Freedom CMS vs Squarespace

• Users and Access. Freedom has a great system setup to create unlimited users for the back office & full control over access. Do you want someone to only be able to access News, Events & Web Pages? - No problem. Do you want someone to be able to access everything except the Billing Module - No problem.Do you want someone to be able to access/edit ONLY the "Volunteer" category of Web Pages - Great! No Problem.
• Custom Modules. Freedom has a great amount of pre-built modules that do a lot of great things. Custom Modules, however, takes that to the next level. Anything you can dream of for your client's needs, can be created as a custom module. You, as the developer, have full control over what fields should be created for a custom module, what types of fields are they (text, radio buttons, WYSIWYG editor, image, etc), and how those field values are used in a lister of ALL items added to that Custom Module & how they are used in a detailed view of one specific item in that Custom Module.
• Hosting & Security. All Freedom sites include the licensing & hosting with easy to update Domain module for us developers to change the virtual host domain at any time.
• Features and Usability. All of the modules offered (including custom) & the whole interface of the CMS as a whole is hands down one of the easiest to use & intuitive CMS's that I have come across. Our clients (and us) love it.

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• Blogs - it provides an easy way to create the blogs, as well as a nice way to organize and sort blogs so that our customers can identify what they want to read before having to slog through everything on the site.
• User Interface - we have a saying: "what if you get hit by a bus?" If the entire operation shuts down because one person is gone, then the program is not worth it. Squarespace's interface is something anyone can learn in the span of 10 minutes, and with a little bit of guidance, you will never be left alone in case your web master is away.
• Pricing and Domain - this was not only easy to set up, but painless and straightforward. No hidden costs, and no sudden expenses that we didn't expect.

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• Cost and Licensing. Personally, we've never had a problem with this with our clients - we sell the value and our clients understand the value of using Freedom over other CMS options. We also will only work in Freedom - so our clients don't have an option. However, there is a monthly cost to license the CMS - which also includes the hosting. Yes, there are free options for CMS's out there - however even with those you have to find hosting. Accrisoft has different tiers of server sizes and monthly costs accordingly depending on you or your clients needs.
• Minimal Themes. Accrisoft only has a small amount of themes available to deploy with your site. They probably have around 10-15, pretty modern and responsive themes that you can use to start a new Freedom installation with, however, if you typically deploy and install themes for your clientele - instead of custom sites, Freedom may not be for you. As you know some other CMS's can have hundreds or thousands of themes. With that said, they allow their solution providers to create themes and use site backups to transfer exact copies of existing sites to another Freedom server. So if you create your own starting templates you can always deploy and start with something - not completely from scratch. I personally don't think this is a problem at all, but am mentioning it for others to know about.

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• I am not a fan of the embedded code. For third party programs, I have to search them for a direct HTML code in order to put it on the site, as their embedded link only creates a hyperlink. Something you can do easier in the text blocks.
• More reliable integration with social media. I have to resync the school's Instagram account weekly. We manage multiple, so I can't just leave it logged in. One time it displayed my own personal account without confirming.
• I would also like a more expansive CMS on par with Wordpress, but that is a preference, not a negative.

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• Better Customer Service. Everything in Freedom is standardized & easy for our clients to use. It's also easy for our support team to handle any support tickets because there's not a thousand different plugins for one thing, e.g. 1000 different form plugins, there is just ONE forms module that is identical to all of our clients.
• Increased Employee Efficiency. All of our development team is unified within Accrisoft Freedom. Any one of us can jump into another's project at any time and know how it's built and how to update or edit anything. Even with custom modules that one developer might not have known another created. Freedom is very intuitive and for example, to continue with custom modules point, all custom modules are built using the same process, so it's easy for developers to edit and know exactly how it's working in minutes - even if they haven't seen it before.
• High Client Retention Rate. We have only lost a handful of clients throughout the many years we've been using Freedom CMS with our clients. And the majority of those that we did lose, were for reasons not related to the website - or beyond their control - e.g. a parent company insisting to use the parent company's CMS solution, even though our direct clients/contacts wanted to stay with us and told us later that they wished they could go back to Freedom because of how much easier and better it was.

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• I've been able to land clients that weren't sure about my design skills after they were able to check out my portfolio.
• The cost is pretty low, so I easily make much more than I invest into the services provided.

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