dotCMS Reviews & Product Details

Easy to use. Great support. They listen to customers and integrate feedback into updates. It's very robust, stable and fast. Lots of APIs

Would like tags to be first class citizens and considered content in the system. Somehow have relationships be bi-directional

Consolidate our content into common content types to facilitate content sharing across all of our websites. As well as to get a handle on our content strategy.

Easy to get the devop overview, great with highly customizable templates, velocity is easy yet powerful. Great API. Impressive knowledge in the user based forum aswell as the dotcms support.

Challenging to grasp the concept of a content driven, not page driven, cms. Would be awesome if one could limit user access to content based on languages.

We get the possibility to feed other systems with data from dotcms aswell as import data from other systems with the API. We can also easy give access to selected parts of the system to different users.

It effectively creates a way to enable a wealth of people from different backgrounds and technical skill levels to update a website that aims to have one voice.

The functionality can be inconsistent, and bugs in the system are pretty prominent across users. I also don't necessarily like the interface — it could be more intuitive and we have received comments about the steep learning curve of the CMS.

We need to find a way to represent first the voice of the institution, in addition to all of the activities, services, offerings and goals in a single digital platform that can be called HOME. dotCMS is helping us to achieve that by serving as the vehicle which enables this massive TEAM effort.

Jenn and team took a look at outdated support contracts and put together something that makes sense for the business need now. We were having a lot of issues with our instance/updates/customized code, etc.

Updates....way too many instance updates.

Team training/technical competency of the team. That's not a dotcms issue, but an internal issue. We now have a focused web manager that I'm hoping will help! Is there anyone on the dotcms team that we can utilize on best practices, current web trends that we should be looking at? Kind of like a web agency?

What I like best is that typical users experience something similar to MS Word.

What I dislike is that when we have backend issues that it is sometimes challenging to get quality service early on in the process. Sometimes we have to go up the management chain to get help.

We are solving the problem of a centralized content process. dotCMS allows the college, in most cases, to allow are content experts to update their content with little help from our one-member web team. In many cases, it has saved time.

Ease of use in the back-end content management interface, allowing for easy relationships and content searching and editing. Overall publish concepts are excellent and easy to get content between environments.

Some challenges regarding "framework software" concepts, where customization is required to make full use of the POTENTIAL of this software. Customization means complication though and makes supporting the system more challenging. The software is AMAZINGLY customizable (that is a good!), though that creates the 'too' customizable scenario.

Serving a multi-channel group of customers and business owners, serving customers that need very targeted delivery of content. Ability to manage a wide range of content types and connections to internal systems to keep that content up to date and delivered to users.

We use dotCMS as an intermediary between our internal systems and our outward facing website. It's not a completely headless build, but more of a hybrid. We appreciate the fluidity of the product in being a hybrid model. The API that the team at dotCMS is great. As a hybrid model, we're able to write and receive data to and from dotCMS with little effort. The support we receive has also been a highlight of using this product. The team at dotCMS is quick and very knowledgeable of the product they're developing.

The backend can be unintuitive and unresponsive at times and the core software is missing some support for what we would consider standard user features. The documentation is outdated or incomplete in some respects. This wouldn't be a huge issue, but there also isn't a whole lot of organic support via other users building and sharing their experiences.

We used dotCMS to rebuild our affiliate site. It's primary function is make marketing materials for content we provide them with available. It also allows users at our affiliate to download and view company and industry-specific information. The benefit of using dotCMS for us was how much is already built into the core and how easy it is to communicate with the API in order to get our customers access to data that lives outside of the dotCMS build.

Bulk uploading - is a pretty neat feature that helped us launch bigger pieces of content.

our design system and having to build widgets from scratch. There are a lot more intuitive features in a WordPress or square space site manager that are not enabled. Would love to have focal point focusing on the end-user. We struggled big-time with issues during the main content creation - with our widgets and pieces of content disappearing when we launched. That was super frustrating. We have also had issues with images not loading - and have had to re-load images 4+ times to get them to show up on the homepage.

It has helped us create pages faster and get products to market faster. On our previous CMS it required a lot of development time.

Simplicity, I've used other CMS programs such as Shopify, Magento, Wordpress etc and I found I was able to dive straight in and get started, the Velocity took me awhile to get my head around but with it's comparisons to Javascript it's helping me understand.

The updates, not being updated to the latest version (Which solves ALL the issues we initially had). I'm not happy we have to be upgraded one stage at a time 4.0 - 4.3 (test and the upgrade). I feel it's a waste of time and resource.

It's making it so all our users who are not developers can create web pages with ease, filling in data where required and utalising the Components in different ways to create a easier, quicker and more stable website.

I like the content creation process and the ability to easily place items in a page.

Lack of support for dynamic functionality

The ability to create full websites while giving a seamless content creation process.

dotCMS/our website supplier is very responsive when we have issues. Both are very transparent when it comes to challenging the current functionalities and adding new ones.

dotCMS has a tendency to make easy things complicated and has some issues with bugs. As we have high demands in regards to styling/formatting, using dotCMS is sometimes challenging.

We have to maintain a lot of different support sites at the same time and adapt content for each of them appropriately. dotCMS offers some elaborate yet accessible tools to address that.

It is fairly easy to learn basic functionality quickly.

Getting data out of dotCMS is complicated and needs a programmer.

Content management and data organization around our assets.

The headless cms is a nice feature, API integration

there are some bugs in the application. It can be less than user friendly for non-technical based users.

the code base is quite flexible under the hood so our team is able to handle a lot of client requests.

the user interface is very good and clear to user

push publishing is not good and needs improving

dynamic content personalistaion

I used an older version of dotCMS when I was a college student working in our communication office. I’d say I had average tech literacy and didn’t need extensive training, and it was easy enough to use. I don’t feel like I could get a website up and running myself with it. It looks like they’ve updated some of their interfaces though so that may not be the case anymore. Overall, pretty good product but not my first thought for website builder.

Challenge to see myself building whole website rather just being contributor.

Was good as an enterprise solution and framework. The website looks really good

Nothing... The history feature I guess is somewhat useful to see where content has been updated but that's about it.

Publishing is so temperamental. Everything breaks down the minute you want to publish something. I've never worked with a CMS that is this difficult to use.

I can see how push publishing to AUTH and then PROD eliminates room for error. But the AUTH environment often doesn't depict how content will look like on PROD so it's a stab in the dark.