Headless (in context of CMS or Commerce) often generates interesting debates. (The Real Story Group‘s forthcoming Ecommerce evaluations will have more on this)
Traditional, legacy platforms will often tell you they got APIs, so they’re headless too. But they aren’t. They are built in a monolithic way, with all services being part of one large platform.
An important consideration of a Headless architecture is availability of individual services, and your ability to pick what you need and scale as you require. Or Micro-services.
I think this picture provides a good analogy. The first one comes with tonne of individual items that you can mix and match, as you want. You can take more of one, and not have one of the remaining. The second one, on the other hand, comes with several of those already combined.
(Btw, I like both these dishes in the picture equally well and I’m not suggesting one is better than the other ;-))
Cross posted from Linkedin