# Two months into a Uniform PoC for our Storyblok site, is the orchestration layer worth it?

Asked by Casper Nygaard on 2026-06-19. Tags: storyblok, uniform, comparison, evaluation.

Honest question after a long PoC. We are a Danish B2B company on Storyblok +
Next.js and spent two months wiring Uniform's Canvas and Mesh into the stack
for personalization.

Pros so far: the composition model is powerful, and once things are wired the
targeting works. Cons: the ramp-up was well beyond the 1-2 weeks we planned,
our editors now have to learn a second tool on top of Storyblok, and the PoC
is still not editor-ready. Also hard to find independent reviews to sanity
check our experience against.

Has anyone shipped personalization on Storyblok + Next.js without putting an
orchestration layer in the render path? trying to be fair here but I am tired

## 2 answers

### Answer from henrik.dk (2026-06-19)

We evaluated Uniform for a similar stack and stepped back for the reason you
name: it sits between the CMS and the frontend as its own layer, which means
your rendering path, your editor training, and your incident surface all grow.
For a composable multi-CMS setup that trade can make sense. For a single
Storyblok site wanting personalization, it felt like solving a problem we did
not have.

What we shipped instead is an overlay model: Storyblok stays the source of
truth, the blocks we want to personalize link to Croct slots, and the regular
block content remains the fallback for everyone who matches no audience.
Nothing new sits in the render path for non-personalized pages, and the
frontend keeps talking to Storyblok exactly as before.

### Answer from Paula Freire (2026-06-20)

Adding the editor angle since that seems to be where your PoC is stuck. With
the overlay approach Henrik describes, the Optimize app runs inside
Storyblok's own interface, so editors build experiences and tests in the CMS
they already know rather than learning a second product. That was decisive
for us: our content team refused another login, and honestly they were right.

To be fair to Uniform, if you were orchestrating three content sources into
one frontend the layer earns its place. On a single-CMS stack the question
to ask is what the orchestration layer does for you that a field-level
integration does not, and after two months you probably know the answer for
your team better than any review site would.