Adobe Business Catalyst was a cloud-hosted system for building and managing web content and online stores with a built-in CRM framework in addition to sales, service, and marketing features including eCommerce and Email Marketing tools. It has been end of life (EOL) since 2020.
$10
per month
Webflow
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Webflow is a Website Experience Platform for modern marketing teams, used to visually build, manage, and optimize websites that offer both the consumer experience teams expect and enterprise-grade performance and scale.
$18
per month
Pricing
Adobe Business Catalyst (Discontinued)
Webflow
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Basic
$18
per month
CMS
$29
per month
Ecommerce - Standard
$42
per month
Business
$49
per month
Ecommerce - Plus
$84
per month
Ecommerce - Advanced
$235
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Business Catalyst (Discontinued)
Webflow
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Up to a 30% discount available for annual pricing.
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.
Webflow is great for designing pages and creating a really nice looking website, without needing to be a pro designer. However, trying to scale a company blog for SEO leaves a lot of room for desire. There are various SEO-related shortcomings (like how canonical tags are added to pages) and I also need to add a lot of custom code elements to blog posts to get the desired control. This means adding new posts and getting them looking the way we want takes way more time than it should do. Also doesn't support next-gen images, which is impacting our page speed scores and leaving us behind when it comes to Core Web Vitals update. Finally, the fact that only one person can enter the designer at one time is really annoying. I get that the Editor should be the solution to this, but it's so so so slow and jumpy that this is essentially unusable.
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.
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.
The Content Management System needs improvement. In my experience, it's very difficult to organise all our content at big volumes. We want to create a resources section where we can categorize our content but there isn't an easy or intuitive way to do it
In my opinion, it's incredibly difficult to create tables in an article
You have to do custom coding for anchor links within an article and it's time consuming and, in my opinion, super annoying
Website designs are not responsive we need to keep designing a separate mobile version
In my opinion, Formatting content in articles is annoying compared to other CMSs like Wordpress, Shopify, Wix, Blogger, etc. Worst experience I've had.
Changes to the nav bar on the homepage do not reflect universally, we needed to do the same changes all over again for our blog and mobile
Content editors need to keep logging in every time they add content
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.
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.
Simple, intuitive interface that is continually improving. The tools and styling of the panels are well-designed, and you quickly get used to the components, variables, styles, assets, etc. There is lots of support for training, and plenty of resources and templates are available. Being able to use this through the browser is great, and this enables straightforward collaboration with colleagues, even more so when they are working remotely.
In my experience, their customer service is an absolute joke, I tried reaching out to them they took forever. I had to keep following up with them as if they never received it in the first place. It’s a new platform, so guidance is needed. Tried the university they offer, in my opinion, it is completely useless, I would just completely move on from this website.
In my opinion, it is horrible, the rendering takes forever. I have the newest MacBook and the platform will still lag and slow down on me. I’m not a developer, I am a designer which makes it worst because I am using the features they are providing not extra coding features. In my opinion, it is a horrible platform really, stay away.
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 haven't had to engage them from a support perspective; however, there is a considerable user community for tips/ideas/troubleshooting and the like. I believe the Pro plan supports additional resources but we didn't find that the cost justified the outcome. Overall the need for support has been relatively minor.
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.
We loved the feature set and extensibility. It's a little pricey but when we have the time to devote to a project it shows why Webflow is such a good fit. Of course there are lots of other things you can use it for, but it's been working for us for one-off marketing projects.
I feel it doesn’t perform the way it’s supposed to and it doesn’t have any beneficial factors to it. In my opinion, there is no reason to use a platform like this when Wix and Shopify, and WordPress exist. I believe Webflow is a platform that shouldn’t exist and it’s only popular because of the hype it received. I tried it and hate it completely.
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.
