Custom or DIY? How to choose your interactive sales content
Author
Jeremiah Simpson
The tool matters less than you think
Most teams shopping for an interactive-content tool are asking the wrong question. The tool matters less than a decision that comes before it: build it yourself, or have it built and own it.
Tiled, Canva, and Foleon are good tools. So is a custom build. Comparing them feature-by-feature misses what actually differs — not the features, but who does the work and what you walk away with. A DIY builder hands your team a template and an editor. A custom build hands you an experience a studio designs, that you own outright, and that still embeds in the enablement stack you already run.
When a DIY builder is the right call
Be honest about your situation. A builder wins when you produce interactive content at volume and need to move fast, you have an in-house team with time to template and maintain it, your needs fit what the platform already does well, and you’d rather run a subscription than a project. If that’s you, buy the builder — a custom build would be overkill.
When custom earns its keep
Custom is worth it when the experience itself has to win the deal: the story is complex enough that a linear deck flattens it, reps need to personalize per account without breaking brand, you need calculators or branching logic a template can’t do, brand fidelity has to be exact, and you want to own the asset rather than rent it.
It’s not either/or
The real world is a hybrid. Custom interactive content doesn’t replace your enablement platform — it lives inside it. A studio-built experience embeds in Seismic or Highspot with a simple copy-paste, so reps reach for it right where they already work, and your team updates copy and pricing through a CMS layer without touching code. Plenty of teams run a builder for everyday volume and commission custom for the handful of deals that decide the quarter.
A quick way to decide
Three questions cut through it:
Does the experience need to win the deal, or just carry information? (Experience → custom.)
Will you run this daily at volume, or deploy a few high-impact pieces? (Volume → DIY.)
Do you need to own it, or is renting fine? (Own → custom.)
If two of three point to custom, it’s probably worth building. There’s no universally right answer — only the right one for your selling motion. The mistake is defaulting to whatever tool is in front of you, when the better question is what you’re trying to accomplish, and who should build it.
Trying to decide between building custom and buying a DIY tool?
That’s the kind of call we help teams make. Tell us what you’re trying to accomplish, and we’ll give you a straight answer. Book a call →