Amaxus CMS (discontinued) vs. Evoq Content vs. Percussion CMS

Amaxus is well suited as a development platform and content management system for companies who have a dedicated, experienced development team because it has such complex functionality. It is not well suited for companies whose main content updater will be a person with limited development experience, because it is so hard to learn and understand how to use.

Incentivized

If you just need to implement a website that is dynamic but not real big in Data Processing almost anyone can do so with very limited knowledge as long as you know how to use a Word Processor and your Browser. If you don't have experience with setting up a Server to run a website there are Companies like PowerDNN, Rackspace and WinHost that can help and I recommend them in that order if you are using DNN. If you need a more sophisticated e-commerce website and don't have much experience with Servers, SQL Server etc. then you should find a consultant to help you install and setup not just the DNN Platform but also select the proper Modules to accomplish what you want to do. If you need a highly customized website that is very data intensive and you are not experienced then be sure to save yourself the time and money by finding a qualified Consultant to help you. The beauty of DNN is that it can handle as simple or as complicated of an Application as you need depending on what your needs are and how far you want to take it.

Best suited for large organizations where everyone knows how to deal with Java in an increasingly Java unfriendly world. Said organization should be willing to pay a huge price for a piece of dinosaur technology

Incentivized

• There is a lot of flexibility and power with what you can do.
• The client has a lot of power to make changes on their own without needing a development team.

Incentivized

• DNN is a feature-rich, open-source project with a flexible license. This let us use it without licensing costs for custom solutions or as-is with no custom code just plug-in modules.
• DNN is written in Microsoft .NET C#. This allows our developers and our customers to use their existing skill set to install and maintain the solution.
• DNN is made for Windows platform, allowing us and our customers to deploy solutions to existing Windows servers or in some cases hosted platforms.
• DNN integrates with Windows authentication allowing us to deploy intranet solutions and use single sign-on for improved user experience and security.

• Separate CMS environment publishes to remote server environment - great for security
• Highly scalable
• Full scale workflow allows for custom routing, approving, etc..

Incentivized

• There is a huge learning curve for developers. All our new website builds were going beyond the timeline because of the learning curve.
• It is very complex and teaching our clients how to use it required several training sessions.

Incentivized

• It can be a bit heavy-handed when it comes to styling. It's sometimes necessary to spend a little extra time to overcome styling issues.
• Up until version 8 of the core DNN platform, implementing single page applications (SPAs) required extra efforts.
• It is very difficult to split a site across multiple servers for load balancing

Incentivized

• One word: JAVA! We don't live in the 1990's anymore! An AJAX/DHTML environment seems a long time coming.
• Horrible end-user experience, learning curve. Our end users' inability to easily use the archaic, Java-based interface, means they send the web developer their content requests. This creates a huge bottleneck and completely defeats the purpose of a CMS.
• Image mangement and integration with content is aweful and time consuming. An image processing tool called ImedImage was developed for Percussion at one point, and left completely stagnant with very little support.
• Implementation is extremely complicated, given the complexity of the system. Sure, scalability is a good thing, but there is very little out-of-the box function. Don't expect to implement a site as quickly as with other CMS platforms.

Incentivized

Even though DNN is a good CMS, I have worked with other CMSs which are far more robust at this point, and would not be overly inclined to select DNN unless cost of the product is the most important factor along with staying on .NET. DNN is a whole package so unless the client has a requirement of including authentication, authorization for users, eCommerce, sticking to something simple is a better option.

Evoq proved to be a solid backbone for our property-management portal, handling ≈300 active rental listings without performance hiccups. The page-builder made it straightforward to craft listing templates that surface photo galleries, floor-plan PDFs, and embedded map pins, while role-based workflows let leasing agents edit unit details (price, availability, pet policy) without touching global site settings—a big win for operational control.

For the management side, the platform’s extensibility let us plug in a third-party rent-payment widget and an automated maintenance-ticket form with minimal custom code. Evoq’s built-in analytics have already highlighted which neighborhoods and bedroom counts drive the most traffic, guiding our marketing spend.

Two caveats:


Search & filter logic – Out-of-the-box search was too shallow for renters who expect Zillow-style filtering. We had to commission a custom module for filter chips (price range, amenities, walk score), which added time and cost.
Mobile image optimization – High-resolution gallery images affected load times on 4G; a CDN or Evoq’s Digital Asset Optimizer add-on is advisable.



Overall, Evoq delivers reliable content governance and enough flexibility to support both consumer-facing listings and back-office property-management workflows, provided you budget for advanced search customization and image delivery tuning.

I don't see how it could get any better unless they moved their staff into our offices. You have available to you any type of Support you need or want, both paid and free from thousands of developers and consultants all over the world. You might even find some on Mars if you look hard enough.Also, with all of the available resources available from your Browser you can literally find the answer to any question you have in a matter of minutes.

Evoq proved to be a solid backbone for our property-management portal, handling ≈300 active rental listings without performance hiccups. The page-builder made it straightforward to craft listing templates that surface photo galleries, floor-plan PDFs, and embedded map pins, while role-based workflows let leasing agents edit unit details (price, availability, pet policy) without touching global site settings—a big win for operational control.

For the management side, the platform’s extensibility let us plug in a third-party rent-payment widget and an automated maintenance-ticket form with minimal custom code. Evoq’s built-in analytics have already highlighted which neighborhoods and bedroom counts drive the most traffic, guiding our marketing spend.

Two caveats:


Search & filter logic – Out-of-the-box search was too shallow for renters who expect Zillow-style filtering. We had to commission a custom module for filter chips (price range, amenities, walk score), which added time and cost.
Mobile image optimization – High-resolution gallery images affected load times on 4G; a CDN or Evoq’s Digital Asset Optimizer add-on is advisable.



Overall, Evoq delivers reliable content governance and enough flexibility to support both consumer-facing listings and back-office property-management workflows, provided you budget for advanced search customization and image delivery tuning.

I have used an in-house CMS which was very simple and only allowed the user to update very basic templated content, and I have used Sitecore, which is sort of like a middle-of-the-road. Sitecore is great because it allows for the user to have a lot of control over templates and updating content, but it's not so complex that it is very difficult and time-consuming to learn how to use, like Amaxus.

Incentivized

Drupal is a highly expensive tool and is not offering anything extraordinary at a high price. If I keep its pricing in account then there should be some extraordinary features but unfortunately, there isn’t anything special about it; rather it was slow in its working. All these things actually forced us to move to Evoq that is just perfect in its working. Its working speed, interface, and UX are so simple that none of our team members find it tough to utilize. It has so many features like content scheduling and rich text edit. It allows easy editing of the text as well, and one can directly add text according to need.

Incentivized

No contest. I can't wait to get off of Percussion CMS.

Incentivized

• It has a negative impact because it put us back on our timelines.
• It had a negative impact because our customers didn't like the learning curve to use it.
• It had a negative impact because it caused so much stress among our team to learn it.

Incentivized

• DNN have given us the ability to have basic sites for clients up and running in a very short time. This makes the client happy.
• DNN has taken the trivial, simple tasks of changing text on a page or an image on a page and put it into the hands of the client. They do not have to pay us to do it and that also frees up more time for us to spend on development.

• We are locked into Percussion CMS simply due to the expense and complexity of migrating to another solution (and the lack of time and budget to do so). I long for the day when I am no longer required to support Percussion CMS, to say the least.

Incentivized