Gartner names Sitecore (and XM Cloud) a Leader

We’ve done it again — Sitecore has been named a Leader for the sixth straight year in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Experience Platforms. We are proud to have been evaluated among 14 other vendors and come out on top again. We are also pleased to share that we are one of only two vendors to have been named a Leader in every publication of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms.

We, at Sitecore, are extremely proud of the innovation we have unleashed in the past 12 months. We have elevated our flagship CMS (XM) to the cloud, transforming it into a fully SaaS solution that boasts CDP-powered analytics, simplified personalization, and next-gen tooling for architects, developers, and business users. Our early release of XM Cloud was announced in July and this evaluation kicked off in August!

Therefore, we feel that this achievement deserves more recognition, especially when we combine it with the introduction of our cutting-edge AI-powered content discovery solution (Sitecore Search) and our low-code integration and automation solution (Sitecore Connect).

We firmly believe that Sitecore's composable DXP has set a new standard in this mature market, and we are proud to be disrupting the industry with our speed at delivering a complete SaaS digital experience platform.

“Two years ago, we laid out an ambitious agenda to create the market’s most modern, cloud-native digital experience platform," said Sitecore Chief Product Officer Dave O'Flanagan. "We knew that it needed to radically automate the content creation and delivery process while also making personalization programs come to life across all channels, not just the web.

"I’m proud of our teams for the speed with which they went all-in on embracing modern frameworks and composability while simultaneously upleveling the end user experience for developers and business users. This is tremendous validation of our early work – and we’re only getting started. The platform we have laid down with XM Cloud will continue to allow us to deliver continued innovation to make it easier and more economical for our customers to deliver their unfair advantage: their digital experience.”

First, there’s a couple of things to know about this report:

• Gartner defines a Digital Experience Platform as "an integrated set of technologies designed to enable the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences across multi-experience customer journeys." In our modern cloud-based infrastructure, digital asset management, content operations, product discovery, and commerce are all integral aspects of our future-facing digital experience platform, but in this report those areas are outside of what’s being evaluated. Nonetheless, we are leaders in this space and we’re paving the way for the future of digital experience platforms.
• There’s a mix of architectures on display in this report. We believe a leading DXP should be fully SaaS – don’t mistake SaaS-like for giving the same total cost of ownership benefits as a full SaaS solution.
• Brands are on a digital experience modernization journey – one that remains a board-level priority – and to us, that means providing freedom and choice to compose their digital experience stack with best-fit capabilities that suit their unique business. We are all-in on composability and believe where Sitecore continues to lead, the market will (in time) follow.

XM Cloud makes its debut — as a Leader

This year, we were excited to showcase Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) Cloud for the first time in our evaluation and in our product demonstration for Gartner. We continue to offer Sitecore XP and have big plans to continue to innovate that product, but we felt the market was ready to discover what Gartner thought of XM Cloud – our successor to XP and the cornerstone of our all-SaaS composable DXP.

Being named a Leader in a Magic Quadrant is an impressive feat for any vendor, but even more so with such a revolutionary product in the market. Combine that with the fact that the timing of this evaluation didn’t line up the best: as mentioned, we did the early release of the product in July and this Magic Quadrant evaluation began in August.

While Gartner notes that XM Cloud is our newest offering, we’re excited about its trajectory: it is Sitecore’s fastest selling new product in history. XM Cloud is designed to provide an exceptional digital experience to users across all devices and channels, and we are delighted that Gartner recognized its value and potential.

Additionally, we also wanted to convey that we’re committed to the cloud. Many vendors today consider composability (SaaS, integrating easily with other technology, modular yet intelligently connected) as the latest flavor of the month but are trying to stretch out the life of their monolithic platforms under the guise of "composable". But the leading brands we work with – United Airlines, Children’s National, and GE Healthcare – see composability as a strategic imperative for their technology architecture decisions and it’s clear who is ahead and who is falling behind.

Gartner’s big trends – we’re all in on them

Without a doubt, we’re in a golden age of innovation within the digital experience platform (DXP) market. As businesses increasingly focus on delivering personalized and contextualized digital experiences, Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant highlights the growing importance of low-code platforms, data and analytics, and cloud-native solutions.

Best-of-breed capabilities (for some vendors)

One of the most significant trends is the addition of new capabilities for many vendors. DXPs are increasingly serving a variety of use cases for customers and employees alike. This trend is likely to continue as organizations seek to partner with vendors who can provide a comprehensive range of digital experience solutions.

Sitecore is one of these larger vendors (#2 market share according to Gartner’s data of vendors featured in the 2023 Magic Quadrant) and our strategy focused on adding new capabilities around personalization, customer data management (CDP-lite as Gartner called it this year), and search all delivered in a modern architecture.

Low-code/no-code capabilities to enable the business user

Another trend identified by Gartner is the growing importance of low-code platforms, which enable businesses to develop, deploy, and coordinate digital experiences quickly and efficiently by putting capabilities in the hands of the business user. This trend is driven by the increasing demand for personalized and customized digital experiences, which require a flexible and agile approach to development.

We’re 100% aligned with this trend — it’s a key reason why Sitecore positioned XM Cloud for this evaluation. We’ve added exciting new features like Sitecore Pages – our front-end as a service (FEaaS) offering for business users to create pixel perfect experiences from a drag-and-drop experience. Sitecore Components, another feature of XM Cloud, allows you to pull content from other sources, including other headless CMS solutions.

This is what makes XM Cloud unique relative to others: we offer businesses tooling and workflows that simply don’t exist in most headless CMS products.

How does this all come together? Look no further than Sitecore Connect, which was released in October 2022. The integration workbench allows Sitecore to ship with thousands of integration recipes, and we’re seeing great interest and uptake on this new integration framework.

Data and analytics to fuel personalized experiences

Gartner also highlighted the importance of data and analytics in driving digital experience strategies. Organizations are increasingly using first-party data collected across multiple experiences – and then applied to create a cohesive customer journey from a multi-channel experience - to understand their customers' needs and preferences, and to personalize their digital experiences accordingly.

This trend is driving the development of new analytics and data management tools, as well as the integration of existing tools into DXP platforms. Gartner notes this as ‘CDP Lite’ and we believe strongly that we’re once again in alignment with this trend.

XM Cloud ships with built-in analytics and, as your personalization needs increase over time, you can iteratively build into our Personalization Engine platform that was named a Visionary by Gartner in 2022 and make use of our Customer Data Platform. While Gartner does not have a CDP Magic Quadrant, IDC named Sitecore a Leader in 2022.

Yes, composable means SaaS, not SaaS-like

Finally, Gartner noted the growing importance of cloud-native platforms, which offer a range of benefits, including scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. Cloud-native platforms are becoming increasingly popular, as organizations seek to modernize their technology infrastructure and move towards a more agile, cloud-based approach. XM Cloud offers all the flexibility and benefits that brands require to achieve their agile goals.

So why should you choose Sitecore, according to Gartner?

1. Robust feature set: Sitecore offers a comprehensive set of features for content management, personalization, and customer data management. Our DXP portfolio includes three clouds, each tailored to specific use cases, as well as additional products for search, CDP, and Content Hub, among others.
2. Established market presence: Sitecore has a long history in the market, with a large and dedicated community of users and partners. This provides reassurance to organizations looking for a proven and reliable solution with a strong track record of success.
3. Composability and flexibility: Our focus on composability and supporting a modular, iterative approach is attractive to organizations that want to build their digital experiences incrementally and flexibly, rather than all at once.
4. Customer success and support: We place a strong emphasis on customer success, with a range of onboarding, training, and support services available to help organizations get the most out of their investment.
5. Seamless integrations: We demonstrated support for integrating with third-party systems, including third-party content management systems, which is important for organizations with complex or diverse IT ecosystems. Additionally, Sitecore Connect provides a hub for integration between Sitecore and third-party systems, making it easier to connect and manage multiple tools and platforms.

Want to learn more? Check out the Sitecore Product Strategy page to get caught up on all our latest innovations.