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Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) – Why / Why Not?

So you have heard about Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) and are debating if it is for you and your project.  First what is SXA and why should I be interested.  SXA is just what it sounds like.  Sitecore has built a framework on top of their Sitecore platform that adds some of the basic templates that allows you to focus on your value-add features faster.  What?!?  Let's take a look at this image to help explain.

SXA out of the box does a great job of separating the areas of concern when building your site that make logic sense.  With the User Experience driving your efforts, SXA allows you to have parallel work streams in the Back-End vs the Front-End vs the Visual Design.  To learn more visit the Sitecore SXA documentation at https://doc.sitecore.com/users/sxa/17/sitecore-experience-accelerator/en/introducing-sitecore-experience-accelerator.html.

With SXA you can:

  • Accelerate the delivery of sites using standard functionality with minimum-to-no CMS development.
  • Enable different work streams to run in parallel.
  • Assemble sites using responsive and reusable renderings.
  • Use themes to enable brand consistency.
  • Choose between different grid systems.

OK, But Do I Have to Refactor Everything to Use It?

The quick answer is no.  SXA is just a series of templates that you could use within your current implementation.  And there are some features you may find very useful quickly.  However, to take full advantage of the all the features which includes some of the tenant and site features, the true separation of concerns and some the Creative Exchange functions, you will find yourself considering the refactoring as a major reshift of your site.  

We chose to start a new 9.3 implementation from the ground up to take full advantage of all the features and to decouple us from our previous implementation based on an agency's custom framework.  We wanted a clean break away based on the issues we were dealing with on a daily basis.  While the initial undertaking was a little overwhelming, it was quickly replaced with the pleasure of having components that just worked.  Two of the best new features that drove our decision was (1) the separation of the Visual Layer.  This allowed us to include the CSS into the content tree.  Our marketing team likes to add new colors to the their palette and this required a full code push for a minimal change.  This was time consuming and prone to issues.  And (2), once we found and learned how to use Scriban template we were sold.  We will cover Scriban template in our next blog post but they are worth mentioning now.  This is by far the largest time saver we have found to date and very powerful.  Scriban is one of the hidden gems of 9.3 and you must be on 9.3 at a minimum.

But Should I Use SXA or JSS?  

There are a lot of opinions on this topic and they are varied across the board.  Let me explain why we chose SXA, but first lets share some opinions we found.


Tony Mamedbekov does a good job of explaining the differences on his blog but tends to lean towards JSS based on his experiences.  

Brian Graves has a solid blog entry that comes across a little more "fair and balanced".

And if you want something that is a little more fun you can watch the JSS v SXA Ultimate Showdown between Mark Van Aalst and Anastasiya Flynn.  It was shown at the Sitecore User Group Conference in April 2020.  I will let you make your own opinions on it.

Here is the quick and short on answer on one over the other.  Do you currently use, or plan to use, a JavaScript framework to build our your site?  Yes, then JSS is probably going to be best for you.  Do you have a lot of content and your concern is to get content loaded quickly and start seeing return on your investment?  Then SXA is probably a better option.  

Sitecore JavaScript Services (JSS) is billed by Sitecore as “a complete SDK for JavaScript developers that enables you to build full-fledged solutions using Sitecore and modern JavaScript UI libraries and frameworks.”
Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) is a Sitecore accelerator that speeds up the production of websites and allows for the reuse of components, layouts, and templates across sites.
Our site relies on Data Exchange Framework (topic for another blog entry) to sync with an external system that provides a lot of our site content.  So based on our amount of content and our own personal biases we decided SXA was our best and fastest option forward.  We felt that JSS at this point required a lot of custom buildout.  Again, if you have the team and desire to go this way it is a great option on its own.  However, our goal was speed to market with a reduced team size so SXA provided our faster path forward.

Our final decision point came down to the Scriban templates that are new in v9.3 and used can be used by SXA.  This is one of the primary drivers of our speed to implementation.  We will cover this on our next blog.  

So, if you are already using JavaScript and are committed to that path then JSS will probably excite you more.  Our opinion is that users don't care what fancy framework you use to write your code and they all render HTML to the browser.  So we chose the SXA Framework for its base components and to assist with our speed to market.  There is no wrong answer here, it is based on what trade-offs you are willing to accept in your architecture.  

But here is a secret that may be new to some.  You can use both in the same implementation.  What!?!  Yes you can use SXA on parts of the site and then use JSS to build out custom functionality when you really want to dazzle the experience.  It's up to you and your project and "it depends".

So, until next time.

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