Freedom CMS vs Squarespace

• 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.

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• Easy to create visually appealing designs using the gridded drag and drop and preset formatting options/ themes
• Maintains consistent design elements across your whole site - which you can change at a high level with one click and automatically updates globally
• Instantly updates content to your live site
• Great photo slideshow options and quotation box features

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• 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.

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• Images - Though the gallery function is robust and able to be customized, I find that when placing images directly on to page layouts, that the software often resizes or moves the image to suit the template. I often wish I could specify the image size directly with pixel dimensions to ensure that it does not move or resize itself, which can cause lower resolution images to look blurry.
• Sidebars - nearly all of Squarespace's current templates do NOT have the option for a sidebar included. This is something we love to use as it keeps the most current notices we wish to share visible on all pages without the need to edit every single page.
• Folders and Indexing - Squarespace currently does have the ability to make dropdown menus by creating folders of pages. However, having a subfolder is not supported. Nor can you nest an Index, a collection of galleries or images, inside of a folder, which means that our products cannot be subdivided into their product folders. It just means we have to have a separate place for them, and our visitors to the site must look in two different places to get the complete information on some items.

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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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• It's my primary platform for design, so hugely impactful!
• Improved client satisfaction, word of mouth referrals and return business.
• Improved project delivery based on ease of use and documentation.

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