Why Composability Gets Complicated

Composable architecture has been part of the digital conversation for years. It is no longer a new idea, and it is certainly not a passing trend. Yet it continues to be misunderstood and misapplied across the industry.

A month ago, we hosted a webinar with Matt Garrepy, Chief Critic at CMS Critic, and Mats Persson, CEO of Umbraco, to discuss what composability actually means in practice. With the webinar, we wanted to discuss the challenges teams face when they try to apply composable principles in real organisations with real constraints. Looking back at that discussion, one conclusion stands out:

Composability is not the problem. Unmanaged complexity is.

Composable is not a shopping exercise

One of the clearest warnings in the webinar was against treating composability as a marketplace activity. As Matt Garrepy put it during the session: “This is not a ‘go to a marketplace, quickly assemble a couple of technologies, and you are off to the races’.”

That statement reflects a pattern seen across many organisations. Under pressure to modernise, teams select multiple tools that claim to be composable, connect them through APIs, and expect flexibility to emerge automatically. What often follows is the opposite. Costs increase, ownership becomes unclear, and systems become harder to change.

Composable architecture is not about collecting tools. It is about designing a system intentionally with a clear understanding of how components interact and how responsibility is shared.

Data brings complexity

Most composable projects do not fail because of APIs or services. They fail because data is fragmented, inconsistent, or poorly understood. Over time, teams build custom extraction logic and point-to-point integrations. These solutions are reused, adapted, and extended until a hidden data layer emerges that is difficult to maintain and even harder to replace.

Mats Persson described this pattern clearly when explaining why so many projects struggle at scale. The challenge is structuring and governing the data that flows between systems.

This is where our upcoming product, Umbraco Compose, comes in. Umbraco Compose focuses on making data extraction and access predictable and standardized. It does not remove complexity completely, but it makes it a lot more manageable and streamlined.

Best of breed is the wrong starting point

Another key insight from the webinar was the idea that best-of-breed thinking often leads teams down the wrong path. What is best depends entirely on context. Industry maturity, existing systems, data quality, team readiness, and business goals need to be taken into consideration.

As Mats explained during the conversation, best of breed only makes sense when it is defined by the needs of the organisation, not by analyst reports or vendor messaging. Many failed composable initiatives are the result of moving too fast toward an ideal architecture without respecting the current reality of the specific organization.

Successful composability starts with what is needed now and evolves over time.

People and process determine success

A recurring theme throughout the webinar was that technology is rarely the root cause of failure. But misalignment in the organization often is. Security, compliance, IT, marketing, and leadership all bring valid perspectives. When those perspectives are not aligned early, they surface later as blockers.

Composable architecture requires orchestration, not only of systems and data, but of people and expectations. Without shared understanding, even the most modern stack will struggle.

Composable systems as the basis for AI progress

Toward the end of the webinar, Mats made the forward-looking observation that composability is a requirement for AI innovation. But in order to get the most out of AI tools, access to reliable structured data across systems is needed. Without a solid and structured composable foundation, AI experimentation remains limited and error-prone, and innovation stays in demos rather than production.

A month after the webinar, that message feels even more relevant. Composability is not something you complete. It is something you practice deliberately and incrementally. And when you do, you’re able to reap the many benefits of a composable architecture: Flexibility, stability, and a future-ready foundation.

If you want to watch the full webinar, you can find it here.

If you want to know more about our upcoming product, Umbraco Compose, please check out this article by Lasse Fredslund, Product Manager for Umbraco Compose.