Why Companies Are Abandoning Monolithic Solutions

In 2023, Salesforce lost 8% market share in the SME segment. HubSpot saw its churn rate increase by 23% on accounts with fewer than 50 users. These monolithic software giants are facing a new reality: companies no longer want their bloated solutions.

According to a 2024 Forrester study, 67% of companies plan to replace at least one monolithic solution with modular alternatives by 2026. This isn’t a technological whim. It’s a matter of operational survival.

What Exactly Is a Monolithic Solution?

The Initial Promise

A monolithic solution is an all-in-one software that claims to cover all the needs of a business domain. In marketing, we’re talking about suites like HubSpot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or Adobe Experience Cloud.

The promise is appealing:

• A single interface to manage everything
• Centralized data
• A single vendor
• Native integration between modules

On paper, it’s ideal. In reality, it’s often a nightmare.

The Problematic Characteristics

Monolithic solutions share several distinctive traits:

Rigid architecture: Everything is interconnected inseparably. Modifying one element potentially impacts the entire system.

Forced updates: When the vendor deploys a new version, you have to accept it. No choice, no going back.

Bundle pricing: You pay for 100 features even if you only use 15. The cost per actually-used feature skyrockets.

Total dependency: Your data, your processes, your teams become prisoners of a closed ecosystem.

Why Companies Are Abandoning These Solutions

1. The Functional Bloat Problem

An SME of 30 people subscribing to HubSpot Marketing Hub Pro gains access to more than 400 features. On average, they use 23. The rest represents visual noise, unnecessary complexity, and unjustified cost.

Revealing figures from a Productiv study:

• 73% of marketing suite features remain unused
• Users spend 34% of their time searching for the right options
• Average training time on a complete suite: 47 hours

This bloat slows everything down. Adoption, execution, innovation.

2. Rigidity Facing Specific Needs

Every company has unique processes. A monolithic solution imposes its vision of the ideal workflow. When your reality doesn’t match this vision, you have two options:

• Adapt your processes to the software (costly in time and adoption)
• Work around the system with workarounds (risky and ineffective)

Concrete example: a web agency needed to categorize client feedback by project AND by feedback type. Their monolithic solution only allowed one classification dimension. Result: daily Excel exports and hours of manual reprocessing.

3. The Vendor Lock-In Trap

Vendor lock-in isn’t a myth. When you’ve invested 18 months configuring a platform, trained 45 people, and accumulated 3 years of historical data, switching becomes a titanic project.

Monolithic solution vendors know this. And they take advantage of it.

Common practices:

• 15-25% price increases per year after the first year
• Critical features moved to higher tiers
• Deliberately complex data export
• Third-party integrations throttled to favor in-house modules

A retail company calculated that migrating away from Salesforce would cost them 340,000 euros. So they remain customers despite growing dissatisfaction. That’s exactly what the vendor is looking for.

4. Innovation Blocked by Inertia

Large software suites evolve slowly. Their massive architecture makes every change complex. New features arrive 18 to 24 months behind specialized solutions.

Meanwhile, your competitors using more agile tools are testing, iterating, moving forward.

The Alternative: Focused Modular Platforms

A New Paradigm

Facing the limitations of monolithic solutions, an alternative model is emerging: focused modular platforms.

The principle is simple:

• Focus on a specific domain
• Excel in that domain
• Offer maximum flexibility
• Enable open integrations

For data collection (forms, newsletters, feedback), Skedox perfectly illustrates this approach. The platform does one thing and does it well, without drowning you in marketing automation, CRM, or advanced analytics features you don’t need.

The Concrete Advantages

Controlled cost: You only pay for what you use. No tax on phantom features.

Rapid adoption: A focused interface can be learned in hours, not weeks.

Flexibility: Open APIs allow you to connect tools that truly match your needs.

Scalability: Adding or replacing a component doesn’t jeopardize your entire stack.

Comparison by the Numbers

Criteria	Monolithic Solution	Modular Platform
Average monthly cost (SME)	800-2500 euros	50-200 euros
Deployment time	3-6 months	1-2 weeks
Feature utilization rate	15-25%	70-85%
Training time	40+ hours	2-4 hours
Ease of migration	Very difficult	Simple

How to Successfully Make the Transition

Step 1: Identify Your Real Needs

Before leaving your monolithic solution, objectively list:

• Features you use daily
• Those you use occasionally
• Those you’ve never opened

This analysis often reveals that 80% of your needs are concentrated in 5 to 10 key features.

For data collection, essential needs are typically:

• Creating custom forms
• Managing a newsletter subscriber list
• Collecting user feedback
• Viewing submissions in a dashboard
• Exporting data to other tools

Step 2: Map Your Data

The main barrier to migration is the fear of losing history. Before switching:

• Export all your data in standard formats (CSV, JSON)
• Document your custom fields
• Identify relationships between entities
• Validate export integrity

Step 3: Choose Solutions That Communicate

The risk with specialized tools would be recreating silos. To avoid this, prioritize platforms that offer:

• Documented REST APIs
• Webhooks for real-time notifications
• Native integrations with your existing tools
• Simple and complete data export

Skedox offers API keys that allow you to automate workflows and connect your forms, newsletters, and feedback to any third-party system.

Step 4: Migrate Progressively

Don’t cut everything at once. A successful migration follows a careful timeline:

Week 1-2: Deployment of the new solution in parallel. Testing on a limited scope.

Week 3-4: Migration of a first complete use case. Validation with users.

Week 5-6: Extension to other use cases. Team training.

Week 7-8: Gradual deactivation of the old solution.

Step 5: Measure the ROI

After 3 months, compare:

• License costs (before vs. after)
• Time spent on recurring tasks
• Team adoption rate
• User satisfaction

Companies that have made this transition report on average:

• 60% reduction in software costs
• 45% time savings on daily operations
• User satisfaction score up by 35 points

Common Objections (and Their Answers)

“We lose the unified view”

False. Modern modular platforms integrate with each other. A central dashboard can aggregate data from multiple sources. The difference: you choose what goes into this view, instead of being subjected to a monolith.

”It’s more complicated to manage”

On the contrary. Managing 3 simple tools is less complex than mastering 1 tool with 400 features. Cognitive load decreases, not the reverse.

”Our IT doesn’t want to multiply vendors”

A matter of perspective. Better to have 3 specialized and responsive vendors than a giant that considers you an account number. Support from focused solutions is generally superior.

”We’ve already configured everything”

That’s sunk cost fallacy talking. The real question: do you want to keep paying for an unsuitable solution because you’ve already paid for it?

Signs That It’s Time to Change

Your monolithic solution is holding you back if:

• You’re paying more than 500 euros/month for features you don’t use
• Your teams work around the tool with Excel files
• Training time for new hires exceeds 2 weeks
• You’ve been waiting for features for more than a year
• Exporting your data requires support intervention

If you check 3 of these boxes, the question is no longer “should we change?” but “when do we start?”

Conclusion: Abandoning Monolithic Solutions, a Strategic Choice

Companies are abandoning monolithic solutions because they’ve understood a simple truth: complexity isn’t synonymous with power. Tools that claim to do everything end up doing nothing properly.

The future belongs to composable architectures. Specialized software building blocks, excellent in their domain, that communicate with each other via open standards.

For data collection, this means choosing a platform focused on forms, newsletters, and user feedback. Not a module among 47 others in a suite whose potential you’ll never exploit.

Ready to simplify your technology stack? Discover Skedox and try for free a platform that focuses on the essentials: collecting, organizing, and leveraging your users’ data without the complexity of monolithic solutions.