Freedom is a cloud-based content management system from Accrisoft Corporation.Accrisoft Freedom specializes in membership and events management, social media, online marketing and e-commerce. Freedom is notable for its highly customizable databases, providing full control over HTML layout and complex filter and search capabilities.
$100
per month
OnSemble
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
The vendor presents OnSemble as more than an employee intranet that keeps everyone connected – but as a digital workplace that makes employees feel valued. OnSemble is designed to keep remote teams engaged, and acts as the culture champion for the organization. With no programming experience necessary, users get started with OnSemble's drag and drop interface that allows full use of imagination to design pages that reflect a company's culture, without entering a single line of code.…
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.
OnSemble is solving a lot of problems that our organization had prior to its implementation:
We can track communication readership.
We can engage with our fellow teammates through chats and recognition.
We have a central location for all job-related links.
We are just now delving into adding departmental pages so folks can communicate within their teams.
I'm not sure of a scenario where OnSemble wouldn't be appropriate - if you have a company that needs to centralize communication, documentation, and share ideas, it's an excellent choice.
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.
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.
As a user: it's pretty intuitive and the only thing holding a user back from getting everything out of it is a lack of curiosity. As an admin: it's not super intuitive. The training and the setup process are crucial to be able to use and maintain the portal, and we still sometimes have questions.
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.
I have always been pleased with my experiences with OnSemble's Support team. First, they have a great library of articles to help me study and guide for many of my questions. But when I cannot quite comprehend, or I "run into the wall", I can be assured that I'll be contacted quickly with a pleasant voice to work through whatever my question/issue may be. Kudos to OnSemble Support!
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.
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.
