When you separate your content repository “body” from its presentation layer “head,” it becomes a headless CMS. What truly makes a headless CMS better than a traditional CMS is its content-first approach with full APIs to access and display content in any way desired.

A pure headless CMS is different, because it offers no front-end capabilities at all, giving you full control of your customer experience via APIs. The CMS typically provides content managers with a presentation and channel agnostic way of managing content. It requires a front-end development team to manage the rest with the frameworks and tools they prefer: The content can be loaded by external applications which handle the content delivery to the client, meaning that the content can be (re-)used by multiple applications and channels (web, mobile app, audio guides, IOT).

There is some confusion around what makes a headless CMS truly “headless”, as vendors use the term somewhat loosely to label their decoupled or hybrid CMS systems. But a true headless CMS is one that was built from the ground up to be API-first, not a full monolith CMS with APIs attached afterwards.