When it comes to adopting a CMS, a brand has three options:

1. Build: You could rally your development team and build your own, bespoke CMS from the ground up, or on top of open source platforms. This road is long, costly, potentially buggy and full of ongoing maintenance.
2. Buy: You could buy a CMS from a respected software vendor, and this has traditionally been the best option for most brands. However, prices are high, deployment time is long and you may be left to your own devices unless you pay hefty support fees to the vendor.
3. Borrow: Imagine using software that you don’t have to buy and move in-house. It exists in the cloud, allowing you and your team to log in and operate from anywhere. All the while, the vendor maintains the software, handles the hosting and deals with all your support queries, all for a monthly or yearly fee. That’s SaaS (Software as a Service).

A SaaS CMS offers you similar features to your current self-installed CMS. But, instead of being installed locally you’re relying on the cloud to offer you a distributed CMS, which can be configured to your unique website needs.

Popular SaaS CMS have traditionally catered to SMBs (think Squarespace and Wix), while more recently, enterprise SaaS CMS vendors such as CrownPeak, Zesty.io, Kentico, Contentstack and Core dna have emerged to bring that same technology to larger companies along with greater scalability, security, and enterprise marketing features.