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 Best suited for large organizations where everyone knows how to deal with Java in an increasingly Java unfriendly world. Said organization should be willing to pay a huge price for a piece of dinosaur technology
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 Separate CMS environment publishes to remote server environment - great for security Highly scalable Full scale workflow allows for custom routing, approving, etc.. 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 One word: JAVA! We don't live in the 1990's anymore! An AJAX/DHTML environment seems a long time coming. Horrible end-user experience, learning curve. Our end users' inability to easily use the archaic, Java-based interface, means they send the web developer their content requests. This creates a huge bottleneck and completely defeats the purpose of a CMS. Image mangement and integration with content is aweful and time consuming. An image processing tool called ImedImage was developed for Percussion at one point, and left completely stagnant with very little support. Implementation is extremely complicated, given the complexity of the system. Sure, scalability is a good thing, but there is very little out-of-the box function. Don't expect to implement a site as quickly as with other CMS platforms. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We switched to WordPress; it was out of my control.
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 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 No contest. I can't wait to get off of Percussion CMS.
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 We are locked into Percussion CMS simply due to the expense and complexity of migrating to another solution (and the lack of time and budget to do so). I long for the day when I am no longer required to support Percussion CMS, to say the least. Read full review ScreenShots — —