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Open-source CMSs cost nothing to license, but they are thin on the features organisations usually buy a digital experience platform (DXP) for. Inka adds those features without a licence, which changes the choice between them.
What Inka adds to an open-source CMS
Capability | Open-source CMS alone | With Inka | Typical DXP |
|---|---|---|---|
Visual page building on the real page | Limited, varies by CMS | Yes | Yes, licensed |
Design-system rules applied while editing | No | Yes | Partly |
Recorded exceptions and evidence for each published version | No | Yes, with Inka Assure (in development) | Rarely |
Preview in more than one frontend while editing | No | Yes | Some |
Several CMSs under one editor, for a phased migration | No | Yes | No |
AI agents working under the same rules as people | No | Coming soon, over MCP | Emerging, licensed |
Forms, listings and search that editors configure | Through plugins | Yes | Yes |
Workflow, roles, scheduling and translation | Yes | From the CMS, in the same editing screen | Yes |
Personalisation, experimentation and analytics | Plugins or third party | Not provided: third party | Yes, licensed |
Personalisation, A/B testing and analytics dashboards are not part of Inka. Where you need them, they come from a specialist tool connected to the frontends, as they would in any composable architecture.
Inka and a headless CMS
A headless CMS separates the content from the frontend, but the editing interface and the content store are still one product. Inka separates them too, making page building a third layer. Change the CMS and keep the editor, the blocks and the frontend; rebuild the frontend and keep the CMS and the rules.
Editors also get what headless usually takes away: building pages on the real page, not in forms beside a preview.
Inka and a DXP
A DXP gives you everything from one vendor, including personalisation and experimentation. The licence usually scales with editors, sites or traffic, and the editing experience and design system are tied to the product, which makes it costly to leave.
With Inka, the editing and governance you would license come from open-source software. Nothing is priced per editor, your blocks and rules are yours, and pages are stored in the CMS, so there is nothing to extract if you move on.
Inka and WordPress page builders
WordPress page builders such as Elementor give editors a visual way to build pages. Inka is a page builder of that kind for a headless site, over any CMS. The difference is what it is for: it is built to keep pages to your design system, not to give editors the freedom to depart from it.
It also adds no markup of its own. The frontend renders your design system's HTML unchanged, so components keep the accessibility they were tested with.
Inka and SaaS headless products
Software-as-a-service headless products such as Contentful, Sanity and Storyblok have no servers to run and polished editors. The trade-offs are subscription pricing that rises with editors and usage, less control over where data is held, a product you cannot extend, and design-system rules that are not enforced.
Inka runs on your own infrastructure or ours, keeps content in the CMS you choose and is open source, so you can extend it. Inka can also sit over a SaaS product through an adapter, so the rules stay yours if the vendor changes.
Composable, without assuming SaaS
MACH (microservices, API-first, cloud-native, headless) architecture promises parts you can swap. In practice it usually means a set of SaaS subscriptions. Inka gives you the same separation of parts with open-source software you can host yourself: the CMS, the page builder and the frontends each replaceable without the others.