# What Your Team Builds vs What Agility Provides

> Source: https://agilitycms.com/docs/overview/what-your-team-builds-vs-what-agility-provides

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](/docs/developers/developing-with-agility-cms)).

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.

## The short version

- **Agility runs** the CMS itself (hosted on Microsoft Azure), the content APIs, the asset CDN, editorial workflow, webhooks and the MCP server for AI agents.
- **Your team builds and runs** the front end: the website or app, its hosting and CDN, the preview and Web Studio wiring, and integrations such as search, forms and analytics.
- **You share** the content model and the security model. Agility provides the tools; your team decides how to use them.

## Responsibility map

| 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](/docs/overview/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](/docs/overview/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](/docs/overview/page-management), [Sitemaps](/docs/developers/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](/docs/developers/developing-with-agility-cms) |
| **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](/docs/developers/content-delivery-and-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](/docs/developers/content-fetch-api), [Content Sync API](/docs/developers/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](/docs/editors/transforming-images-using-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](/docs/developers/setting-up-preview), [Handling Agility URLs](/docs/developers/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](/docs/overview/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](/docs/editors/workflows), [User Permissions](/docs/owners-admins/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](/docs/developers/webhooks), [Verifying Signed Webhooks](/docs/developers/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](/docs/overview/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](/docs/apps/apps-in-agility) |
| **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](/docs/owners-admins/a-b-n-testing-in-agility-cms) |
| **AI agents** | The [Agility CMS MCP Server](/docs/developers/agility-cms-mcp-server), which acts with each user's own permissions, and the read-only [Knowledgebase MCP Server](/docs/overview/agility-knowledgebase-mcp-server). | Which AI clients you allow, and a rollout policy for your team. | [Governing AI Access to Agility CMS](/docs/owners-admins/governing-ai-access) |
| **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](/docs/developers/extending-the-cms) |

For security in particular, the shared-responsibility table in [Hosting, Security & Compliance](/docs/owners-admins/hosting-security-and-compliance#shared-responsibilities) is the reference. It covers API keys, front-end hosting, user administration and custom code in more detail.

## What teams most often forget to plan

These items belong to your team, and they are easy to leave out of a first estimate:

- **The preview deployment.** Editors can't preview until a deployed site reads preview content. Plan it as part of the first sprint, not the last.
- **Webhook-driven revalidation.** Agility clears its own CDN cache when you publish. Your site's cache is yours to clear, usually from a publish webhook.
- **Redirects.** Editors manage URL redirections in Agility, but your front end has to apply them.
- **Search, forms and analytics.** Each one is an integration with its own tool, owner and cost.
- **Web Studio wiring.** In-context editing needs the SDK script and decorated components, plus a Content-Security-Policy that lets Agility frame your site.
- **Go-live tasks.** DNS, environments and a launch checklist. See the [Website Deployment Checklist](/docs/developers/website-deployment-checklist).

## Building the front end faster

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](/docs/developers/why-we-recommend-nextjs-and-dotnet), 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](/docs/developers/vibe-coding-with-agility).

## Related

- [How Agility Works: A 10-Minute Architecture Tour](/docs/overview/how-agility-works)
- [Headless, Hybrid or Traditional: Choose Your Delivery Model](/docs/overview/choose-your-delivery-model)
- [Run a Two-Week Proof of Concept](/docs/overview/run-a-two-week-proof-of-concept)

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## Related pages

- [Evaluating Agility](https://agilitycms.com/docs/overview/evaluating-agility.md)
- [How Agility Works: A 10-Minute Architecture Tour](https://agilitycms.com/docs/overview/how-agility-works.md)
- [Is Agility Right for Your Project? When It Fits and When It Doesn't](https://agilitycms.com/docs/overview/is-agility-right-for-your-project.md)
- [Choosing a Headless CMS: A Capability Checklist and Questions to Ask Any Vendor](https://agilitycms.com/docs/overview/choosing-a-headless-cms.md)
- [Run a Two-Week Proof of Concept](https://agilitycms.com/docs/overview/run-a-two-week-proof-of-concept.md)
- [Headless, Hybrid or Traditional: Choose Your Delivery Model](https://agilitycms.com/docs/overview/choose-your-delivery-model.md)
- [Getting Your Content Out: Data Portability and Exit](https://agilitycms.com/docs/overview/data-portability-and-exit.md)
- [Building the Replatforming Business Case](https://agilitycms.com/docs/overview/replatforming-business-case.md)
- [Evaluate Agility with an AI Agent in 30 Minutes](https://agilitycms.com/docs/overview/evaluate-agility-with-an-ai-agent.md)

Index of every docs page: https://agilitycms.com/docs/llms.txt