Accrisoft Freedom vs. Paligo

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.

Incentivized

Paligo is particularly well suited for developing similar document sets for multiple products or product lines. It is not a page layout application, so don't expect the same capabilities as popular applications for graphics-heavy documentation. With some up-front time developing good layouts, however, Paligo does manage to create very usable PDF output for customer-facing documents.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The review mode is super convenient. Comparing a snapshot of the previous versions with the current one clearly outlines the respective changes and reduces the necessary content to review tremendously.
• The option to reuse text fragments is another handy feature. Text fragments will be updated whenever the original text fragment is altered is also extremely helpful.
• Managing a content's structure was never easier. An intuitive drag & drop functionality allows you to design your document's structure however you like.
• You can also fork content, in addition to reuse text fragments. This is another helpful option that no longer requires you to create repetetive chapters over and over.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The amount of CSS/JS required to customize a site's appearance can be cumbersome
• Product documentation can be lacking, specifically with integrations; in some cases, support offered no real help when trying to solve a problem with an integrated service
• Some features require extensive development experience to use, which can sometimes be an obstacle to less-experienced team members

Incentivized

We switched to WordPress; it was out of my control.

Paligo single-sources beautifully. Allows for customization. Has the best translation features. Has the best support services.

Incentivized

Generally, I'm very happy with Paligo and the productivity gains that I get from using it. There are a few arbitrary limitations on structure, and when applying conditional formatting, that I don't really understand. Unlinking / editing reused text uses this broadly inscrutible colour-coding that I just hate. It would be nice to double-click a component, make edits, then respond to a popup asking if I want to confirm the edit for all linked content, or unlink this instance. Likewise converting from an informal topic insertion to duplicates of its raw contents.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

All the support requests I've submitted have been resolved in one way or another. Sometimes it takes some back and forth, which is to be expected. This is where being on a different continent becomes a drawback. Since we became Enterprise users, we've also had an additional level of help and support from a dedicated account manager in the US, and the resolutions seem to come more quickly

Incentivized

Everything went well

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We moved from Flare to Paligo. One of the main reasons was the fact that Paligo is a cloud product. Collaboration with anyone outside of our team was more difficult with Flare. Also, maintaining a server for Flare content was going to become an issue, and overall I felt the Flare desktop product was prone to errors and issues. The flexibility of assigning Paligo licenses was a huge factor, as was the stability of the cloud platform.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• I am not involved in the financial decisions for my company regarding Paligo; the decision to migrate our content to this environment predates my hiring. However, I know that the migration effort from WordPress to Paligo was an initially heavy lift, but any content migration effort would be. I believe that ultimately, getting our content out of WordPress was a positive move, and I look forward to seeing what Paligo will help us accomplish in the future. Sorry, no hard numbers from me. :)