Highlights From The Forrester Wave™: Content Platforms, Q1 2025
The Forrester Wave™: Content Platforms, Q1 2025, is now live! We looked at 12 key vendors and evaluated them on 24 criteria. Four Leaders emerged, followed by five Strong Performers and three Contenders. To learn more about these vendors and how they serve their target markets, Forrester clients can view the full report.
Get Ready For A More Intelligent Approach To Content Management
The enterprise content management market has undergone a significant transformation and today is exemplified by AI-enabled cloud content platforms. Generic document management doesn’t cut it. Technical leaders and the business roles they support want flexible, extensible platforms on which to design and deploy a range of content-rich apps. Content platforms are a foundational component of an overall digital workplace, integrating with key productivity suites and essential enterprise applications.
A Fast Pace Of Innovation Marked This Year’s Evaluation
Our Wave methodology ensures that we do a deep dive into the evaluated content platforms, looking at extensive written questionnaire responses from vendors, sitting through demos and briefings, and talking directly to their customers. I found that:
- The pace of innovation over the last two years has been unprecedented — driven by AI. Generative AI (genAI), is transforming how we create, consume, and govern content. Vendors are making substantial investments in genAI, with capabilities evolving quickly as large language models and agentic AI continue to develop. This rapid iteration means that businesses can expect continuous improvement, including evolving pricing models to put more AI capabilities into users’ hands.
- Automation opportunities abound. From simple document approvals to complex processes that integrate with other enterprise applications, the range of automation capabilities is expanding. Intelligent data extraction helps fuel high-volume, document-centric workflows and automates metadata identification and tagging. Document generation capabilities, increasingly assisted by AI and integrations, continues to be an area of investment for vendors.
- Packaged apps and solution templates can fast-track adoption and productivity. Many vendors have mature vertical strategies and have packaged apps designed specifically for industry-specific use cases. Look for predefined templates or solution accelerators to tailor your deployment to meet specific business needs — often with minimal custom development.
Key Considerations For Buyers
Not all vendors are ideal for every content management use case. When building a shortlist for content platforms, keep in mind that:
- Vertical expertise matters, and not everybody has it. Look at the vendors that understand the nuances of your industry and that invest in the solutions, professional services, and partner ecosystem to meet your requirements. Vendors focusing on key verticals will invest in meeting industry-specific compliance obligations, obtain certifications, and help clients meet their regulatory requirements.
- Pricing models are simplifying — but becoming opaque. While a handful of vendors in this evaluation do publish the pricing for their most common subscription bundles, most don’t. Most vendors price their cloud content platforms on per-user/per-month models with a choice of a few subscription tiers, such as basic, intermediate, or advanced capabilities. Vendors that still offer self-hosted or on-premises deployment options may have additional pricing and licensing models tied to API calls, storage volumes, or other usage- or application-based parameters. Know your use cases and your requirements when you reach out to vendors that don’t publish pricing/licensing models.
- Context matters when trying to get value out of genAI. Bring AI to your content rather than bringing your content to AI. Using the embedded genAI capabilities from your content platform vendor can provide an unfair advantage. Most evaluated vendors are using a retrieval-augmented generation architecture that shields your corporate content from public AI models, and also respects existing access controls and permission structures. Exposing a genAI assistant in a folder, a workspace, or search result interface can ground the AI in the that specific context — i.e., a customer case, a project folder, or list of incoming claims — to return specific answers and relevant citation links to source documents.
Interested in learning more? I’ll be hosting a webinar for clients on Thursday, March 6, to go over the key findings from this Wave. Join us by registering here!
Forrester clients are encouraged to set up a guidance session or inquiry to talk about our key findings and learn more about this market.