation experience. No platform vendor has paid to be included, excluded, or ranked favorably.
Should I use the DXP Scorecard instead of the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant?
Use both. They answer different questions. The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms plots a shortlist of vendors on Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision, which is useful for confirming a vendor is a credible business. Neither axis measures cost efficiency, build complexity, or maintenance burden, and inclusion thresholds for revenue and geographic reach exclude many viable open-source and mid-market platforms entirely. The DXP Scorecard covers a wider field on published criteria, with every score and its reasoning open.
What criteria does the DXP Scorecard evaluate?
The DXP Scorecard evaluates platforms across 10 weighted categories: Core Content Management, Additional Platform Capabilities (DXP Features), Technical Architecture, Platform Velocity & Health, Total Cost of Ownership, Build Simplicity, Operational Ease, Use-Case Fit, Regulatory Readiness & Trust, and AI Enablement. Underneath those sit 184 individual criteria covering developer experience, content author experience, API design, ecosystem health, licensing costs, implementation complexity, AI integration capabilities, compliance posture, and how well the platform fits scenarios like marketing sites, commerce, intranets, and multi-brand deployments.
How are platform scores determined?
Each platform is scored using a structured framework with 184 individual evaluation criteria across 10 categories. Scores range from 0 to 100 and reflect real-world capability, not theoretical maximum. Every score includes a reasoning statement and a confidence level (HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW or INFERRED) based on the quality of the evidence behind it. Research is AI-assisted and drawn from primary sources: public GitHub repositories, official product documentation, API references, release notes, pricing pages and technical write-ups. The rubric, the weights and the review of every published change are human. Category scores are recomputed as the weighted average of their underlying criteria, so a headline number can never drift from the detail beneath it, and every change is reviewed before it is published.
How often are platform scores updated?
Continuously, on a rolling automated schedule. The largest and fastest-moving platforms are re-evaluated roughly twice a month, most of the field monthly, and the smallest platforms every other month, so the whole set turns over regularly rather than being refreshed once a year. Every scorecard is timestamped with the date it was last evaluated and keeps a changelog of what moved and why. If a score is more than 12 months old, treat it as directionally useful but verify against the platform's current documentation before making procurement decisions.
Does any vendor pay to be included or ranked in the DXP Scorecard?
No. No platform vendor has paid to be included, excluded, or ranked favorably, and no vendor reviews or approves a score before publication. The site is funded by advertising, a directory of implementation partners, and an opt-in vendor program that lets a platform publish its own clearly labeled response next to its scorecard. None of that touches scoring: vendor and partner content is stored separately from scoring data, and no scoring, ranking or recommendation logic reads it. All 43 platforms are evaluated against the same criteria by the same methodology.
Start Evaluating
43 platforms, 184 criteria, every score published with its reasoning. Not sure where to start? Answer seven questions and begin from a shortlist.