At Nebulab, we take a lot of pride in our two-pronged approach to creating value for eCommerce brands: on one side, we have our Consulting Services department, working with customers on a one-on-one basis to develop bespoke solutions. On the other, our R&D team is constantly looking for new product opportunities. When the two work together holistically to inform each other’s work, magic happens.

Today, we’re proud to announce [Sprout](https://getsprout.app), our product seeding toolkit born precisely from such a spark of magic. When we found ourselves solving the same problem over and over for different customers, we realized it was time to create a reusable solution that could put an end to brands’ influencer gifting pains once and for all.

## What’s The Big Deal with Influencer Gifting?

After Apple released App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14.5, dramatically increasing the cost of paid social media advertising, most DTC brands began looking for novel marketing channels that could sustain their growth without killing their bottom line.

One of the most promising new channels is influencer marketing: by partnering with like-minded influencers and content creators, brands can access highly engaged audiences, usually at a fraction of the price of paid social. Influencer marketing is being adopted by brands of all sizes to complement and enrich their channel mix.

![](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/6ca1956b5ba7812852239ee7c48481df3d1dd597-2560x2496.png?fit=clip)

When partnering with an influencer, brands typically send them a free sample to try the product and generate relevant UGC to share with their audience. These samples may vary depending on how many SKUs the brand has, and they may include handwritten notes, branded merchandise, or other goodies to give the influencer even more firepower to efficiently promote the brand. Large brands also have stringent requirements around budget control, fulfillment, and revenue reporting.

As we worked with customers such as [Cometeer](https://cometeer.com) and [Goodles](https://goodles.com) to develop bespoke solutions to solve these challenges, we realized that there was no product out there to facilitate influencer gifting campaigns at scale. All the gifting toolkits we looked at were either too focused on peer-to-peer gifting or part of larger, incredibly expensive influencer marketing platforms that do way more than the average brand will need.

As a result, most brands are using spreadsheets and manual work to run influencer gifting campaigns: they reach out to influencers individually, collect their shipping address and product preferences, and then ship out the samples manually. The entire process is time-consuming, prone to error, and above all, soul-sucking. We think that there are better uses of a marketer’s time.

So we set out to solve this problem once and for all.

## Enter Sprout, Influencer Gifting Peace of Mind

Sprout is a simple product at its core: you connect it to your Shopify store, set up a gift link, and share it with your influencers. The influencer uses the link to select the product(s) they want to receive and enter their shipping information, and an order magically appears in your eCommerce platform, which you can fulfill like any regular order.

![](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/25f5ad60bb46e1ee9349d1fc124742576d0cf1ae-2560x2496.png?fit=clip)

The magic of Sprout lies in the level of integration and control it offers:

* **It supports rich product catalogs.** You can have option selectors for multi-variant products, allow influencers to redeem merchandise and goodies along with the primary SKU, and specify redemption limits for each type of product.
* **It’s on-brand through and through.** The entire redemption experience can be customized from the ground up to match your branding. You can also add custom content blocks and even custom fields to collect additional information.
* **It integrates seamlessly with your stack.** Rather than forcing you to fulfill orders manually or through a separate UI, Sprout simply uses the eCommerce stack you already have: it integrates natively with your eCommerce platform and any apps you might have installed, so that any post-purchase automations will still fire–as long as you want them to, of course.
* **It’s made for data-driven brands.** Serious brands take reporting seriously. All gift orders created by Sprout use a special discount code and are tagged granularly, so you can easily filter them out in your reports and analytics.
* **It gives you the control you need.** If you’re a big player, we have what you need: Sprout allows you to invite multiple team members with different permission levels, assign monthly budgets to each team member, and automatically expire gifts to reclaim unused budgets.

And this is just the beginning: we’re working closely with our first cohort of customers to inform the product roadmap and enable Sprout to automate even more of your influencer gifting campaigns. With the capabilities unlocked by generative and predictive AI technologies, there’s an opportunity for Sprout to become a one-stop solution for your entire influencer funnel–but more on that when the time is ripe.

## Take Sprout for a Spin!

Sprout is currently available to select brands in early access.

**For $400/month, you get unlimited access to all features and a branded redemption page, lovingly crafted by our design team.** In pure SaaS fashion, you can try Sprout for 30 days and cancel at any time if you don't think you're getting your money's worth—although we guarantee you will.

If you want to give it a try, reach out through [Sprout's website](https://getsprout.app?utm_source=nebulab&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=sprout_announcement) and we’ll be in touch!

Announcing Sprout, Our Toolkit for Influencer Gifting

With the rising cost of advertising and inflationary pressures making it hard to acquire, activate, and retain customers profitably, direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands are increasingly looking for ways to lower operating costs and scale more efficiently. This often takes the form of wholesale partnerships or marketplace expansions, which allow brands to tap into existing audiences and offload last-mile distribution.

We strongly believe a wholesale motion should be a crucial part of any modern brand’s go-to-market strategy. However, the DTC channel offers several opportunities that would allow brands to disengage from performance marketing as their only methodology of customer acquisition. At the same time, DTC brands can benefit from unique advantages, such as end-to-end control over the customer experience and direct access to zero- and first-party data.

This article will explore product-led growth, a methodology adopted by startups such as Dropbox, Slack, and Zoom to achieve low-cost, exponential growth. We’ll unpack the fundamentals and benefits of product-led growth, how it can be applied to eCommerce and DTC, and how you can take your first steps toward establishing a product-led growth strategy for your DTC presence.

## What Is Product-Led Growth?

Product-led growth (PLG) is a business methodology originally popularized by [OpenView](https://openviewpartners.com/) in 2016. It consists of techniques that allow you to shift away from spending marketing dollars to capture and retain customers, letting your product do the selling instead.

In contrast to more traditional approaches, such as market-led and sales-led growth models, companies that adopt product-led growth put their product experience at the center of the brand journey and take a product-first approach to scale their revenue and customer base.

They also automate secondary functions such as customer success and invest heavily in self-serve onboarding experiences, which allows potential customers to experience and play with the product before committing to the purchase.

For SaaS startups, this can take different forms, such as: offering customers a free trial, taking them through a self-guided onboarding tour, automating customer support, or facilitating word-of-mouth by rewarding customer referrals.

A well-executed product-led growth strategy has numerous benefits:

* **Lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC):** by letting your product and existing customer base do the selling and relying less on marketing campaigns, brands can reduce their CAC.
* **Higher Lifetime Value (LTV):** product-led growth leads to more engaged customers, which exhibit a higher Average Order Value (AOV) and Repeat Purchase Rate (RPR), making for a higher customer lifetime value.
* **Higher Revenue per Employee (RPE):** by automating as much as possible of the customer journey, you can lower your operating costs and free up resources to focus on more strategic initiatives.
* **Deeper customer understanding:** to adopt a PLG strategy, you’ll need an intimate knowledge of your customer base. This positively impacts all areas of the business, such as your fulfillment, customer service, and marketing teams.
* **Improved team alignment:** since product-led growth encompasses the entire organization, team members in a PLG company are more aligned and focused than marketing-led or sales-led teams, which makes them happier and more efficient.

As you can see, product-led growth allows you to create a flywheel that positively impacts key metrics across all areas of your organization. As you become more experienced at practicing product-led growth, you’ll start seeing the world through a different lens: rather than relying exclusively on paid acquisition channels, you will begin experimenting with ways your product can generate traction and create efficiencies.

## Does Product-Led Growth Apply to eCommerce?

The answer is: it depends. While product-led growth has been initially designed for traditional software companies, you can–with some creativity–adapt many of its elements to work for the business model and customer journey of an eCommerce/DTC brand.

For an eCommerce brand to become a product-led company, you must broaden your perspective of what constitutes your “product.” Many brands identify this directly with their physical product and consider the rest of the shopping experience an implementation detail. This mindset severely limits your ability to benefit from a product-led growth strategy.

![](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/16f5b011c01d62e0d9a223638a5fc607bf5a84df-2560x2402.png?fit=clip)

Instead, product-led brands consider every customer touchpoint part of their product, and they’re constantly thinking about how to create new touchpoints to engage, activate and retain the customer. Here are a few examples of brands that are using techniques borrowed from product-led growth:

* Vitamin brand [Care/of](https://careof.org/) has a [mobile app](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/care-of/id1273387955) that allows to personalize their subscription plan, track their vitamin and health routines, and get rewarded for consistency. The app allows potential buyers to experience Care/of’s product’s value while building further engagement with established/active users.
* Swiss sportswear brand [On](https://www.on-running.com/) recently released [Cyclon](https://www.on-running.com/en-us/collection/cyclon), a program that allows customers to “subscribe” to specific products, such as running shoes and tees. They have taken a sporadic event, such as buying a new pair of shoes, and turned it into a SaaS-ified experience that boosts customer retention.
* Rather than asking customers to pay for their orders upfront, apparel brand [Stitch Fix](https://www.stitchfix.com/) allows subscribers to try outfits and only pay for what they keep. This allows customers to experience the value of the brand before committing.

Subscription-based and membership-based brands have an inherent advantage over brands that favor a one-time purchase journey. This is because they start with a much larger “surface area” to engage their customers. However, brands that don’t have a subscription or membership program–and have no intention of establishing one–can still see success by borrowing and implementing individual elements from product-led growth.

## Embracing Product-Led Growth for Your Brand

Brands looking to start with product-led growth often get discouraged by the number of initiatives they could experiment with. If you’re coming from a traditional marketing-led approach, it can be hard to adopt the right mindset. 

If you don’t know where to start, an excellent first step is to map customer touchpoints across different stages of your shopping funnel and user experience, from brand awareness to order fulfillment. There are a few ways to do this:

* Involve stakeholders from different departments to understand how they interact with the end-user, directly and indirectly.
* Talk to your most loyal (and least loyal!) customers to collect feedback on how your brand fits into their day-to-day, their current pain points, and any ideas they might have.
* Look at quantitative analytics to uncover usage and engagement patterns.

The more feedback and data you can collect, the more holistic your understanding of your brand-customer relationship will be, and the more opportunities you’ll uncover for a product-led growth transition!

Once you have your customer touchpoints mapped out, look at each critically and ask yourself the following questions:

* **How can you command a greater share of customer attention?** Many DTC brands have a transactional relationship with their customers and fail to invest in a longer-term relationship. In reality, zero-party and first-party data allow most brands to create deeper connections: what are some “aha” moments you can generate?
* **How can you deliver value before capturing value?** For a DTC brand, this often takes the form of content-driven education or offering a tool that helps customers enter your brand’s world and experience its value _before_ a traditional activation. Sneaker marketplace [The Edit](https://www.theeditldn.com/), for example, provides a free [personal shopping service.](https://www.theeditldn.com/en-eu/pages/personal-shopping-service)
* **Can you create efficiency by investing in automation?** This is often more nuanced than a simple yes-or-no answer. Any investment in automated/self-service workflows must offer a justifiable return on team efficiency or customer engagement (or both!). Generative AI, in combination with low-code/no-code platforms, creates some fantastic opportunities to automate customer service, product quizzes and similar while mainaining a human touch.
* **How can you spark virality?** Product-led companies are masters at making their products viral. eCommerce brands have many opportunities in front of them: packaging, transactional notifications, and even customer service interactions can become ways to generate positive word-of-mouth.

If you come up with an endless list of initiatives, don’t panic! Start with smaller experiments that allow you to build momentum and train your product muscle, and see how your customers respond. A strong product management foundation can help identify the biggest point of leverage.


## 5 Examples of Product-Led Initiatives for eCommerce Growth

For inspiration, here are the five most common product-led initiatives that we see eCommerce and DTC brands apply:

* **Membership programs.** While traditional loyalty programs primarily reward spending through cashback or similar models, well-designed membership programs take the brand-customer relationship one step further by leading customers to identify with the brand. This can take the form of early access to new products, in-person or virtual get-togethers, direct access to company founders, and any other perks relevant to a brand’s unique customer base.
* **Referral programs.** Happy customers love to spread the word, and referral programs allow them to do just that. It’s common for brands to reward referrals with discounts and promo codes, but we encourage brands to design a bespoke strategy that will resonate more with their customer base. If you’re a luxury brand, offering swag/products in partnership with other brands might be better than offering $20 off.
* **Try before you buy.** Allowing your customers to experience your physical product before committing to a purchase is the epitome of delivering value before capturing value and can be a great way to engage undecided customers (especially when paired with some of the other initiatives in this list!).
* **Educational content.** Content is one of the most common organic marketing efforts pursued by DTC brands, and with good reason. Producing valuable, educational content for your audience is a straightforward way to generate brand awareness by solving a genuine problem. If you go down this path, nvesting in a solid [content infrastructure](https://nebulab.com/blog/ecommerce-content-management) will pay dividends.
* **Web-based/mobile apps.** Often, brands design mobile apps that are purely transactional, making them useless to customers that have not already decided to shop with the brand. In doing so, they miss invaluable opportunities to nurture their audience through content and interactions that don't aim for a direct sale.

While these are all good starting points that will apply to many brands, you should have the courage to explore unique ideas that will make you stand out. Rolling out a successful product-led strategy requires a deep understanding of your customers, how they experience your brand, and what opportunities you can capitalize on to become an indispensable part of their daily routine.

If you need help rolling out your product-led approach, [reach out!](https://nebulab.com/contact-us) Since 2012, we’ve helped tens of DTC brands scale their presence by developing unique experiences. We’re happy to help you figure out if product-led growth is right for you and how you can get started on your product-led journey.

Scaling DTC Brands Through Product-Led Growth

With unlimited digital estate, DTC brands can tell their stories, announce, entertain, educate, and keep their name front and center in customers’ minds, all of which is very hard to do in the limited shelf space afforded by wholesale partners. Now that even die-hard digitally-native brands are going omnichannel in pursuit of reach and profitability, **it’s paramount to double down on the exclusive capabilities of each channel to create complementary experiences—for DTC, content is one of the most obvious levers to pull**.

A slew of platforms has emerged over the past decade that promise to offer the definitive solution to all content management pains. These solutions provide functionality that covers the entire content management lifecycle, from writing to publishing, presentation, and SEO, but they do it in very different ways. In fact, we’ve seen at least four generations of content management tooling emerge in these years, all of which coexist today, serving different use cases and market segments.

For eCommerce operators, finding a North star to follow in this vastness can be tricky, and engineering teams are usually not much better off. If you haven’t been exposed to all these tools and understand the nuances of each, it’s easy to get lured in by the promise of unlimited flexibility and endless automation, only to find yourself stuck with a complex piece of software that requires weeks of integration work, or doesn’t play nice with your editorial workflow.

In this article, we will provide an overview of the content management space, as seen from the perspective of an eCommerce brand. You will learn the different types of tools you can use, their advantages and limitations, and some practical recommendations about which tool to adopt depending on your goal, use case, and growth stage. The goal is to equip you with all the knowledge you need to make an informed decision for your eCommerce brand.

## The four generations of content management

Different content management solutions have been launched in the last twenty years. While there’s no universal taxonomy, we can classify them under four categories: monolithic CMSs, headless CMSs, site builders, and page builders. In the following paragraphs, we’ll explore these different solutions, their pros and cons, and the leading players in each space.

### Monolithic CMSs

Monolithic CMSs were the first content management solution to emerge in the market. **These tools take over your entire content experience by handling every single aspect**: they provide an interface that allows you to edit and publish your content and present the content to your audience via a public-facing website.

You’ve probably heard about [WordPress](https://wordpress.org/), arguably the most popular CMS in the world. Initially built for blogging, WordPress has been expanded over the years to encompass an incredible number of use cases, allowing you to publish blogs, entire websites, and even online stores. It’s estimated that WordPress powers over 43% of all websites.

![WordPress website](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/908b2d57d03ec193412387c8af8d151b6df2393b-2560x2136.png?fit=clip)

**Monolithic CMSs have been around for over fifteen years, and they’ve stood the test of time**. They offer a user-friendly, streamlined content editing experience and many plugins and apps that make them easy to repurpose for different use cases. Since they have a considerable market share, they also boast rich ecosystems of system integrators.

However, they also come with some limitations: th**ese content management systems are meant for content-centric websites, not for eCommerce brands.** They usually take over your entire website and don’t play nice with other parts of your tech stack. This makes them a less-than-ideal choice for a DTC brand, which needs to present the content on their storefront or even enrich it with dynamic data such as product information.

### Headless CMSs

Headless CMSs were built to solve precisely these limitations. **Compared to monolithic solutions, headless CMSs are much more nimble**: a headless CMS only provides an interface to define your content structure and manage your content. Presenting your content is up to you, and typically requires a design and engineering team to integrate the headless CMS into your existing frontend.

[Contentful](https://contentful.com/) has long been the primary contender in the headless CMS space, but many competitors have launched their solutions over the years: [Prismic](https://prismic.app/), [DatoCMS](https://datocms.com/), and [Sanity](https://sanity.io/) are among the most popular alternatives, offering slightly different functionality such as custom editorial workflows/UIs and internationalization, and wildly different price points.

![Contentful homepage](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/551c31bc9b5a60be3f663151ba0172e06f790da5-2560x1810.png?fit=fill)

**Headless CMSs enable brands to treat content as data, making it fully portable and allowing them to present their content wherever they want**. Most headless CMSs also connect to your backend: for instance, an eCommerce brand will be able to pull product and pricing information from Shopify and include it right in the middle of an editorial piece. Such functionality allows you to blur the lines between content and commerce, making for a much richer customer experience.

Headless CMSs are still very popular thanks to their flexibility, but they come with their own limitations: mainly, **they require design and engineering work when marketers want to integrate new types of content into a company’s existing digital properties, or whenever they want to make visual changes to the existing experience**. This may be problematic for brands operating with low budgets or in high-velocity environments.

### Site builders

While site builders are not technically new (Webflow was born in 2012, one year before Contentful), they’ve seen a recent surge in popularity. You can think of site builders as a modern take on monolithic CMSs: like monolithic solutions, site builders also take over your entire website. However, **they offer more modern and advanced functionality**, such as support for drag-and-drop editing across your entire website, responsive design, custom code, API access, and integrations with popular third-party design and development tools. Almost all site builders also include a native headless CMS, or will optionally integrate with a third-party headless CMS.

The most popular site builder is [Webflow](https://webflow.com/), which is often used by SaaS companies to manage their marketing websites, or by eCommerce brands to spin up self-contained editorial experiences. Webflow also allows creating gated content and building Zapier-esque workflow automation. A recent competitor is [Framer](https://framer.com/), which allows designers to build, test and publish websites straight from Figma wireframes.

![Webflow homepage](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/0082e34207f075b05269676c871a8d0d49b1601a-2560x2034.png?fit=fill)

**If your team has limited technical experience or you don’t want to use your engineering bandwidth, using a site builder can be an excellent way to quickly spin up new editorial experiences that will meet the standards of the modern Web.** And if you need to implement deeper customizations or complicated workflows, your engineers can still make those adjustments at a reasonable pace.

The main disadvantage with site builders is that, for all their flexibility, **they will still be pretty self-contained, and they’re hard to integrate with other digital properties.** Maintaining brand consistency will also be more challenging since your design system will live both in your site builder and across any other frontends you have. This is fine if you’re building a standalone experience such as a microsite, but can hurt your brand reputation when used for integrated experiences such as a company blog.

### Page builders

After coming full circle with site builders, the content management pendulum is swinging the other way once again with page builders. Like site builders, page builders also offer drag-and-drop editing, built-in headless CMSs, and all the modern developer tooling you might expect. **Unlike page builders, site builders try to be non-obtrusive: rather than taking over your entire website, they allow you to model specific pages or sections of it.** For example, you might let your eCommerce platform power your product catalog and checkout experience while your page builder powers your site navigation and blog.

The most popular page builder is [Builder.io](http://builder.io/), used by several eCommerce brands such as Everlane, J.Crew, and Harry’s. It allows you to use their native visual editor or to import your own components, connects with several third-party data sources, offers built-in A/B testing, and lets you publish your content across the Web, mobile, and wherever else you want. An early-stage contender is [Plasmic](https://plasmic.app/), which offers a very similar feature set, but pairs it with a more modern UX.

![Builder.io homepage](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/29e681ed0cb541c8da8d8c65119b10cfe3f08b8d-2560x1528.png?fit=clip)

**Page builders can be an excellent compromise between headless CMSs and site builders**: they allow you to easily integrate your content into your existing digital properties in a non-obtrusive, brand-consistent way, and they offer a visual interface that helps non-technical stakeholders to quickly iterate on both content and presentation.

However, they are not a one-size-fits-all solution. **While an essential page builder integration can be a reasonably low-effort process for your engineering team, getting page builders right can be a complex initiative.** Once you start bringing in your own UI components, performing search engine optimization, running A/B tests, integrating with external data sources, or implementing rich user interactions, the level of complexity goes up dramatically, and keeping everything running smoothly can be a challenge.

## Evaluating the right solution for your brand

As you’ve seen, there’s no easy answer: each eCommerce CMS has its pros and cons, which you should weigh against your company’s stage, requirements, and technical savviness. The three main factors we keep into account when picking a solution for our clients are:

* **Business goals**: what do you want to achieve with your content? This is closely tied to where you’ll want to place your content, which in turn informs your choice of tooling. Are you looking to inform, inspire, or convert? (Often, it will be a mix of these, which is perfectly fine—just make sure you cover all your bases!)

* **Span of control**: site builders give operators maximum flexibility to change whatever they want, whenever they want it. This is both a blessing and a curse: a non-designer making design changes can quickly become a disaster. What’s the sweet spot between not enough and too much control for your team?

* **Implementation effort**: page builders are more complex to integrate than headless CMSs, which in turn are more complex to integrate than a monolithic CMS. Do the benefits outweigh the extra effort of integrating the solution with your tech stack?
Apparel brand and Nebulab client [Huckberry](https://huckberry.com/), for instance, relies heavily on their blog, [The Journal](https://huckberry.com/journal). The Journal is a fully integrated part of Huckberry’s shopping experiences: articles typically feature one or more Huckberry products, which users can add to their cart with a simple click. It’s a very conversion-centric approach.

![Huckberry’s blog, The Journal](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/7ce46f90390f88961bbc568a2fafc78deb24b464-2560x2512.png?fit=clip)

Travel brand [Away](https://awaytravel.com/), on the other hand, publishes the travel and lifestyle magazine [Here](https://www.heremagazine.com/). Away’s magazine has a laid-back, inspirational approach with its content, and you can hardly notice that a DTC brand is behind the project.

![Away’s magazine, Here](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/85383a0a4b600d7279c82359e0f0da9edf9209b8-2560x1664.png?fit=clip)

### Picking tools vs. building infrastructures

**Rather than only adopting one solution, we recommend creating a content management infrastructure, i.e., a suite of tools that integrate and build on top of each other.** For example, here’s a typical journey a DTC brand might undergo:

1. As a first step, they adopt a headless CMS, which allows them to decouple content and presentation. They use their headless CMS as the source of truth for all their content and integrate it with their existing digital properties (e.g., their product pages).

2. At some point, the marketing team starts complaining that they can’t make visual changes to how the content is presented on their product pages without asking the engineering team. This leads the team to integrate a page builder for specific website sections (e.g., the PDP and the blog). The page builder is connected to their headless CMS, which is still used for managing the actual content.

3. The brand eventually outgrows the page builder as well: the marketing team wants to start experimenting with standalone experiences such as microsites for contests, promotions, and product launches. This is when the team adopts a site builder, giving marketing full power to launch new properties with little to no engineering assistance.

**As marketing teams gain more freedom, brands need to create checks and balances to avoid brand dilution.** This can mean having a content inventory that is continuously monitored for consistency, ensuring the same person is orchestrating all digital experiences, or having a full-fledged design system that can be applied across different platforms. **Ultimately, how much centralization you need depends on your brand’s scale and your reliance on content.**

## Our favorite CMSs for eCommerce brands

At Nebulab, we have helped tens of brands design, launch and optimize their content stack, and we have developed some pretty strong opinions on which CMS platforms to use:

* **Monolithic CMS:** [WordPress](https://wordpress.org/). As mentioned, we rarely pick monolithic CMSs for eCommerce brands—but when we do, we go with WordPress. It has a beautiful, intuitive UX and an incredibly vast ecosystem of plugins and integrations, making it a good fit for many use cases and deployment options.

* **Headless CMS:** [Sanity](https://sanity.io/). A few years ago, we would have recommended Contentful or Prismic ([and we have](https://nebulab.com/blog/five-no-code-ecommerce-management-tools#the-best-headless-cms-prismic)). Ever since we’ve had a chance to try Sanity, we fell in love with its flexibility. While traditional headless CMSs force users to use a standardized UI for managing content, Sanity’s content studio is open-source and can be tailored to your content management needs and editorial workflows.

* **Page builder:** [Plasmic](https://plasmic.app/). While Builder.io has been around for slightly longer, Plasmic offers a more modern UI for their editing backend. With that said, the two tools are incredibly similar, so we encourage you to experiment with both and see which one you prefer.

* **Site builder:** [Webflow](https://webflow.com/). Even though products like Framer offer a more streamlined experience for non-technical users, Webflow remains an incredibly powerful tool if you know how to use it. With support for custom workflows and gated content, your team can quickly spin up rich micro-sites that cover various use cases.

As always, your mileage may vary. Before committing to a solution, you should thoroughly assess your present and anticipated requirements and experiment with different setups to build a stack that can scale with you as your needs evolve. If you need any advice or want to speed up the process, [we’re happy to help](https://nebulab.com/contact-us)!

The Nebulab

Announcing Sprout, Our Toolkit for Influencer Gifting

Scaling DTC Brands Through Product-Led Growth

Building Content Infrastructures for eCommerce Brands