Sulu is an open source DXP, and it's time we said so

Look at what runs on Sulu today. Allianz Cinema handles scheduling, ticketing and sponsorship fulfilment for 100,000 open-air cinema visitors a season. Zangersheide manages horses, stallions, foals and live auctions as their own entities, with a control panel for the auction. Lech Zürs runs one site for winter and summer, with segmentation built in and hotels, restaurants and events synchronised through APIs. These are digital platforms and industry applications. Calling them websites undersells what the teams behind them built.

For a long time we kept calling Sulu a CMS anyway. Partly on purpose. CMS is concrete, and for years DXP was a wide and often inflated marketing term we didn't want to touch. But partners and customers have been telling us the same thing for a while: Sulu does more than we communicate, and we have not been clear enough about the position we want to take. In every comparison we ended up on the CMS shelf, even when the projects looked nothing like the ones around us.

Looking back, we described Sulu smaller than it was. In July we wrote that content management was the start of the story, not the end of it. Here is how it continues.

With Sulu 3.1 on the way, we are ready to say it plainly. Sulu is an open source DXP.

If your first reaction is "please, not Sulu too", we understand. So here is what this does not mean, before we get to what it does.

We are not turning Sulu into a closed enterprise suite. We are not putting the platform behind a new commercial license. We are not moving features out of the open source product to create an artificially limited community edition. The entire codebase stays MIT. Symfony stays the foundation. Community LTS stays. Sulu.ai and Sulu.cloud remain products built alongside the open codebase, not carved out of it. We are changing how we describe Sulu, and nothing about what it is built on.

Why "DXP", and not a word of our own? We tried. "Content management platform." "Content application platform." Both true, and both ours alone: no analyst list, no RFP column, no shelf a buyer walks to. A category that already exists gives you all of that, and you only have to explain why you belong on it. Inventing a category costs funding rounds we don't have and don't want. DXP already describes what we want to be. We would rather fill a category than invent one.

For us, a DXP is not a marketing suite that has to own every part of your stack. It is a platform where content, media, structured business data and your own application logic come together to create digital experiences across channels.

The architecture philosophy we believe in is simple. What belongs together, build together. What is better solved elsewhere, integrate.

We don't believe a DXP needs to replace your ERP, your CRM, your analytics stack or, in most cases, your commerce platform. Specialised systems exist for good reasons. But content, media, product data, business objects and the logic that is specific to your business need one shared, extensible foundation. One admin, one permission model, one API. That is the role we want Sulu to play: the centre of a digital platform, built on Symfony, that holds your content and data, runs the logic that makes a project yours, and orchestrates the systems around it. Everything beyond that has to earn its place.

Sulu 3.1 doesn't turn Sulu into a DXP. Sulu was that already. 3.1 is the first release we ship with the new position in mind, and it starts where real projects have been pushing us for a while: product data.

Products have attributes, variants and relationships, their own structure and their own lifecycle. Treating them as content pages works until it doesn't. With the Product Bundle, they become a first-class part of the platform. Products live in the same admin, with the same media library, taxonomy, languages and publishing workflow as everything else, rendered with Twig or delivered through the API. And because agents are becoming a channel of their own, the Sulu MCP Server exposes that data to external agents, while Symfony AI lets you build your own agents inside the application.

While Sulu changed, so did the category around it. DXP has become an established description for platforms that bring content, data and applications together to deliver digital experiences across channels. At the same time, some of the open source options that once existed in that space have moved to proprietary licenses or ended their community editions. Open is only as real as the license, and that gap is opening right now.

We looked at the market, looked at what Sulu had become, and found a position that fits us surprisingly well: an open source DXP.