Composable or monolithic? How modern digital architectures are really built

Composable is not a technology question

At some point, this moment arrives. Something small needs to change on your digital platform. A new payment method in the shop, a second language, a quick landing page test for next week’s campaign. And that small thing turns into a major project. Approvals, release cycles, waiting time. Not because your team is too slow or your agency does bad work. The system was simply never built for this.

Or the other moment. Your platform provider raises licensing fees. You pay, because leaving would cost more than the increase. That’s exactly what the pricing model is built for.

Two different moments, the same root cause. Your system is a monolith. Everything from a single source, everything tightly interlocked, everything centralized. For many years, that decision worked well. Until technology started moving faster than the next release cycle.

The question is no longer whether your system runs stably. The question is whether it can change fast enough.

The Lego promise

There’s a name for the alternative: composable. Instead of one closed platform from a single vendor, you assemble individual, interchangeable building blocks. Content, search, commerce, personalization, each standalone and connected through interfaces. Need a new search function? Swap out the search component. Without touching the whole platform.

In the industry, this principle is called MACH. Behind it is a simple idea: small, independent services that work together through open interfaces, instead of being locked into one fixed block. The foundation for this often comes from open source. A system like Drupal, for example, delivers content through interfaces to any channel, making you independent from a single vendor’s licenses and roadmap.

There’s a simple reason this matters right now. Your content has to work everywhere today – on the website, in the app, in the newsletter, in the showroom. And the open standards behind it are now mature enough that you no longer need a large development team to make it work.

So much for the promise. And it’s real. Gartner expects around 70 percent of enterprises to be using composable technologies by the end of 2026.

Composable sounds like Lego, then. Freely combinable, always interchangeable. Except Lego comes with instructions and a fixed box. Your digital ecosystem doesn’t. You have to write the blueprint yourself.

A kit without a blueprint

Think about your own marketing stack. One tool for the newsletter, one for landing pages, one for analytics. Each introduced by a different team, each connected on its own. What you end up with is a system of isolated solutions – not an engine that runs smoothly.

With composable, the same risk exists, just one level deeper. The freedom to choose and swap every building block individually sounds good. One gets added after another, each with good reasoning. A year later, fifteen services are running, and no one ever decided which system was actually emerging. This time, not with individual marketing tools, but in the platform your entire business runs on. And there, putting things back in order is far more expensive.

The biggest trap when making the switch is therefore not the technology. It’s the missing governance. Anyone running many specialized services needs clear answers: Who is allowed to add something? How are dependencies documented? Who keeps the building blocks up to date?

And this is exactly where it becomes clear what this decision really is. Composable or monolith – that’s not an IT question. It’s a leadership decision. It determines how quickly you can react to the market and how independent you remain from a single vendor. Governance is the lever that determines whether freedom turns into speed or into sprawl. That lever shouldn’t be delegated down to IT.

When the switch is worth it

Not every organization needs this. Anyone running a manageable website with stable content is often better off with a well-maintained monolith. For now. Until the market demands a level of agility the system can no longer provide.

Composable architectures prove their value where flexibility genuinely matters. With multiple brands, markets, or channels. With platforms that need to change quickly. With companies that want to reduce their dependency on a single vendor.

The smartest entry point is rarely the big leap. Take out the one area suffering most under the old system – search, content, or commerce, for example – and run it in parallel. If it works, you have a solid foundation for the next step. And proof you can show internally.

The ecosystem decides

Composable or monolith is ultimately not a question of technology. It’s a question of what your digital ecosystem should look like. How complex is it? How fast does it need to change? How much independence do you really need?

A well-ordered ecosystem is not an end in itself. It’s the condition for technology to become what it’s supposed to be. A driver, not a drag.

How agile is your platform today? And where do you feel its limits?