Sitecore Experience Platform Reviews: 3.9/5 — Good for the Price

Because Sitecore is such a powerful platform on which you can develop whatever you can dream up, every time we've said "I wish we the CMS could do [whatever]," we've realized we could develop or configure it to do just about anything we want. This is a great benefit of the product. However, that also means that we are having to do a lot more development and tweaking than we have with other CMSes. You can do just about anything with it, but you will have to plan to develop it: templates, mobile responsiveness, SEO implementation, workflows, etc. We also like many of the advanced marketing analytics, campaign, and personalization capabilities and are looking forward to using these features – but we have not utilize them much yet. These were some of the features that led us to choose the platform. Note: We are new to Sitecore and in the midst of transitioning a large University website and intranet to it, so my comments are coming from the perspective of a relatively new customer (≈ 1 yr owning the product). But I experience with many other commercial and open source CMSes over the last 20 years, so feel I have a good understanding of how the product compares to others.

There can be a steep learning for Sitecore, especially for those coming from WordPress or other CMSes targeted at a simplified content editor experience. The application seems to be making strides in the area of user-friendliness, however. The 8.0 update and Launchpad UI is much less intimidating for new users. But the Content Editor experience can still be intimidating for new users and the Experience Editor can also be complex and confusing for inexperienced editors. Also, because Sitecore is a proprietary, commercial, enterprise-class platform, it is not as easy to find and acquire plug-ins/extensions and some of the best ones available can be pricey. Likewise Sitecore developers and content editors with experience on the platform are also harder to find (though a good .NET developer should be able to learn Sitecore quickly). Sitecore seems to be gaining momentum, however, so this may be changing.

Moving public website and creating completely intranet on the platform for a mid-size, private university. Approximately 5,000 pages being built across the two sites, coordinating with around 500 business users.

It's extremely powerful. Sitecore has functionality to allow a large company to have multiple users making modifications with intricate security and permissions. You can also have multiple languages and globalisation of a website for use with global companies. Adding new pages is easy, along with editing and making modifications to existing pages. From this aspect, it's pretty quick and easy for someone to learn how to modify their website.

Although Sitecore is powerful, it's also clunky and way too much of a system for a smaller company to use. I have used several different CMS systems, and Sitecore is probably one of the most challenging. If you don't use a process with several steps for adding, editing and approving content, you are left with several seemingly unnecessary steps to complete. Adding a new page or image takes several clicks. Depending on the browser used, I have seen issues where certain functionality isn't accessible, or areas of the admin portal are greyed out. This could of course be only in the environment I use, but it does seem a bit finicky at times.

We have a business website, and using Sitecore allows us to modify and edit content. We use a third party to make the customisations of the site, but it is hosted by our company. To be honest I am not sure if any real benefits have been realised yet. There are still too many frustrations. Its not that Sitecore is a bad product, it's perhaps too much of a product for what we truly need.

Sitecore has a lot of capabilities, some of which we are not currently leveraging at my company.

Sitecore is not extremely intuitive to use.

Allowing our company to have a reasonable public interfact to help educate on what we do. Allows the communications team to do most of the updating without needing intervention by IT.

Good CMS for websites with a lot of data and variable elements. Can be used to create sites with multiple languages.

Based on my experience with other content management systems, creating new content elements from the templates feels like an unnecessarily long process. Plus, actually entering in data isn't the most fluid process.

We use Sitecore for website creation.

I like the ability to create personalized content for website visitors and customer profiles

EXM. EXM. EXM! We're on 8.2 and honestly it should not even be included

Actually I find that using EXM creates more problems than it solves. We have issues uploading and indexing lists every day

What I like best is the potential for personalization and experimentation.

Takes a while to learn and apply all of the potential of the platform.

We're very early in our experience journey but very hopeful to do more personalization.

the personalization capabilities, AB testing

our upgrades have taken...years, it's not super user friendly if you're not technical

solving customer problems

Our entire company is using it so it will best in the long run.

The user experience has been very difficult for Content Authors/Editors. I don't like having both a content editor and an experience editor. The CMS we had before sitecore was much easier.

Serving up Process Content to our Agency Owners and Staff and Sales Leadership to enhance Customer Experience and Business Owner success.

Honestly I am not qualified to write a formal review at current stage, as we are just at the POC stage of implementation sitecore as the new CMS solution in our product, that's the reason I give a Neutral rate (no good or no better at this point from my point of view, not product ). We had XP1 installation and development training. Few things I find good about sitecore are: 1) It seem pretty easy to create and publish content and content structure 2) The multiple sites and versioning and multi-language support 3) If using .Net framework to build the layout, it seems pretty straightforward 4) The personalization capability seems very promising.

The whole Sitecore seems lag in the header-less offering. The installation, deployment and scalebility seems kind of having too much complexity. As it could involves a lot of database instances, search indexes to scale, it only resides in windows environment, not flexible in custom integration, not easy to containerize etc. The JSS as the web service offering is still a big question mark in my mind

We are mainly to use Sitecore XP as the new CMS over existing open source CMS (drupal), so far we are still in POC stage, so no real benefits has been realized yet.

I like how comprehensive all of the features are for the platform and the ability to connect to all of your professional applications. It is clear that this is for mid to large companies that want to make the digital experience core to their strategy.

How developer-necessary the platform is in order to enable all of the functionality. I understand that you will always need to invest additional time and resources to get the most out of any tech investment, but it seems that a lot of these features could be a bit more OOTB or Sitecore-directed implementation and that partners/developers would be needed to really customize and extend the platform, not just to get you up an running. We are still stuck with a system that really only operates as a CMS and that is due to a poor partner decision.

We have A LOT of content and we service many different industries and services. We are using Sitecore XP to deliver that content to all of the relevant audiences and create recirculation opportunities for our content based on content-type, industry/service tags, etc. We have also used it to help connect multiple separate sites on the platform for a more cohesive experience.

I like the flexibility the platform has which allows us to deliver on our clients needs.

If you are planning on using the cloning feature it can impact performance on content entry servers.

It frees up companies to focus on a better user experiences by alleviating the difficulties of managing content.

Flexibility. No limitations on technical possibilities.

Stuck in promises, towards partners and their customers. Most actual example (on the project I work or) is the release and follow-up on ScForms. The functional limitations that were present at launch are (for the most part) still there.

Commercial- and UX improvements on web- and e-comm projects.

The platform is great for large websites with many pages. It is secure with options for user permissions which is great for organizations with lots of employees.

The backend isn't intuitive for non-technical people and there are glitches with the Media Manager. There is no visual editor so the design feels somewhat limited.

Website management

The file structure is simple and organized and the locking featuring while editing is great.

It doesn’t show thumbnails of photos that are uploaded and live.

We host our website in sitecore. I do like it’s feature of only so many users allowed on at a time.

We've been able to make it do almost anything we want it to.

The menus are complicated and hard to navigate

We want powerful web administration for the best price.

Customizable for the most part without much effort

The user interface isn't always easy to use

Website

The capability to make changes to any portion of the site

Not allowing CSS (may just be our version) lack of tech support and FAQ

CMS

SiteCore is a big machine. This tool is one of the heaviest and expandable CMS (Content Management System) I've been working on. Everything car be done but requires most of the time specific developments. It means that a SiteCore project costs a lot. If your Company has a Website Project, eCommerce, Corporate and so on, SiteCore is an option. What I like the best in SiteCore is its flexibility. Nothing is fixed. Your solution can always be improved through many assistants. And if standard CMS features doesn't fill your needs, then your can explore Marketing extension, search engine optimisation options, emailing system add-ons and much more. The roles management is also very very powerful. You can fine tune each profile or manage them by group. One of the best feature we are using is the font end page editor. In it, a user with the correct rights will be able to place, within an predefine layout, components in different place-holders. It's very very convenient as soon as you need to add new pages with specific contents. To finish, i would say that SiteCore is not easy to learn to use but it serve the purpose. There are too many features to being able to describe them, but the key I appreciate are are there.

It's complex, not really user friendly and not easy to learn. Its an heavy tool, meaning that when you want to deploy a SiteCore solution, it can't be done like if you want to deploy a Wordpress Blog. It requires a lot of parameters, a dedicated IT company to manage the dev project, a team in your company to handle the project as well, and time. The probably most disliked aspect of SiteCore is its user interface. Old fashion, and too complex, it's a real cons for users used to do everything on nice interfaces. There are pros and cons, but SiteCore should be considered only for big Websites and for companies with large internal IT and Communication team. Lastly, the cost. It's not free at all. In addition to the IT external company needed to setup the initial solution as well as to do any update, the SiteCore licence itself is expensive.

We had to find a solution that allows us to publish thousands of contents through several main websites as well as in different language. To stay flexible, we have imagine a Tagging solution that let us, basically, specifying in SiteCore that we want to display in "This" page contents tagged with this keyword and this keyword. An easy to understand the concept is to imagine a recipient page, used to display news on our french office website. SiteCore will dig into our silo of content and will display all the ones tagged "News, French, ...". This very flexible approach requires to be strict and rules on how to use tags. This is an internal process.

I like the customization and the enterprise feel. Seems like there is a lot of expansion capability.

I don't like how long it takes to do everything. Compared to other CMS platforms I've used, it is very difficult to navigate. Publishing a page a long series of steps for example. Everything takes a long time to do.

Landing page for original content - eCommerce capability and online product category.

The ability to tag pages with data that aggregates to create a user profile. It really helped us with persona targeting and guiding Sales conversations

Sitecore is a pretty sophisticated platform and there isn't much support if you aren't Sitecore certified. We'd always have to bug our developers to put in tickets for us.

We're definitely able to personalize a user's web experience with Sitecore, which has resulted in a lift in engagement and overall conversions

Experience editor makes it really easy to change content and personalize experiences.

The product doesn't work at a fundamental level sometimes.

Content personalization, digital experiences and content design

It seems Powerful for the Digital team and analytics

it needs a strong technical team with knowledge of website development, Accessibility, Digital Analytics, and Strong Sitecore development and experience, to be able to implement a proper website. We have A development team, it was a very cumbersome process to implement the site, updating templates was very difficult for them. The digital team does not have access to create new Templates and ....

create website

The breadth of the offerings and possibilities are pretty awesome.

Working in the platform can be agonizing. Very slow and tedious.

Company website, conversion, personalization, remarketing, email marketing.

It's a content management system and it is very easy to use (in my opinion).

It can be very slow and it's not easy to use compared to other CMS platforms. The back-end is very old looking as well. It should be easy to get to the pages, but you have to keep clicking and go through a maze to be able to go where you want. HTML editors usually have some color in text, however on sitecore there is no color so it's hard to see your code.

The only benefit is that it's a content management system.

I like that you can update all pages of your site in one place.

It is constantly freezing and glitching. If you do not save every few minutes you lose all your work. There are a lot of features that should be easy, but instead require back-end work. The setup itself is not intuitive or user friendly at all.

Website page hosting

That you could find agencies that worked with it and also that you could find tutorials on how to update the website since it is popular.

I disliked the fact that we would update content and most of the time the formatting would get messed up. We had to learn some basic "tricks" and code in order to try to figure it out but it was very frustrating if we wanted to give some content updates to someone new who didn't know that Sitecore had issues. Also, it was rigid and we wanted to make things look a lot better but we were stuck in our template.

It was the back end to our Woodruff Arts Center website. The benefit is that we needed a website and this fit the purpose.

I think that Sitecore could be a great platform for a minimalist site.

Sitecore is very expensive and the base model just doesn't cover what you need. We constantly had to add modules onto what we bought, the implementation was horrible, slow responses, and the email platform was HORRIBLE! They claim the product is drag and drop, but that isn't true. it constantly freezes and has hiccups.

Trying to provide a very tailored customer experience to visitors.

I suppose if your developers are VERY skilled at configuring Sitecore, if your editors can live with the editorial experience, and if your business doesn't care about the monolithic construct that is Sitecore, it is sort of practical to have everything under one roof. Provided of course that it works better for you than a best-of-breed, composable approach.

Most of it, I'm afraid. First and foremost I truly loathe the lack of editor focus displayed by the product. Even when you go for (and spend countless hours developing) an in-page-editing experience, the editors are confused by the mix of in-page/WYSIWYG and panels brought in from the Sitecore backoffice for picking content/media/you name it. And if you rely purely on backoffice editing, things go from bad to worse. The backoffice does not cater at all for editors. It is very functionally driven, and there are seemingly no useful extension points for tailoring the editorial experience, i.e. to create custom editors for complex editorial needs. I also really dislike the monolithic approach of suite-based products. I have yet to see it create more value than hand-picking products that suit your business needs perfectly, and stitching them together in a composable architecture. The deployment and required infrastructure for Sitecore is an absolute nightmare, compared to the alternatives - particularly if you compose an architecture based primarily on SaaS products instead. Developer productivity is quite low in comparison to the alternatives.

Sitecore solves the same problems as any other suite-based product, namely having everything under one roof. This however comes with the price of complete vendor lock-in and making you work for the product/the way the product wants you to work, instead of picking products that work for you and in the way you want to work.

It is a powerful tool that can support global sites. Great multi-lingual capabilities and like the .NET synergies. Good partner network.

Once you are a client, there is little to no support. Sitecore as a company is very hard to communicate with and our reps have turned over three times already. Very hard to do deploys and our current site has performance issues that are difficult to solve.

Have created a global, multi-lingual, multi-tenant site with hundreds of content authors around the world.

Allows us to display content based on on store location. We often have different amenities offered so it makes for a better guest experience if we can share more relevant information.

There are often too many different steps needed to make one small change.

Makes us more efficient