Likelihood to Recommend The only thing I believe Accrisoft Freedom is not as well suited is for large e-commerce sites. Accrisoft Freedom actually has an E-commerce module and can do products and online sales, however if this is the majority of what your business does (or your clients' businesses), I would recommend an E-commerce focused CMS. For almost all other circumstances I can think of though, I would recommend Accrisoft Freedom - ma and pa shops on up to a corporation.
Read full review As a true content management system it is great for site and content creation. It does need some help when it comes to adding functionality for using modern code systems that require server side scripting. For a marketing or public company site, it is an ideal CMS. For a SAAS type site, there could be many road blocks.
Read full review Pros Hosting and maintenance is taken care of. Due to it being proprietary software, everything is built to work together. Simple to use. Basic functionality for websites is built in without having to dig through thousands of potential options. Development is straightforward...no backend languages required. So if someone wants a unique layout for a portfolio, it's very simple to add a new content type and build the new layout using basic html and css. Read full review Easy to get going for a business that has tons of content they need to manage. Clickability offers development and design services so you don't really even need IT. No need to worry about server uptime, storage, bandwidth, etc you have all the reports at your fingers for what you are using. Simple template and content design system, easy to expand and add. Powerful CMS and settings with a design and programming guide provided. AkAMAI and Limelight CDN's can be used for powerful and fast loading in many regions. Debugging tools to see how long specific templates and content load is exceptional. One can narrow down that this specific template ran X number of times and took this look and had to be stopped at X number of time due to exceeding set limits. Having a built in Dev, Staging, Production environments for testing makes seeing new features and how they will integrate into your site seamless. Read full review Cons Their preview setup for reviewing page changes prior to pushing them live is not good. You basically have to push things live to see how they will look, then go back and tweak it, while the changes in progress are live on the site. They need a sandbox, or a better preview feature within the backend so you dont have to keep pushing changes live to test out functionality. Integration with outside tools is non existent. Instead of trying to force people to use their modules or features it would make much more sense to more easily integrate with leading tools in niche spaces. The UI is pretty old. It could use a big refresh. Things like drag and drop builders and functionality should be standard these days. This is also a plus for non tech savvy users as it keeps their page structures to what works without letting people tinker. But if you want to tinker and be a higher end user Freedom isn't the best bet. Read full review Choosing ad size/placement should be easier than it is. Now, I have to re-create the whole thing. When you "save" anything a pop-up comes up that is redundant. Ad list only shows a limited number. It's not until you click on one and cancel it out, then you can see all the listings. A bit tedious and redundant. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We switched to WordPress; it was out of my control.
Read full review As mentioned in the last questions we are going to use a competitor brand next year. I think the issues are trying to find and fix problems from the previous programer. The steep learning curve and lack of mobile and social sharing capabilities. Things that I like are the strength of the programing which comes with a trade off. The ease for those who don't know markup to make updates to the website. Clickability isn't the easiest and can be difficult to find the content that you are interested in. We will not be using it next year.
Read full review Usability My experience with Clickability has been mostly positive but there are a few areas for improvement. It's generally easy to learn and use on a daily basis. I can move fast and do my job with speed with needed. But there is some clunky functionality with targeting and page building. My rating would be higher if some improvements were made.
Read full review Support Rating This rating is based on personal experience only. I believe majority of people would say their support is top notch & 10/10. The only reason I am personally am giving it lower is because I consider my self a much more advanced user of Freedom than their typical Solution Provider developers. Because I am advanced, I troubleshoot my own issues pretty in-depth before I even contact Accrisoft support. Therefore sometimes I feel it takes longer to get the researched & specific answer I need vs. a simple support question would.
Read full review I found that some agents were better then others, usually you have an account representative and that I would consider level 1 support. To get really complex answers you need to talk with an engineer.
Read full review Implementation Rating Overall, it was pretty seemless to switch the sites over.
Read full review Alternatives Considered In all honesty, we have been moving away from Accrisoft Freedom due to its lack of customizability. We as an agency generally prefer open source solutions since our client base primarily consists of those looking for a more custom solution that can be built off of in the future. While yes, these tend to need more care and attention, they have benefited us more.
Read full review Many of other content management systems similar to WordPress need custom installation. The server costs and upgrades quickly add up. Clickability while expensive, eliminated the overhead of managing all the dependency needs for a CMS. Clickability also works with its clients to understand the business needs and proposes the solutions accordingly. They have a good support team.
Read full review Return on Investment This was the first CMS we had at our company so hard to say positive or negative impact. Prior to this CMS there was a static site that html files had to be ftp to a company to have the site updated. So from that standpoint it made updating the site much less expensive. Compared to a tool like Wordpress this is much more secure and easier to manage, but since we outsource that portion of it to the company that built the site we dont realize those gains. Read full review I know a big positive is the fact that it is always-on. We are the leading news corporation for our state, and in many markets, nationwide. We pride ourselves on our strong ethics in the community and thus need to exude reliability to maintain the trust of these communities. Having a website fail periodically erodes that reliable perception. It has allowed different areas of the company to approach our team and work in a cohesive manner. Dave Sell Manager, Interactive Development / Software+Web+Cloud Engineer
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