What makes Pack different from a headless CMS?

If you’re an ecommerce merchant considering a headless CMS, you’re likely: 

1. On a Shopify theme and starting to get really creative with work-arounds as you’re building new experiences.

2. Worried about site speed—especially as you continue to add apps and content to your store.

3. Made the switch to a headless CMS and are looking for other options—ideally solutions that are easy to use, less expensive, and that yield blazing-fast shopping experiences.

No matter which category you find yourself in, this article explains: 

• Digital experience platforms (like Pack)—which include a visual headless CMS

• Traditional headless CMSs

• How you can tell which is right for your brand

• How Pack can help you get the benefits of a headless approach, and avoid some of the tradeoffs.

Let's dive in.

Pack’s digital experience platform vs. a traditional headless CMS

Unlike a traditional headless CMS, Pack gives you every tool you need to build and manage a Shopify Hydrogen storefront. It includes:

1. A visual headless CMS that’s built specifically for Shopify

2. CRO tools to help you optimize and personalize your shopping experiences

3. Dev tools to speed up your development process

Pack and a traditional headless CMS have different benefits to offer your brand, developers, and marketers. Let’s look at how they stack up.

Content management experience

A traditional headless CMS centralizes content data that can be pushed to multiple channels outside your site (i.e. in-store kiosks) — an important feature for brands who need flexibility to distribute content and connect with systems outside of Shopify. However, that flexibility comes at a cost.

A headless CMS heavily relies on technical teams for both content management and maintenance. Marketers face limitations and long lead times when launching new content, and the dev team has less bandwidth to build new features. For growing brands, it’s generally more power—and more complexity—than you need. It’s like investing in a rocket ship when you’re only looking to cross the street.

Pack is perfect for teams who want to move fast and iterate quickly. It empowers developers and content teams to create, edit, prepare and publish content seamlessly within the context of their Shopify Hydrogen storefront. You can launch new content in minutes with our drag-and-drop visual editor, reducing developer burden and speeding up content launches. Additionally, Pack offers real-time visual editing and pre-built content models, removing the friction associated with complex content management systems. 

If your website is your main focus regarding content data management, and you place an emphasis on team agility and low-code front-end customization, Pack is the clear choice.

Platform capabilities + support

Traditional headless content management systems are built to support any platform, even those outside of ecommerce. They also support integrations for apps outside the Shopify ecosystem. 

While this does provide brands with greater flexibility to build outside of Shopify, frameworks, source code, and hosting integrations will need to be built/managed by a developer. Core support for headless content management systems comes from the CMS platform and APIs. 

As an official Hydrogen partner, Pack focuses its platform capabilities entirely around Shopify. This includes:

• Compatibility: Built for Shopify Hydrogen storefronts

• Integrations: Focused on the Shopify ecosystem

• Framework: Support for Remix, or Next.js

• Hosting: Netlify or Oxygen integrations are pre-built and maintained

• Codebase: Integrated into Hydrogen and metaobjects 

• Preferred asset delivery: Connect with Shopify CDN, Cloudinary, etc.

Brands built with Pack don’t need to worry about tailoring their systems to work with Shopify, plus they receive support that’s specific to Shopify for third-party integrations, and a Hydrogen integration. 

3. Time-to-market, ownership costs, and flexibility for merchants

Some of the most daunting challenges of going headless are time-to-market, cost of ownership, and developer flexibility. 

A traditional headless CMS is only one solution of several that you need to launch a headless storefront. Other components including a hosting service, developer framework, 3p integrations, codebase, and more are all required to get the ball rolling — and it takes anywhere from 3 to 12 months to go live. 

Cost of ownership tends to be quite high due to heavy dev reliance, longer release cycles, and the need for a custom-built supporting tech stack. Additionally, while a headless CMS provides flexibility outside of Shopify, most growing brands don’t end up using or needing those features.

Launching a custom Shopify Hydrogen storefront with Pack takes less than 3 months from planning to execution. Because Pack is inherently low-code, dev reliance is also low, resulting in faster content launch times and lower fixed costs. Finally, Pack empowers merchants to choose between Remix and Next.js as their framework — delivering flexibility and value within the ever-growing Shopify ecosystem.  

Do you need Pack or a traditional headless CMS?

While any brand, regardless of size, scope, and resources can benefit from headless commerce, ideal candidates for a traditional headless CMS often require:

1. A platform to manage and distribute content across multiple channels (not just their website)

2. The ability to connect to multiple backend systems, and integrations with apps outside the Shopify ecosystem

To facilitate integration and maintenance of a traditional headless CMS, these brands will (ideally) have ongoing support from robust technical teams.

Conversely, brands that would benefit most from building their store with Pack have these attributes:

1. Focused on building a blazing-fast, flexible Shopify Hydrogen storefront

2. Ready to reap the benefits of a headless approach (faster site, higher conversions, more flexibility) without the learning curve and dev reliance

3. Prioritizes agility—keeping content launches and iteration light-weight and fast.

Cuts partnered with Pack and achieved 200% YOY growth

A great example of an ideal Pack candidate would be our partner, Cuts Clothing.  

Cuts went from a scrappy startup to a front-runner in the D2C apparel space. While their team started with a traditional headless enterprise CMS, they needed a solution that would maintain site speeds while delivering a better editing experience for their marketing team.

Pack's Customizer helped Cuts’ marketing team remove bottlenecks with drag-and-drop content management capabilities. With Pack, they can create, edit, and deploy content without relying on a dev team for assistance.

Since partnering with Pack, Cuts boosted YOY growth by 200% and conversion rates by 21%.   

Get the benefits of a headless approach—without the overkill.

Gone are the days when brands must choose between site speed and content-rich experiences. We have headless commerce to thank for that.

However, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to headless, and brands need to weigh the costs and benefits before taking the leap.

With Pack, you can combine the full capabilities of Shopify with the speed and flexibility of a headless CMS, without slowing down your team or over-complicating your tech stack. 

Are you ready to build a scalable eCommerce business? Contact Pack today and start your headless journey!