If you've ever hired an agency to help you evaluate digital experience platforms, you probably remember the experience fondly. The workshops. The weighted scoring matrices. The beautifully formatted final deliverable that somehow always landed on the platform your agency was already certified to implement.
Coincidence? Not quite.
The DXP evaluation industry has a structural problem that nobody talks about openly. It's expensive by design, and it's conflicted by nature. Let's talk about both.
Your Evaluation Costs More Than Some Implementations
Agency-led DXP evaluations are not cheap. Depending on the firm, a formal platform selection engagement can run anywhere from $30,000 to well over $150,000. Large consultancies and global SIs regularly charge six figures for what amounts to a comparison exercise that includes stakeholder interviews, requirements gathering, vendor demos, scoring workshops, and a final recommendation deck.
That number might feel justified if you're making a platform decision that will cost your organization millions over the next five to seven years. But consider what you're actually paying for. You're paying for an agency's time to research platforms that are well documented publicly. You're paying for workshops to help you articulate requirements you largely already know. And you're paying for a recommendation that, in most cases, was directionally determined before the first kickoff call.
The DXP market in 2026 is valued at roughly $15.2 billion globally and is projected to nearly double by 2036. With that kind of growth comes a flood of agencies positioning themselves as objective evaluators. But objectivity costs money to maintain, and very few agencies have a business model that actually supports it.
Here's the uncomfortable math. If an agency charges you $75,000 for a platform evaluation and then wins the $500,000 implementation project on the platform they recommended, that evaluation wasn't a cost center for them. It was a sales funnel.
The Recommendation Was Made Before You Signed the SOW
This is the part nobody wants to say out loud, so I will.
Most agencies already know which platform they want you to pick before the evaluation begins. The process exists to validate a conclusion, not to discover one.
Why? Because agencies have platform partnerships. They have certification tiers. They have revenue-sharing agreements, preferred partner status, co-marketing funds, and in some cases, direct referral fees from vendors. This isn't speculation. The practice of vendor kickbacks and referral incentives is well documented across the broader tech consulting and advertising industries. A Salesforce executive in Australia publicly called out agencies for requesting referral fees in exchange for recommending their platform to clients. Industry commenters confirmed that this practice extends into the commercial CMS space, with major CMS vendors offering incentives to agencies and consulting firms for steering clients their way.
The incentive structure is clear. An agency with a Gold or Platinum partnership with a specific DXP vendor gets preferential pricing, dedicated support, access to pre-release features, leads from the vendor's own sales pipeline, and sometimes direct revenue for every deal they close on that platform. That's not a neutral evaluator. That's a channel partner running a selection process.
Does every agency operate this way? No. There are genuinely platform-agnostic firms that maintain independence. But they're the exception, not the rule. And even well-intentioned agencies face unconscious bias when 80% of their implementation revenue comes from a single platform.
The result for you, the buyer, is predictable. You spend months and tens of thousands of dollars on an evaluation that tells you to pick the platform your agency was always going to recommend. The scoring matrix was weighted to favor that platform's strengths. The vendor demos were sequenced to make that platform shine. The "shortlist" was curated before you ever saw it.
What Would a Truly Independent Evaluation Look Like?
If you strip away the agency incentives and ask what buyers actually need from a DXP evaluation, the answer is surprisingly straightforward. You need accurate, current data on how platforms actually perform across the criteria that matter: content management capabilities, technical architecture, total cost of ownership, regulatory compliance, build complexity, maintenance burden, and real-world use-case fit.
That's exactly what the DXP Scorecard provides.
The DXP Scorecard evaluates 36 platforms across 187 individual scoring criteria organized into ten categories. Every score includes documented reasoning, cited evidence, and a confidence rating.
This is, quite literally, what agencies charge tens of thousands of dollars to produce. In many cases, the Scorecard provides more depth than what those evaluations deliver, because agencies working on a fixed-fee engagement rarely have the incentive to go 187 criteria deep across 36 platforms when they've already decided on their top three.
The best part? The DXP Scorecard is available to anyone. No gated PDFs. No sales calls. No $20,000 Gartner subscription required. You can compare Sanity against SitecoreAI, Adobe Experience Manager against Contentful, or Optimizely against HubSpot CMS on your own, using the same depth of analysis that used to require hiring an agency or buying an analyst report.
It doesn't replace the need for implementation expertise. You will still need a capable partner to build on whatever platform you choose. But it does replace the need to pay someone else to tell you which platform to choose, especially when that someone has a financial interest in the answer.
What Should Buyers Do Differently?
Start your evaluation before you engage an agency, not after. Use publicly available tools like the DXP Scorecard to build your own shortlist based on your actual requirements. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of each platform before a vendor or agency has a chance to frame the narrative for you.
When you do bring in an agency, ask hard questions. Which platforms are they certified on? What percentage of their revenue comes from a single vendor? Do they receive referral fees, co-marketing funds, or preferred pricing from any of the platforms they're evaluating for you? If they can't answer those questions clearly, the evaluation isn't objective.
Platform decisions should be driven by your business goals, your technical constraints, and your team's capabilities. Not by which vendor gives your agency the best partner incentives.
The Bottom Line
The DXP evaluation model is broken. Buyers pay premium rates for a process that's structurally biased toward the platforms agencies already want to sell. The information asymmetry that justified expensive evaluations a decade ago has largely collapsed. Platform capabilities, pricing structures, and technical architectures are more transparent than ever.
Tools like the DXP Scorecard make it possible to do your own homework before writing a six-figure check to an agency whose recommendation was baked in from day one. That doesn't mean agencies don't add value. It means the value should come from implementation expertise, not from telling you which platform to buy when they already know the answer.
Do your research first. Then hire an agency to build.
