From Low Code to Headless CMS: Building Composable Architectures

The Legacy Burden

Three years ago, your company made a decision: adopt a low-code platform. Sales promised 10x faster development, lower costs, and business users building their own solutions. The pitch was compelling. The reality? You ended up with a monolithic, vendor-locked system that's becoming increasingly difficult to customize.

This is the story of hundreds of organizations in 2025. The low-code revolution promised autonomy; instead, it delivered dependency.

Why Low-Code Hits a Wall

Low-code platforms excel at rapid prototyping and standard business applications. But they have fundamental limitations:

• Vendor Lock-in: You're building on someone else's platform. Their roadmap is your roadmap. When they decide to sunset a feature you rely on, you have no alternatives.
• Customization Limits: Beyond the 80% of common use cases, you hit walls. Trying to customize further requires dropping into proprietary languages or hiring platform-specific experts.
• Performance Penalties: Low-code platforms optimize for speed-to-development, not speed-of-execution. Your application is slower, uses more cloud resources, and costs more to operate.
• Scalability Issues: That prototype that worked for 100 users? It might struggle with 10,000. The abstraction layers that made development easy now become performance bottlenecks.

Enter the Composable Architecture

Composable architecture is the antidote. Instead of a monolithic platform controlling everything, you build with best-of-breed components that work together:

• Headless CMS: Manages content, but doesn't dictate how it's consumed. Content becomes data that flows to any frontend.
• Microservices: Business logic lives in independently deployable services, each optimized for its specific domain.
• API-First Design: Everything talks through well-defined APIs. You can swap components without rewriting dependent systems.
• Modern Frontend Stack: React, Vue, Angular—you choose. You're not locked into the CMS vendor's frontend framework.

The Migration Path

You don't rip and replace everything overnight. Successful organizations take a phased approach:

Phase 1 (Months 1-3): Extract Content Move your content from the low-code platform into a headless CMS. This is usually the easiest piece. Tools exist to help migrate. Strapi, Contentful, and Hygraph all have migration tooling.

Phase 2 (Months 4-9): Build the Frontend Create a new frontend application (web, mobile, both) that consumes content from the headless CMS. Keep the old system running in parallel. Users don't see a difference; you're just changing where content comes from.

Phase 3 (Months 10-15): Extract Services Identify business logic that can be extracted into microservices. The recommendation engine? Extract it. User management? Extract it. Each service you pull out reduces your dependence on the legacy platform.

Phase 4 (Month 16+): Deprecate Legacy System Once most functionality has been migrated, you can finally sunset the low-code platform. By this point, it's just a historical curiosity.

Technology Choices That Matter

Headless CMS: Strapi is open-source and self-hosted (good for privacy-conscious organizations). Contentful is SaaS and fully managed. Hygraph adds real-time APIs. Choose based on your team's DevOps maturity and budget.

API Gateway: Kong, AWS API Gateway, or Tyk. This becomes your interface to the outside world. It handles authentication, rate limiting, and request routing. Invest in this early.

Frontend Framework: If you're starting fresh, Next.js has become the default choice for enterprise React applications. It handles server-side rendering, static generation, and API routes elegantly.

Backend Language: This is less important than you think. Go, Python, Node.js, Rust—pick based on your team's expertise and your performance requirements. The important thing is that each service has clear boundaries and well-defined APIs.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Mistake #1: Premature Optimization Don't split things into microservices before you understand the boundaries. Keep services together until you have clear reasons to separate them. YAGNI applies to architecture.

Mistake #2: Underestimating API Design Your APIs are contracts. Change them thoughtfully. Version them properly. Document them obsessively. Bad APIs create cascading failures across your organization.

Mistake #3: Neglecting Data Consistency With multiple databases and services, transactions become hard. Invest in event sourcing or saga patterns early. Don't discover this problem when you have data corruption in production.

Mistake #4: Forgetting About Operations Microservices are easy to build and hard to operate. Invest in monitoring, logging, and tracing from day one. The observability tax is real but necessary.

How Trostrum Can Help

Migration from low-code to composable architecture is complex and risky. We help organizations:

• Assess their current low-code system and identify migration opportunities
• Select appropriate headless CMS and service technologies for their domain
• Design the phased migration path with minimal disruption
• Execute migrations while keeping systems operational
• Build observability and DevOps practices to manage the new architecture

The Time to Start is Now

If you're feeling constrained by your low-code platform, you're not alone. The window for composable architecture has opened, and the talent pool of engineers who understand it is small but growing. Waiting another year makes migration more expensive and more risky.

Start small. Pick one service to extract. Prove the pattern works. Then scale it.

Final Thoughts

Low-code platforms have their place. But as your organization grows, as your requirements become more sophisticated, you'll need control that only a composable architecture provides. The organizations winning in 2025 aren't those locked into platforms—they're those building with open standards and modular components.