Accrisoft Freedom vs. RWS Tridion Sites

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

Love the product and I really like how we use it for public sites. The only negative aspect is that it is just hard to find Tridion devs that understand the tool, grasp .net, react, and understand the blueprint, etc.

• 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

• Makes it easy to spin up a new site quickly
• Allows for numerous users to work on the same site without conflicting with each other's changes
• Allows you to unpublish changes or revert to old versions if you make a mistake
• Allows you to time publishing actions (for example, you can set it to happen overnight)

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

• Tridion is complicated in enough ways that it makes it difficult to train new users. Therefore, we have to limit the number of people with access to the system since we have not yet implemented Workflow.
• When something goes wrong (items fail to publish, or there is unexpected behavior with components), there is little explanation provided that would point us in the right direction to troubleshoot. As a result, content Authors and Editors have to frequently ask for IT assistance.

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

I am giving this a semi-high rating because we have already got Tridion up and running and we are still in the process of moving the sites over to Tridion. It is unlikely we will be moving things to a new CMS AGAIN in the near future as the cost to get Tridion was high.

The editor user interface is very user friendly and in-site editing makes simple updates fast and easy. The extensibility of Tridion is a big plus and the ability to add our own options into the default Tridion interface helps us integrate with external systems. Finally, the user permissions and security system helps us deploy it within our large organization.

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

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

It is a nuclear missile compared to the other handguns and knives on the market today. But it also requires nuclear technicians and expertise that a handgun doesn't require. Do you need to decimate your competition and you have the investment capabilities necessary to put a nuclear missile into the sky? Then definitely do it. Especially if you need a very good multi-lingual blueprint provider like Tridion.

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

• SDL is a very complex system. Creating custom components by external vendors turned out to be expensive.
• The learning curve is very slow, so training takes a lot of time and cost.
• The revamped corporate site looks clean, modern, and is mobile-friendly.

Incentivized