A feature matrix is the usual starting point: rows for workflow, scheduling, roles, media, search and syndication, a column for each platform, and ticks almost everywhere. It feels rigorous, and it rarely separates the options, because established platforms all do these things in some form.
What separates them is fit: how closely a platform matches the way your organisation publishes, and what it will cost to make up the difference.
Start with how the desks work
Before looking at any platform, map how content actually moves through the building. Who commissions, who writes, who edits, who signs off, and what happens when a story changes after it is published. Most publishers have several workflows rather than one: news, features, reviews, sponsored content and print often run differently.
- What has to happen before a piece can be published?
- Who needs to see it, and at what stage?
- What is published on a schedule or under embargo?
- What changes after publication, and how is that recorded?
- Where do people work outside the CMS today, and why?
Know what your archive holds
The archive is often a publisher's largest asset and the hardest part of any move. A new platform's content model has to hold what is already there: bylines, series, issues, sections, image rights, related content and years of tags. A platform that suits new content but cannot represent the old simply pushes the problem into the migration.
Count the places content goes
The website is now one destination among several. Newsletters, apps, syndication partners and print may all draw on the same stories. If content is entered once and reused, the CMS needs a structured model and a clean way to deliver it. If most of it only ever appears on the website, a traditional CMS with a strong editor is often simpler and cheaper.
The right CMS is the one that fits how your newsroom works, plus the changes it has agreed to make.
Cost it over five years
- Licences, which can scale with users, traffic or content volume
- The build, including templates, integrations and the migration
- Running costs over the life of the platform, not only in year one
- Training, and the time editors lose while they learn a new tool
- The cost of moving again if the choice turns out to be wrong
We run this comparison as part of a Blueprint: workshops with each desk, an audit of the archive and integrations, and a written recommendation with the reasoning behind it. Sometimes the answer is that the platform you already have, upgraded, is the right one.
