CCMS and CMS: Similar terms for very different systems

Understanding the difference between CMS and CCMS is crucial for selecting the right content management approach. While both terms sound similar, they represent fundamentally different systems designed for completely different purposes.

If you need to create marketing websites, blogs, or e-commerce sites, a CMS is the right choice. For complex technical documentation requiring content reuse across multiple formats and publications, a CCMS is what you need.

Let’s sort out this terminology confusion and help you make the right choice for your organization.

The fundamental difference between a CMS and a CCMS lies in their purpose and approach to content management. CMS platforms manage content at the document or page level for websites, while CCMS platforms manage content as granular, reusable components for complex documentation.

CMS solutions excel at creating marketing websites, blogs, and e-commerce sites with HTML-based content. CCMS solutions excel at technical documentation, policies, and procedures using XML-based structured authoring that enables sophisticated content reuse and multi-format publishing.

A lot of information found online tends to throw around the terms CMS and CCMS as if they are interchangeable. But in reality, these terms refer to fundamentally different systems created for completely different purposes.

What many refer to when using the term “CMS” is really a “Web CMS”. This is a software application that supports the creation, editing, management, and publishing of your content at the document or page level.

To put it simply, a CMS is mainly used for commercial sites, such as a marketing website, blog, news site, e-commerce site, or similar. It uses HTML as the source for the content with enough functionality to support these use cases.

Typical examples of Web CMS applications that you may be familiar with are WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. WordPress alone powers over 43% of the internet and commands a 61.4% market share among content management system-based websites, more than all other platforms combined.

WordPress’ market share has more than doubled in the last decade, making these platforms incredibly popular for creating marketing pages and product catalogs for e-commerce sites.

You wouldn’t want to use WordPress to create hundreds of technical manuals or thousands of insurance policies or SOPs, as you would with a CCMS. In the same way, a CCMS is not the right tool for the job of creating a typical marketing website or e-commerce site for selling products.

The introduction of the “Headless CMS” platforms is an interesting one. However, these platforms do add to the terminology confusion.

The problem is that some of these platforms sometimes use the term “component” and even “component content management system” as well, even though a Headless CMS has much more in common with the regular Web CMS. But make no mistake, a Headless CMS is not what CCMS software is.

When Headless CMS vendors speak of “components”, the examples provided are typical of what you would find in a regular Web CMS. They are not advanced, granular, and semantically rich structured components for technical content or other complex documentation.

While a Headless CMS can provide a way to get content to different channels by “pulling” the content from the Headless CMS to those other channels, which is also doable with a CCMS through the API, its use case is fundamentally different. Its ability to work with and produce content is much more similar to a regular Web CMS and is mainly geared toward commercial websites.

There are many uses for a (Web) CMS (including “Headless CMS”), and this list is not exhaustive, but typical uses may be:

• When you need to create a typical marketing website, managing content at the page level.
• When you need to create an eCommerce site or news site or similar with content like products or news stories served from a database.
• When you need to post and maintain articles for a news site, blog or similar website.

We’ve discussed what a regular (Web) CMS is, as well as the newer variant of it called Headless CMS, and what their typical use case is. But now it’s time to get to the CCMS, or Component Content Management System, and how it’s different.

The difference between CMS and CCMS is significant. In fact, a CCMS is a completely different beast.

The extra “C” (for “component”) is key, and it signifies that content is managed as small components of content: from images to topics to procedures and tables and down to individual words or phrases.

A CCMS is designed for creating and managing complex documentation and publishing to many different platforms, such as PDF, HTML5, eLearning (e.g SCORM) and more. Because a CCMS breaks down content into components, it is ideal for managing technical documentation or large volumes of policies or procedures, where this granular content can be single-sourced in hundreds or thousands of different publications.

Another key feature of a CCMS, and why it’s so suitable for technical writers and complex documentation, is that it uses XML-based and metadata-rich structured authoring. This guarantees long-term consistency, accuracy, and quality, as well as increases the efficiency of content production, separating the content from the layout with automatic formatting to a multitude of output formats.

The same content can be published to a website, to professional print PDF output, an internal knowledge base, support channels you already use, like Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow, and more, via powerful integrations. And because it uses XML, which is easily machine-readable and transformable, it even makes it easy to support future format needs.

There are many more features in a CCMS that make it suitable for the production of complex documentation, such as version management, translation management, etc. But the key is its focus on advanced technical writing requirements and intelligent single-sourcing and content reuse functionality.

In practice, four specific situations typically requiring a CCMS:

• Two or more writers are working on the same content.
• The volume of content has become too large to manage in a file system.
• Your content must be translated into two or more languages.
• When the number of concurrently maintained versions of a document exceeds one.

Additional scenarios where organizations benefit from a CCMS include:

• Organizations that need to publish to many different output channels, such as knowledge bases, policies and procedures, eLearning, and support help centers.
• Organizations that have many different products or versions of documentation that share content and want to make this content reusable and increase efficiency.
• Organizations that have large volumes of policies and procedures (or SOPs) to produce, manage, and maintain efficiently.
• Organizations that need to achieve consistency, accuracy, quality, and longevity of content across teams of writers.
• Organizations that need to collaborate better on documentation globally
• Organizations that need more efficient translation management.
• Organizations that need to be able to create multiple personalized versions of their content for multiple audiences, markets, regional compliance, and more.

The confusion about the difference between CMS and CCMS gets even worse when the term CDP (Content Delivery Platform) is added to the mix. While not a content management system itself, CDPs work alongside your CCMS to enhance content distribution.

Some CCMSes include hosting for your content, but this may not fit your particular needs. For basic web hosting of publicly available content, it usually makes more sense to deploy as part of your existing website to benefit from existing infrastructure like analytics and load balancing.

If you need to restrict access to content based on user profiling, content delivery platforms such as Fluid Topics and Zoomin can provide cost-effective solutions. Most CCMSes integrate with these platforms to push content directly from your authoring environment.

Content Delivery Platforms are feature-rich but priced accordingly. For simple knowledge base needs, most CCMSes also integrate with lower-cost solutions such as FreshDesk.

Even though it’s common to see the terms CMS and CCMS (and others) misused and confused, hopefully this article should have helped clarify the fact that what is typically referred to by the term CMS is something very different from an actual CCMS.

There are a variety of considerations when it comes to choosing the right fit for the content you produce. Use the information from this article to guide you through the different options to make the best possible decision for you and your team.

And if you’re interested in learning more, feel free to explore the Paligo case studies.