Marketing leaders bought into Sitecore’s promise of agility, personalisation, and seamless campaign delivery, but all too often they now find themselves blocked by complexity. This article explores why many teams feel trapped in their own CMS and how modern, composable platforms are putting control back into marketers’ hands.
If you’re leading a marketing team reliant on Sitecore, the story might sound familiar. The platform was sold as a powerhouse for content freedom — a way to orchestrate experiences across channels, personalise journeys, and accelerate campaigns. But the reality for many CMOs is very different.
Instead of agility, teams face bottlenecks. Instead of independence, they depend on development sprints for even the smallest updates. And instead of real-time experimentation, they’re left waiting in ticket queues while competitors launch faster.
At Candyspace, we often see this tension: ambitious, energetic marketing teams struggling with enterprise tools that were meant to empower them.
The promise that never quite delivered
Sitecore positioned itself as a marketer’s dream: content creation, personalisation, and analytics, all in one place. But for most brands, the day-to-day experience hasn’t lived up to the vision.
Marketers tell us they face:
- Rigid content structures make it hard to quickly spin up new pages or campaigns.
- Underutilised personalisation tools are abandoned because they’re too complex or require developer support.
- Simple changes that still need development support to complete, slowing go-to-market timelines, and causing cultural discord.
The impact is significant. Long lead times, lost momentum, and frustrated creative teams see opportunities pass while they wait for a release window.
When being ‘enterprise-grade’ becomes a limitation
In theory, Sitecore offers everything a modern marketing organisation could need. But its scale and architecture, which is designed for IT control and multi-system integration, can create friction for the very people who need to use it most.
Editing workflows can feel rigid. Page layouts and components are often locked down to maintain system stability. And the personalisation features that made Sitecore famous are frequently sidelined because they demand too much configuration or need specialist training to be effective.
According to Gartner’s 2023 Marketing Technology Survey, marketers use of their organisation's martech stack fell to 33% in 2023, down from 42% in 2022 and 58% in 2020. This is a telling reminder that capability alone doesn’t equal usability.
The hidden cost of dependence
Behind the scenes, marketing agility has become a dependency chain. Do you want to tweak a template? You need to raise a ticket. Have to launch a landing page? Got to wait for the next sprint. Update a form or tag for a campaign? Add it to the backlog.
It’s not developers that are the problem; it’s the platform structure that makes marketers dependent on them for basic operations. Over time, this barrier slows campaign velocity, weakens creativity, and drives teams toward off-platform workarounds.
For CMOs, that means poor ROI on their technology stack (and possibly on campaign efforts overall), lower adoption rates, and increasing tension between marketing and IT.
A new generation of CMS is rewriting the rules
The really good news is that the market has moved on. Modern, composable CMS platforms now offer marketing teams the agility Sitecore once promised, but without the technical overhead.
These new platforms give marketers:
- Flexible content models that allow new pages and campaigns to go live in minutes.
- Intuitive visual editors that anyone can use, not just trained specialists.
- Integrated personalisation and analytics designed for marketers, not engineers.
- Cloud-native scalability without the maintenance burden of legacy systems.
It’s not about ripping out Sitecore overnight, though; it’s about recognising when complexity is holding you back and exploring architectures built for speed, autonomy, and collaboration.
From frustration to freedom
Marketing leaders need a roadmap that restores control, enabling teams to move faster, test ideas, and respond to data in real time. Best-in-class CMS solutions have the potential to deliver this in spades: systems that empower marketers rather than gate them, and that turn digital experience management into a creative advantage rather than an operational constraint.
Key takeaways
- Marketing teams feel trapped by Sitecore’s complexity and developer dependency.
- Underused personalisation and rigid content structures restrict creative speed.
- Composable CMS platforms are putting flexibility, control, and agility back in marketers’ hands.
For many digital and marketing teams, Sitecore has become a platform that slows them down instead of powering them forward. Escaping that cycle doesn’t mean giving up on DXPs, it means embracing one built for change. Modern, composable DXPs, such as Optimizely, Contentful and Storyblok combine the structure enterprise needs with the freedom that marketing and technology teams demand.
Candyspace helps ambitious marketing teams unlock digital agility through modern CMS and DXP solutions. We design and deliver composable platforms that give marketers the control, speed, and confidence they need to deliver exceptional experiences.
