The headless CMS market is growing rapidly. It is estimated at almost 4 billion dollars in 2026 and is expected to grow to more than 22 billion by 2034 – an annual growth rate of over 21 percent. Sanity The reason: companies are realizing that classic CMS systems no longer meet the requirements of modern multi-channel delivery. Web, app, IoT, voice – content has to arrive everywhere, not just on a website.
The market leaders are well known. Contentful for enterprise governance and global scaling. Strapi for teams that want full control over infrastructure and data. Magnolia as a bridge between classic page management and API-first content delivery – especially strong when several systems have to be served at the same time. Webstacks Sanity for developer teams that treat content as structured, programmatic data. What they all have in common: the separation of content and presentation. Model once, deliver everywhere.
For a long time, Liferay solved this with Web Content and Asset Libraries – and had a fundamental problem in doing so: content was bound to a site. If you needed the same article on two portals, you maintained it twice.
What the new CMS really is – and what it isn't
The new Liferay CMS solves this problem. Content lives in Spaces – no longer in sites. Conceptually, a Space is an independent content unit that can be assigned to teams, projects or brands. Technically, Spaces are still Liferay Sites under the hood – but the decisive difference lies elsewhere: everything is built with Liferay Objects.
This is not a cosmetic redesign. It is a different data model. Content is no longer stored as a static web content structure but as an Object – with its own fields, validations, workflows, API endpoints and versioning. This means: every content structure you define automatically gets REST and GraphQL APIs. No custom development, no Service Builder.
Why this matters for enterprise portals
What Contentful and Strapi give pure web projects, the new Liferay CMS now gives the enterprise portal in an integrated way: a central content base that can be delivered to any channel via APIs – while remaining natively embedded in the existing Liferay infrastructure. User roles, workflows, authentication, permissions – all of this is available out of the box. With Contentful or Strapi, it has to be built separately.
Especially for companies with complex portal landscapes – multiple sites, different teams, different channels – this is a considerable advantage. No additional stack, no further system.
AI – already planned for, not yet finished
2026 is the year in which AI integration goes from a nice-to-have to the standard in the CMS market. Contentful automates localization and SEO optimization, Strapi generates content types and alt texts via AI chat. WeBlogTrips
Liferay is following suit – and the new Object-based data model is the right foundation for it. Structured, machine-readable data is the prerequisite for meaningful AI assistance. If you store content as an unstructured HTML block, you cannot process it automatically. If you store it as a typed Object with fields and metadata, you can. The AI integration in the new Liferay CMS is still at an early stage – but the architecture is designed for it.
Our conclusion
The new CMS is the right step at the right time. Liferay is catching up on what the market has been demanding for years – and doing so in a way that makes sense for existing Liferay installations: integrated rather than isolated, built on the proven Objects platform, with a clear AI roadmap.
If you are still building new things on Web Content today, you are building on sand. If you upgrade to 2026.Q1 and create new content in the new CMS, you are well positioned for the next five years.
