I recently shared the three Web Content & Experience Management (WCM) vendors that RSG dropped from coverage after our recent update to that research stream. Today I'd like to continue with a happier topic: the three vendors we've added to our coverage...

• Contentful
• GX Software: XperienCentral
• Perfect Sense: Brightspot

Let's do a quick preview of each.

Contentful

Headquartered in Berlin, Germany, Contentful has caught and ridden the global wave of "headless" CMS architectures. Of course, the pure headless approach isn't for everyone. Still, Content is arguably the first — and certainly the most prominent — WCM platform built natively within Amazon AWS, and it captures the original spirit of cloud by deploying as a multitenant, SaaS-based environment at a time when nearly all its competitors have committed to PaaS architectures.

So Contentful is sexy. But it's also a bit over-hyped and techie-oriented solution. Our 11-page review describes the trade-offs your business stakeholders face with this platform.

GX: XperienCentral

Coming out of Nijmegen, Netherlands, GX has emerged as another Benelux regional player beginning to execute more internationally. To be sure, the product is not new, though the vendor has done a fair bit of work in the past few years to spiff it up.

Consider XperienCentral a kind of lighterweight Adobe Experience Manager, whose overall stack and approach it resembles. But what does it mean to be AEM Lite? Can you really get away from the technical complexities of the JCR and OSGI? Our 12-page evaluation gives you the inside scoop.

Perfect Sense: Brightspot

Emerging from the rich technology corridor outside Washington DC in northern Virginia, Brightspot benefits from the founders' roots in AOL and the company's freedom to build a wholly new product using contemporary Java frameworks.

The transition from services company to software company is never easy, though, and Perfect Sense is still building the all-important channel and ecosystem around Brightspot. Find more details in our 14-page review.

How to Differentiate

As you can see, assessing vendors is a multi-dimensional challenge.

You have unique needs and will want to weigh certain considerations and use cases more than others. We can help. To remove some of the guesswork, take a tour of RSG's RealQuadrant application.