Adobe Business Catalyst (Discontinued) vs. Constant Contact vs. WordPress

The service provision is good the accounts customer service is poor so I would struggle to give BC a better than average review, if only they could offer customers a better accounts service then the value would be much higher.

Constant Contact is an excellent tool for sending out flyers and newsletters. However, I feel the content's appearance is typically all the same. When I receive an email from Constant Contact, I can immediately identify it - the templates usually all look the same. When sending out communications with images, it is easy to use Constant Contact and link webpages. However, the email layout is always vertical and can get very lengthy. I prefer a more flip-book approach with options to flip the page.

Incentivized

Wordpress is a great solution for a website of nearly any type. It may not be as suitable if a fully custom solution or app is needed, and it does have some limitations when it comes to connecting it to external products (especially if the product doesn't have any support from a native system), and it does require a lot of testing. Multiple plugins in one install are common but also increase the risk of conflicts, and when those do occur, it can be exceptionally time-consuming and tedious to identify what is causing the issue. As third parties create many plugins, you're also at risk with each potential security breach, which needs to be kept in mind. I would be cautious to use WordPress to store any sort of sensitive PPI. That said, it's a wonderful, easily customizable solution for many, many different types of websites and can allow even inexperienced client users with low-tech knowledge to update basics.

Incentivized

• Probably one of the easiest e-commerce platforms to work in, it does take setup, but compared to a lot of other e-commerce solutions, this is probably the best one that I have seen that can be designed and implemented custom.
• Their template system works very well and allows you to create and re-use templates across Adobe Business Catalyst.
• Their pre-built modules are great, giving people a great way to use common web elements without having to use a plug-in or find some solution, it is simply built in and generally works exactly as you would expect.
• Adobe Business Catalyst is more of an all-around solution, providing elements that most smaller companies would have a hard time figuring out, since it includes the ability to build websites, send and track e-mails, analytics. It really is a powerful tool that would typically require a fair amount of coding knowledge and expertise but with the system already built, it can be easily modified and edited by those with limited or no coding knowledge at all.

Incentivized

• Market segmentation is great: my main segmentation is by region because that's how our sales team is divided.
• Lists: making customized email lists is easy and intuitive; the custom fields allow some flexibility in case our fields don't exactly line up with Constant Contact's.
• Campaigns: creating campaigns is quick and simple. I especially appreciate the 'resend to non-openers' option. I am constantly using this feature.
• Subject line generator: I like using the recommended subject lines. I'm able to plug in their recommended ideas, or sometimes, this feature helps me generate my own ideas.

• Easy to use User Interface
• Coding / Plugin Implementation is awesome
• There's always a solution available for the platform
• Security is easy to use and robust
• Implementation with 3rd party platforms, such as Google's variety of tools
• Can download and host on your own server or use their hosted servers

Incentivized

• Multi Client Management: The dashboard for managing multiple clients as a reseller is a little difficult to get to. There is also no very easy way for me to manage multiple clients at once. I have to log into and out of individual client accounts to do billing or management.
• Lack of Server support: There are certain server protocols and languages that are not supported using BC. For example I cannot build a custom php database and upload to BC. I am required to use their tools.

Incentivized

• It would be nice if we had more customizable options for emails - like moving around pictures and text boxes, rather than a set spot for everything to go.
• I would like it if multiple people could work on a document at one time. So if I'm in charge of graphics, I can get those updated while someone else is entering content, etc.

Incentivized

• WordPress breaks often so you need to have someone who understands how to troubleshoot, which can take time and money.
• Some plugins are easier to customize than others, for example, some don't require any coding knowledge while others do. This can limit your project if you are not a coder.
• WordPress can be easily hacked, so you also need someone who can ensure your sites are secure.

Incentivized

Actually with Business Catalyst there is no renewal; once you are a partner, you are a partner for as long as you like. It is an investment in your business not simply a product you purchase...and as an investment in partnership with Adobe, both are committed to each other's success.

There is no doubt that we are going to renew Constant Contact. We have not just invested a lot of time in learning and creating a great looking product but we have developed a strong database of information that allows us to track how we are doing for each newsletter. This supports our goals of creating products that residents desire and are excited to receive.

The complications we have and the lack of support. Every plugin has a differente team of support in charge and make one plugin work with the other one always affects the website performance. It's a thousand times better to have only one provider with all functionalities included unless you are an expert web developer or have a team dedicated to it

Incentivized

Overall it is a "plug and play" interface. The majority of the work is done in other software interfaces. Managing billing, user roles and custom reports are all that you need to manage in the actual BC user interface. For my business this is an incredible benefit as I have to leave my preferred software less.

Incentivized

There is always room for improvement. I don't know how they test their systems, but they should invite not-so computer savvy people to test it. If I, as an expert have problems, they need to think like the technophobe. Since I've used Constant Contact in the past as part of my former employment, I have not viewed any of the tutorials and just jumped in to work on my client's newsletter. With that said, I found some areas easy and some a bit cumbersome

Extremely easy to use and train users. It took very little time to get everyone trained and onboarded to start using WordPress. Anytime we had any issues, we were able to find an article or video to help out or we were able to contact support. The menu options are well laid out so it is easy to find what you are looking for.

Incentivized

very few issues with availability

Incentivized

No major problems in sending out the email campaigns and accessing the analytics

Incentivized

Anyone can visit WordPress.org and download a fully functional copy of WordPress free of charge. Additionally, WordPress is offered to users as open-source software, which means that anyone can customize the code to create new applications and make these available to other WordPress users.

Very few issues

Incentivized

The system seemed quite slow sometimes. Specifically, there was sometimes a delay in sends if it was during a high traffic period. There were time-outs when uploading new code for an email, and a lag in reporting analytics which was sometimes as long as 72 hours

Mostly, any performance issues have to do with using too many plugins and these can sometimes slow down the overall performance of your site. It is very tempting to start adding lots of plugins to your WordPress site, however, as there are thousands of great plugins to choose from and so many of them help you do amazing things on your site. If you begin to notice performance issues with your WordPress site (e.g. pages being slow to load), there are ways to optimize the performance of your site, but this requires learning the process. WordPress users can learn how to optimize their WordPress sites by downloading the WPTrainMe WordPress training plugin (WPTrainMe.com) and going through the detailed step-by-step WordPress optimization tutorials.

The support provided by Adobe is excellent. Though the knowledge base, forums, blogs and online chat questions most all answers can be found. In the event that you are unable to find an answer or you have a unique situation simply post a question to the forums. These forums are regularly monitored by Adobe and its users.

I think the overall support for Constant Contact has always been incredible; I have nothing negative to say. Our customer support representative was attentive, easy to understand, and very knowledgeable. I never felt like I wasn't a priority of his and my issues, while very small, were fixed in a very short time frame.

I give this rating, which I believe to be a great rating for a community based support system that's surrounding it. Most platforms and products have their own, and as WordPress does have their own team that help here and there, a lot of it's handled by community involvement with dedicated users who are experts with the system who love to help people.

Varies by the person providing training. High marks as it's incredibly easy to find experienced individuals in your community to provide training on any aspect of WordPress from content marketing, SEO, plugin development, theme design, etc. Less than 10 though as the training is community based and expectations for a session you find may fall short.

bcgurus.com kiyuco

Incentivized

It is very easy to find online resources to learn how to do just about anything with WordPress.

Pretty easy to do

Incentivized

Implementation is very easy for someone who wants to send out the “batch and blast” type newsletters. If you want to use their templates with no customizations, the product works fine. However, the more customizations you get into involving link color, etc, that’s where things can get tricky for someone who may not be familiar with coding

WordPress is not a great solution if you have: 1) A larger site with performance / availability requirements. 2) Multiple types of content you want to share - each with its own underlying data structure. 3) Multiple sites you need to manage. For very small sites where these needs are not paramount, WordPress is a decent solution

As far as the CMS for BC goes, there is none out there that compares. In the past we have utilized Joomla, Wordpress, Mambo, Drupal, Concrete 5 and others. None of them were as easy to use and train on that Adobe's Business Catalyst. Our alternative to BC is WordPress when our clients want a less expensive solution. For the most part that works OK but we have had issues with plugin incompatibility among other issues. We lost at least two clients because of similar issues. The other great part about BC's solution is that we can still work with our favorite site creation tool - Dreamweaver. The whole process continues to be more and more simplified with added features to the system. No other solution (that we've found) offers such an easy way to create custom web sites that are easily editable by our clients.

Incentivized

Constant Contact is much more intuitive for people who are not tech-savvy. Also, while sendgrid offered more options in it's drag and drop interface, it displayed differently across different email clients, which made it very cumbersome to use. It also took much longer to upload contact lists and it was harder to manage existing contacts. Performance in sendgrid was much slower as well, and the Preview feature was quite buggy. Our team initially chose sendgrid because of the integration options that it's API offered, but we ultimately switched to Constant Contact because it was much easier to build campaigns and better suited our requirements.

WordPress isn't as pretty or easy to use as certain competitors like Jimdo, Squarespace or HubSpot, but it makes up for it with its affordability, familiarity and the ability to find quality outside help easily. The same can't be said for certain competitors, as you might need to find an expert and it could get costly.

Incentivized

It's easy to build small sites or large sites and there is lots of templating.

Incentivized

Very reliable in sending email campaigns and controlling the recipients so that no contact is sent the same email more than once, even if they are on a resent list

Incentivized

WordPress is completely scalable. You can get started immediately with a very simple "out-of-the box" WordPress installation and then add whatever functionality you need as and when you need it, and continue expanding. Often we will create various WordPress sites on the same domain to handle different aspects of our strategy (e.g. one site for the sales pages, product information and/or a marketing blog, another for delivering products securely through a private membership site, and another for running an affiliate program or other application), and then ties all of these sites together using a common theme and links on each of the site's menus. Additionally, WordPress offers a multisite function that allows organizations and institutions to manage networks of sites managed by separate individual site owners, but centrally administered by the parent organization. You can also expand WordPress into a social networking or community site, forums, etc. The same scalability applies to web design. You can start with a simple design and then scale things up to display sites with amazing visual features, including animations and video effects, sliding images and animated product image galleries, elements that appear and fade from visitor browsers, etc. The scaling possibilities of WordPress are truly endless.

• As someone who uses it on behalf of other clients, our ROI with BC is definitely positive. We needed a mid-range CMS without huge licensing costs to satisfy mid-range clients who have some dynamic needs but doesn't need the expense or liability of enterprise level products. Without it we would have lost possible customers or taken bigger hits on projects because of the costs involved with satisfying their mid-level needs
• Our clients are all usually very positive about the BC platform and are able to use it themselves which lessens our Support time/cost.
• To use the Web App element,. which we do on almost every site, you need to pay for the highest plan. This brings along with it many features most of our clients would never use. A more basic plan with that Web App capability would be a big improvement on our costs.

Incentivized

• I have had nothing but positive impacts from using Constant Contact.
• The church is large, and there are many subgroups and axillary groups within the church. Setting up specific groups based on responsibility, interest, member goals, and service needs allows me to send information quickly, saving valuable time for other tasks.
• Constant Contact allows leadership to stay personally engaged with the members I work with, without over-taxing my time. It feels so seamless.

Incentivized

• Allowed us to being all websites under a single umbrella, saving costs on similar products.
• It's increased our website turn time and made us faster and more efficient at launching websites.
• Edits and tweaks happen much faster as we have a customized environment.

Incentivized