What is your developer-dependent CMS actually costing you? Calculate your costs and get a full report
What is your developer-dependent CMS actually costing you? Calculate your costs and get a full report
Evaluating Agility
A responsibility map for headless projects: what Agility runs (CMS, APIs, CDN, workflow, webhooks, MCP) and what your team builds (front end, hosting, preview, search, forms, analytics).
Agility is a headless CMS. It stores your content, gives your editors a place to manage it, and delivers it through APIs. You build and deploy your website or app outside of Agility, and it pulls content in through Agility's SDKs or REST API (Developing with Agility).
That split is the most common surprise in a headless project. Teams expect the CMS to provide something that, in a headless architecture, their own code has to do: the preview route, search, forms, redirects on the live site. This page maps every part of a typical project to the side that owns it, so you can plan and estimate for it from day one.
| Area | Agility provides | Your team builds, chooses or configures | Read more |
|---|---|---|---|
| The CMS | A hosted Content Manager for editors. Agility hosts and maintains it; there is nothing to install. | Nothing to host. You decide who gets access. | Concepts |
| Content model | Content models, component models and page models, with field types, validation and linked content. | The content architecture: which models, fields and relationships your editors need. | Content Architecture |
| Pages and routing | Sitemaps, a page tree editors control, page-level SEO fields, and URL redirections managed in the CMS. | Front-end routing that reads the sitemap and renders each page model and component. Applying redirects on your site. | Page Management, Sitemaps |
| Front end | Starters and SDKs. Agility recommends Next.js and .NET for new projects. | The website or app: a code component for each component model, your design system, accessibility and performance. | Developing with Agility |
| Hosting and front-end CDN | Built-in hosting integrations with Vercel and Netlify. | Choosing and operating hosting and its CDN: cache lifetimes, invalidation, firewall and geo rules. | Content Delivery & CDN Architecture |
| Content delivery | The Content Fetch API (REST), the GraphQL API and the Content Sync API, served through a global CDN. Cached content is invalidated at the edge when you publish. | Caching in your own app, and revalidating it when content changes. | Content Fetch API, Content Sync API |
| Assets and images | A media library served from the asset CDN, with resizing and format conversion through query strings. | Requesting the right size and format for each image in your components. | Transforming Images with Query Strings |
| Preview | Deployments registered against each sitemap, a Preview button for editors, and preview API keys. | A deployed site (or route) that reads preview content with a preview key and recognizes preview requests from Agility. | Setting Up Preview, Handling Agility URLs |
| Web Studio | Visual editing, commenting and screen-size comparison of your site inside Agility. | Deploying the site, allowing Agility to frame it in your Content-Security-Policy, adding the Web Studio SDK script, and decorating components and fields for live editing. | Getting Started With Web Studio |
| Workflow and governance | Publishing, scheduling, batches, approval workflows, roles, item-level permissions and version history. | Setting up roles and workflows that match how your team works. | Approvals and Workflows, User Permissions |
| Webhooks | Webhooks on content and page events, with signed deliveries. | Endpoints that receive them, verify the signature, and do the work: revalidate pages, update a search index, notify other systems. | Webhooks, Verifying Signed Webhooks |
| Search | Published content through the APIs, and webhooks that tell you when it changes. | Choosing a search provider, indexing content, and building the search experience. | Searching Content at Scale |
| Forms | Marketplace apps that let editors pick a form from several form providers and place it on a page. | The form provider, where submissions go, and spam protection. | Apps |
| Analytics and testing | Apps that bring analytics into the CMS, and component-level A/B/n testing where each variant is managed as content. | The analytics or experimentation tool, tracking code, and wiring variants into your components. | A/B/n Testing in Agility CMS |
| AI agents | The Agility CMS MCP Server, which acts with each user's own permissions, and the read-only Knowledgebase MCP Server. | Which AI clients you allow, and a rollout policy for your team. | Governing AI Access to Agility CMS |
| Extending the CMS | The Management API and SDKs, the CLI, custom fields, custom scripts and the Apps SDK. | Any custom fields, apps, scripts or integrations you need, and keeping their credentials safe. | Extending the CMS |
For security in particular, the shared-responsibility table in Hosting, Security & Compliance is the reference. It covers API keys, front-end hosting, user administration and custom code in more detail.
These items belong to your team, and they are easy to leave out of a first estimate:
The front end is still yours to own, but you don't have to start from a blank page. Start from the Next.js or .NET starters, or build the site for your use case with an AI coding tool and the Agility CMS MCP server, as described in Vibe Coding with Agility.
