Uniform blog/How visual editors vary across DXPs

How visual editors vary across DXPs

Turner SatoPosted on Mar 24, 2025

5 min read

How visual editors vary across DXPs

Visual editors in digital experience platforms (DXPs)—a market predicted to grow to $27.2 billion by 2028—are often marketers’ primary tools for building personalized experiences at scale.

Though visual editing has come a long way since the release of software like WordPress and Adobe Dreamweaver, not all editors are created equal. Visual builders vary widely across DXPs depending on vendors’ capabilities and approach to digital experience management.

Composable DXPs, with their API-first modularity and seamless third-party integration, give digital teams no-code visual tools, complete with multisource editing and simplified experience creation and delivery.

Read on for a definition of visual editors, their commonalities and differences, and why visual building in composable DXPs promotes better collaboration, easy content creation, and a quicker time to market.

What is a visual editor?

A visual editor or visual editing helps you create, design, and publish content on a webpage through a user-intuitive interface.

Sometimes referred to as a WYSIWYG (“what-you-see-is-what-you-get) interface, you don’t need coding skills to use a visual editor–a major bonus for marketers who need to preview digital experiences before they go live. Many editors offer basic WYSIWYG features and drag-and-drop functionality. Others might provide premade templates or allow you to change the underlying HTML and CSS.

Visual editors also differ from page builders, which assemble webpages but tend to lack visual editors’ broader functionality, including editing and publishing content beyond the web.

How visual editors differ in composable DXPs vs. other DXPs

Below is a list of visual-building capabilities that separate composable DXPs from other DXPs and support digital teams’ quest to build omnichannel experiences at speed.

Page components

Page components are standard among most visual editors, whether you’re working in a CMS-based DXP or a modern one. They allow you to style content using preconfigured design patterns, from formatting paragraphs to selecting font types to inserting hero images.

Visual editors in most DXPs

Typically, designers and developers set and manage components in DXPs. However, the digital landscape moves quickly, and relying on engineering for new components can stall workflows and impact the consistency and quality of customer experiences.

Visual editor in a composable DXP

In a composable DXP, page components use an atomic design approach. Unlike DXPs that require developer-heavy implementations, atomic components enable you to assemble or combine more complex variants—tags, badges, image galleries, product detail pages, etc.—without code.

Launching new experiences becomes cheaper and faster. Since a composable DXP connects to any source, atomic components follow brand guidelines and are reusable across multiple sites and channels for maximum flexibility and scalability without continued governance.

Site performance

In today’s omnichannel environment, speed can make or break the brand experience. Fickle customer demands mean digital teams must create relevant, channel-specific content quickly or risk losing engagement and revenue.

Visual editors in most DXPs

To get ahead, performance must be lightning-quick, flicker-free, and agile amid countless competing sites. While many DXPs offer visual editors that excel at optimization, some can impact site performance and loading speed due to the complexity of rendering and updating experiences in real time.

Visual editor in a composable DXP

The visual workspace, the composable DXP’s visual builder for managing experiences, has edge-side technology that delivers the fastest version of your experience to your audience regardless of their location.

Hyper-personalization

Personalization is a critical aspect of digital experiences and, similar to speed, drives conversions and sales. If your DXP can identify and position content displayed on web pages, the platform should also be able to personalize content through its visual editor.

Visual editors in most DXPs

Many DXPs lack native, built-in personalization capabilities and, instead, rely on static rules-based approaches that are difficult to scale and limit dynamic content. As your audience grows, these visual editors make it challenging to replicate targeted web pages for every demographic and location.

Visual editor in a composable DXP

By contrast, a composable DXP’s visual workspace lets you tailor content at the component level. For example, you can create different versions of a banner image that changes color and displays personalized messaging based on who visits your site.

Building a campaign that targets repeat shoppers? In a visual workspace, you can tweak headlines or revise a product description to reflect visitor data such as order history or personal interests.

Multisource data integration

Your brand relies on a technology stack that includes more than just a DXP to deliver personalized experiences with tailored offerings. Digital teams build their campaigns using content and data from CDPs, DAMs, personalization, AI, and other services scattered across the enterprise.

Visual editors in most DXPs

Many DXPs are single-source solutions that are essentially “walled gardens”: they offer visual editing, but creating one experience requires working across numerous platforms. These DXPs claim to be fully composable but, in reality, operate in a closed system dictated by vendor-controlled components.

Visual editor in a composable DXP

Composable DXPs such as Uniform are composable first and equipped with a visual builder that seamlessly pulls content and data from the back end through no-code integrations. The visual workspace brings your organization’s fragmented content into one visual environment, where marketers build experiences quickly and autonomously, and developers focus on innovation instead of IT tickets.

Agentic AI + generative AI

Increasingly, marketers need to do more with less, and AI technology, combined with visual editing, helps automate and streamline everything from content creation to SEO.

Visual editors in most DXPs

The reality? Most DXPs lack true AI-native capabilities, offering bolted-on AI features that require third-party integration.

Visual editor in a composable DXP

A composable DXP integrates AI into your editor’s rich text field or you can bring your preferred AI into the visual workspace. Moreover, a composable solution provides AI capabilities across three main areas:

Generative AI. Pre-configured prompts generate personalized text and images for components, compositions, and more.
AI agents. Virtual assistants help with SEO and CRO tasks, set up A/B tests, evaluate performance, and suggest improvements.
AI translations. Translate your content from one language to another in minutes.

With AI fully integrated into the DXP’s visual workspace, writing prompts and queries takes a few clicks, allowing you to output on-brand, data-driven content in record time.

Visual editing with composability in mind

Composable DXPs give brands and digital teams marketer-first tooling for managing holistic digital experiences compared to composable-adjacent industry peers. Ultimately, visual editing in your DXP should be simple and effortless, letting marketers work faster and smarter amid shifting market trends and customer demands.

Schedule a demo with Uniform to see how our visual building capabilities stack up against the competition.