Accrisoft Freedom vs. Sitecore Digital Experience Platform

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

Sitecore offers Content Hub with Product Content Management and Content Management Platform. The Digital Experience Platform and Content Hub can both host structured content and publish the finalized version to Experience Edge. Both platforms offer different ways to manage content. During a technical and business evaluation, the evaluation panel must understand the difference between a Content Modelling focused approach, or a layout management focused approach. Sitecore Digital Experience Platform is also best not to be used to host many files and images in the Media Library. That responsibility should be offloaded to a digital asset management company like Sitecore Content Hub DAM. The technology evaluation panel must also understand how to work with a Headless CMS, where the HEAD needs to be hosted, and the costs associated with the HEAD. Composable DXP is fantastic, but everyone must understand the various cost components. Marketers and the data team will need to go into the CDP and Personalize the platform with an excellent understanding of how a composable "installation" works. All the Martech vendors have similar challenges that data and development teams need to work through with a full experience. Any CDP/analytics platform will, at some stage, require further data enrichment from other sources. Understanding the Sitecore Search features and limitations is also essential.

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

• Comprehensive Solution: Sitecore offers a fully integrated suite of products that cover the full spectrum of DXP capabilities, including search, personalization experimentation and more, delivering a complete composable DXP solution for customers.
• Beyond Headless: XM Cloud provides more than just headless capabilities, featuring in-built tools like authoring host, page editor, etc., enabling faster and more powerful implementations.
• Focus on AI: Sitecore has now got an excellent AI offering called Stream; it looks promising; however, it would be too early to give feedback on the same.
• Customization: Sitecore's backend is highly customizable, allowing for deep modifications through pipelines and patch configurations.

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

• Experience Editor is a little old fashioned and sometimes slow to use.
• Bulk operations in the Content Editor
• Sitecore serialization is should be part of the Content Editor to provide visual reference for items which are serialized and will be overwritten by future deployments similar to what Unicorn does so well

Incentivized

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

Sitecore has proven that it can deliver on its promise of a robust, reliable enterprise CMS solution with plenty of features. Also, they keep updating it with more and better features. Now that we are highly trained on it we have started on getting the most out of it and we plan to keep doing more of that in the future.

Once you learn how to use the platform and can put a solid strategy in place to manage it long-term, it becomes a lot easier to use. The tricky part is working with resources who are familiar with the platform to navigate some of the common implementation and configuration pitfalls. Although Sitecore has worked very hard to overcome some of these from their earlier product versions by creating wizards and improving their support documentation, at the end of the day it is still a very complex and powerful system that needs to be implemented carefully in order to foster the best possible user experience for authors. So it could be rated very usable or not usable at all based on how much planning took place and the quality of the implementation.

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

1. Customized software development & maintenance. 2. Technology Consulting - Consulting-based services for technology solutions data engineering or cloud solutions. 3. Used for tapping into multiple data sources such as CRM and marketing automation systems and, creating automated data extracts with a high-end visual representation of data. 4. Implemented for scheduling an existing report to automatically refresh and be delivered to specific users at a specific regular interval.

Incentivized

Sitecore captures and remembers every single interaction your customers and prospects have in any part of the system, allowing you to build comprehensive, ever-learning profiles of each individual. From email marketing, to social media, to online shopping, Sitecore remembers where each interaction left off so you can automatically continue the conversation. Sitecore helps you manage your content for each and every experience your customers enjoy. Customize what content you want and the system will take care of how it's displayed.

Make sure you work with a partner that can help you take advantage of the entire platform. Specifically we see a lot of customers not taking advantage of Sitecore DMS and thus missing a huge opportunity. Sitecore is a platform that is meant to be constantly optimized and improved upon.

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

Sitefinity is improving but at the time of decision making it had nothing that could compare with the A/B testing and personalisation features that Sitecore offers. This was a key differentiator and ultimately ensured Sitecore was purchased. WordPress isn't really comparable and isn't within our technology stack, which is mostly Microsoft.

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

• ROI depends on what features the customer wants to leverage from Sitecore. Sitecore is not just a CMS. It's CEP platform which comes with Analytics, Personalization, A/B Testing, and Email for marketers modules etc., out of the box.
• Based on my experience some of the customers lean towards third party services. This is primarily due to lack of the understanding of these features. If a customer leverages these out of the box features ROI will be high. It depends on how much is being [sent] to third parties services.
• Sitecore has very good accelerators in the market. These accelerators allows you to create response sites very quickly. If a simple campaign site takes 50K to build the site may save at least 50% of that cost. Examples of site accelerators are Brainjocks, Keystone, Cognifide etc.

Incentivized