Your partner marketplace does a lot of quiet work.
It’s where customers figure out what your product can become. It’s where partners decide whether you’re worth investing in. And it’s often the most visible proof that you’re serious about being a platform.
Which leads to a common question: can you just build it on your existing CMS, like WordPress or Webflow?
On the surface, it feels efficient. You already have the site. You already know the tools. You can ship something quickly.
The problem is that what looks like a shortcut early on often turns into friction later. Not because CMS tools are bad, but because they were never designed to support how partner ecosystems actually operate at scale.
Before we get into where things break down, let’s align on what a partner marketplace really is.
What a partner marketplace actually does
A partner marketplace, sometimes called an app marketplace, integrations page, or partner directory, is the system customers use to discover, evaluate, and adopt partner solutions and integrations around your product.
It’s not just a list of logos.
A functional marketplace helps customers understand which integrations solve which problems, helps partners showcase value, and helps your team keep everything accurate as the ecosystem evolves. Over time, it becomes part of how customers buy, how partners co-sell, and how your platform differentiates.
That’s where CMS-based approaches start to strain.
Can you build a marketplace on a CMS?
Yes. Technically, you can.
Most teams start this way because a marketplace looks like content at first. Partner descriptions, screenshots, links, maybe a few filters. A CMS is good at managing content, so the decision feels reasonable.
The issue is that marketplaces stop behaving like static content almost immediately.
As soon as you add more partners, more owners, more updates, or more internal stakeholders, the operational cost shows up.
Why CMS tools are so tempting
When teams go this route, they usually default to what they already use.
- WordPress feels flexible and extensible, especially with plugins and custom fields.
- Webflow offers strong visual control and is easy for marketing teams to manage.
- Other CMS tools promise similar benefits with varying degrees of customization.
The appeal is speed and familiarity. No new vendor. No new workflow. No new budget line.
That appeal fades once the marketplace becomes something you have to actively run, not just publish once and walk away from.
The real tradeoffs of using a CMS for your partner marketplace
CMS tools shine when content is owned by one team. And when that content is more or less set-it-and-forget-it. Partner marketplaces are the opposite.
Here’s where things usually break down.
- Scaling becomes manual work
Going from a handful of partners to dozens or hundreds means constant edits, reviews, and coordination. Each new listing adds operational overhead because the system wasn’t built for high-volume, repeatable partner workflows. - Ownership gets fragmented
Marketplace updates often require help from marketing or engineering, which slows down iteration and pulls control away from the team closest to partner relationships. Over time, this creates backlogs and stale listings. - The experience degrades quietly
CMS-based marketplaces tend to look fine but function poorly. Search is limited. Filters are brittle. Content ages quickly. Customers struggle to find the right integration, and partners don’t get meaningful visibility. - Customization turns into technical debt
Plugins, custom scripts, and workarounds pile up to simulate marketplace behavior. Each addition increases maintenance costs and risk, especially during CMS upgrades. - You lose insight into what’s actually working
Understanding which integrations get attention, which partners drive adoption, and where customers drop off usually requires custom analytics work. Most teams simply go without, which makes it hard to justify investment or improvement.
"Our app directory is built on WordPress, making listing creation a fairly manual process. There's no integration, authentication, or any of those workflows... it's mostly a marketing site today." - Staff Product Manager at a category-leading B2B SaaS company
At some point, the marketplace becomes something the team tolerates instead of something that drives value.
Why a dedicated marketplace platform works better
Dedicated marketplace platforms exist because this problem repeats itself.
Instead of forcing marketplace behavior into a CMS, these platforms are built around how partner ecosystems actually operate. Partner Fleet is one example, but the category itself is what matters.
A purpose-built platform changes the equation:
- Partner operations scale without added headcount
Self-serve onboarding, listing creation, approvals, and updates remove the manual work that slows teams down as ecosystems grow. - Control sits with the right team
The people responsible for partner outcomes can manage listings, workflows, and visibility directly, without routing everything through other departments. - The marketplace stays current by default
Faster updates, structured data, and built-in governance keep content accurate and useful, which improves trust for both customers and partners. - Performance becomes visible
Marketplace-specific analytics make it easier to understand adoption, engagement, and partner impact, which supports better decisions and clearer executive reporting.
The result is a marketplace that behaves like infrastructure, not a marketing page.
How to think about next steps
If you’re evaluating your current setup or planning what comes next, a few questions tend to clarify the path forward:
- How much manual effort does it take to keep your marketplace accurate today?
- Who actually owns updates, and how often do they get blocked?
- Can you clearly see which integrations matter to customers?
If the answers feel uncomfortable, the issue usually isn’t execution. It’s tooling.
Choosing the right foundation early, or replacing the wrong one before it becomes critical infrastructure, saves time, budget, and credibility later.
Ready to rethink your partner marketplace?
If your marketplace feels harder to manage than it should, it’s probably not a people problem. It’s a platform problem.
Happy to talk through what scaling looks like in practice, whether that means evolving what you have or moving to something purpose-built.
