Cascade CMS

Cascade CMS

62 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Cascade CMS	Score8.2 out of 10	N/A	Cascade CMS (formerly Cascade Server) by Hannon Hill is a content management system, with built-in tools to help users eliminate stale content, increase digital outreach, and promote end-user adoption and accountability. Cascade CMS is designed for decentralized web teams in most major industries, including higher education, government, healthcare, and technology. Included is Clive, an engagement and real-time personalization tool for collecting information and using it to craft personalized…	N/A

Pricing

Cascade CMS

No answers on this topic

Pricing Offerings
Cascade CMS
Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes

Optional

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Community Pulse
Key User Insights
	Cascade CMS
Considered Both Products	Hannon Hill Verified User Chose Cascade CMS Cascade Server is miles ahead in usability and reliability. With DNN, I had to jump through hoops to add and edit content, and trying to customize was not easy. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Cascade CMS Fewer outages with Cascade. The templates are better and easier to navigate. Incentivized Helpful? Craig Campbell Director of University Web Communication in Marketing at University of Hartford (Higher Education, 501-1000 employees) Chose Cascade CMS Our latest round of CMS evaluations we looked at OmniUpdate, Drupal, and Wordpress as possible CMS choices. It quickly became apparent that all of the upper tier products seemed capable of managing strong websites, but upon a deeper investigation of our needs Cascade rose to … Incentivized Helpful? John Dezember Web & New Media Specialist at Cleveland State Community College (Higher Education, 201-500 employees) Chose Cascade CMS Cascade CMS focuses on managing content and gives you the tools to display this content any way that is needed. While it may lack some features/extensions found in other popular platforms, the user management, workflow and template engine are the best you can get. Incentivized Helpful? Andrew Bauserman Senior Web Architect at William & Mary (Higher Education, 1001-5000 employees) Chose Cascade CMS There are several fine CMS products on the market, and each serves its purpose. For our needs, Cascade CMS is the best alternative. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Cascade CMS We selected Cascade server seven years ago, and the CMS environment at the time was clearly different than it is today. We decided to go with a vendor solution rather than a free solution because the long term cost in hosting a free solution is not, in fact, free; we've found … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Cascade CMS Because the (bad) Cascade decision was made quickly by a small team, we have a larger team and a longer timeline, with a growing list of functionality that we expect a replacement system to have. We've been looking into a number of other products to replace Cascade. Highest on … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Cascade CMS The learning curve is minimal compared to Drupal. Implementation is easier Cascade Server is secure Incentivized Helpful? Mallory Rice Applications Manager in Customer Service at Harvard Medical School (Higher Education, 51-200 employees) Chose Cascade CMS I didn't have any input when it came to buying/using Cascade server. In fact, before using Cascade I wasn't aware that such a website management system existed! I imagined it was going to be much more complicated--editing individual code and CSS page by page, with very involved … Incentivized Helpful? Jeff Dillon Director of Web Services in Information Technology at California State University, Sacramento (Higher Education, 1001-5000 employees) Chose Cascade CMS Hannon Hill was chosen because of the architecture with the Cascade engine being separated from the published pages providing stability and security. The company is also focused on primarily higher education, the user group and feature set. The releases are always … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Cascade CMS The version of Sitecore that I use right now doesn't have a UI showing the assembled web page. That suits my current company's needs, but for most people, they want to see their changes within the tool as they make them, visible within their web page. Cascade Server does that … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Cascade CMS Cascade scales better. Incentivized Helpful? Collan Davidson Web Administrator in Social Media at True Value Company (Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees) Chose Cascade CMS Very well. It works just for our purpose. Incentivized Helpful? Michael G. Wagner Webmaster in Marketing at Hofstra University (Higher Education, 1001-5000 employees) Chose Cascade CMS WordPress offers a wide range of prebuilt templates, but Cascade Server offers great customization for folder structures and workflows. Incentivized Helpful? David Van Wie Manager, Campus Web Technology in Information Technology at SUNY Upstate Medical University (Hospital & Health Care, 5001-10,000 employees) Chose Cascade CMS We felt the overall level of customization that Cascade Server allowed us was the deciding factor in our selection. Its users and groups management was also very robust and provided us a better system, and overall better access, for content managers in our organization. Helpful? Erik Espana Associate Director of Web Communications in Marketing at Union College, Communications & Marketing (Higher Education, 501-1000 employees) Chose Cascade CMS In my limited experience with WordPress, I found it difficult to retrofit to use as a content managements system for a website. It's a great blogging solution and could easily be used to manage an organization's press releases. Incentivized Helpful? Alexander Christian Undergraduate Researcher at Northwestern University (Higher Education, 5001-10,000 employees) Chose Cascade CMS Cascade Server was the software I was required to learn. I have no further experience or suggestions for this software, other than its usage in basic website development functions. AutoCAT software allows for immediate access to basic functions of design, as well as the … Incentivized Helpful? Pranjit Kalita Website Upgradation and Management in Information Technology at Purdue University College of Science (Education Management, 1-10 employees) Chose Cascade CMS This is my first foray into web-content management, and I am using it simply because my supervisor required me to. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Cascade CMS I have not used any other products similar to Cascade Server at my current position. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Cascade CMS Cascade was the College of Liberal Arts and the department's choice. I was a front-end user and web content developer. I know Cascade is widely used at the College and at other colleges and departments, but I do not know the reasons they selected Cascade. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Cascade CMS Cascade is a significant improvement over WebCRMA in virtually all respects: more powerful and intuitive user interface, better multimedia integration, and a a greatly improved function set in terms of editing, reviewing, and publishing content. Although I did not play a role … Incentivized Helpful? Hrishikesh Deshkar IT and Communications Analyst in Social Media at School of Information Studies, Syracuse University (Information Technology and Services, 11-50 employees) Chose Cascade CMS It wasn't my personal choice to go for Cascade Server for my organization. But as I already said, Cascade Server is good for managing parent child websites which are uniform in design. I guess the level up to which uniformity can be maintained and traffic can be handled by … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Cascade CMS Cascade Server provides more formatting features. It pretty much provides all the features that a standard web service portal has and the website is written in complex programming languages such as c# or VB .Net, JAVA, J2EE, JSP etc. At the same time, Cascade Server provides … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Cascade CMS None, sorry. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Cascade CMS I have used DreamWeaver before and that was much more difficult and stressful to use. Cascade Server is a dream (no pun intended). Incentivized Helpful?
	Would buy again
	No answers on this topic
	Delivers good value for the price
	No answers on this topic
	Happy with the feature set
	No answers on this topic
	Lived up to sales and marketing promises
	No answers on this topic
	Implementation went as expected
No answers on this topic

Features

Cascade CMS

Comparison of Security features of Cascade CMS
Feature	Cascade CMS 8.0 19 Ratings 3% below category average
Role-based user permissions	8.019 Ratings

Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Cascade CMS
Feature	Cascade CMS 7.1 13 Ratings 9% below category average
API	7.012 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language	7.37 Ratings

Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Cascade CMS
Feature	Cascade CMS 7.1 19 Ratings 10% below category average
WYSIWYG editor	6.119 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness	6.018 Ratings
Admin section	8.019 Ratings
Page templates	9.017 Ratings
Library of website themes	5.52 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design	7.015 Ratings
Publishing workflow	9.019 Ratings
Form generator	6.47 Ratings

Comparison of Web Content Management features of Cascade CMS
Feature	Cascade CMS 6.9 18 Ratings 8% below category average
Content taxonomy	8.013 Ratings
SEO support	7.014 Ratings
Bulk management	9.014 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions	6.011 Ratings
Community / comment management	4.85 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	Cascade CMS
Small Businesses	Umbraco CMS Score7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Square Online Score7.7 out of 10
Enterprises	RWS Tridion Sites Score9 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Cascade CMS
Likelihood to Recommend	9.9 (44 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	9.1 (26 ratings)
Usability	9.1 (4 ratings)
Availability	6.7 (4 ratings)
Performance	8.0 (1 ratings)
Support Rating	9.1 (5 ratings)
In-Person Training	7.0 (1 ratings)
Online Training	5.0 (1 ratings)
Implementation Rating	9.1 (4 ratings)
Configurability	9.0 (1 ratings)
Ease of integration	6.0 (1 ratings)
Product Scalability	5.0 (1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale	6.0 (1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale	5.0 (1 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Cascade CMS
Likelihood to Recommend	Hannon Hill Cascade Server is well suited with it's WYSIWYG editor being better than most editors that I have used in other systems. In context, editing makes adding content easy compared to the last CMS I used where you had to wing it and view the page outside of the CMS to see if it was correct. The ability mix HTML, CSS, and the Script of your choice anywhere and with ease. The scenarios were Cascade Server is less appropriate would be in the use of compilers or programs like Visual studio. You need to go out of Cascade Server and go to other environments to perform tasks and then copy the result to Cascade Server. You can write directly in Cascade Server, but it's easier to do in and editor that is specific to a function. Incentivized Verified User Read full review
Pros	Hannon Hill Cascade CMS makes no assumptions about your content. Templates control how the content gets displayed. Workflows are intuitive and allow for one or more people to review content before it is published. The published site is static (no database connection) which allows for faster page loads and reduced risk of attack. Incentivized John Dezember Web & New Media Specialist Read full review
Cons	Hannon Hill Cascade CMS is not an out-of-the-box pre-built system that you can install, turn on and expect to be serving sites and pages on day one. It's not a blogging system like WordPress, or a drag-and-drop system like SquareSpace (both of which I've used for their own purposes). You need to have someone tasked with management and system administration – and if you implement the on-premise self-hosted version, you ought to have several people. We have the university's IT shop handling infrastructure (server hardware, containers, clustering, operating systems, load-balancing, DNS, database servers, NAS/SAN drives), our Web & Design team managing Cascade CMS (system settings, sites, templates, permissions) and managers coordinating each respective academic unit (A&S, business, education, law, marine science). Andrew Bauserman Senior Web Architect Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	Hannon Hill Changing systems would require too much effort. Our institution is using Cascade Server, WordPress and Drupal but we only serve 2200 students so we have 1 too many content management systems. Reflecting on current technical resources we would like to drop down to 2. This effort hasn't moved forward because of the extensive work required to migrate content and train users in a new system. Incentivized Jason Slater Associate Director of Web Communications Read full review
Usability	Hannon Hill Cascade CMS is completely usable on mobile devices, we can train our content editors in a single 2-hour session, and we support 1,000 users with a very small team. There is a level of complexity for the system administrators, site managers and web programmers who implement templates and content types. But the complexity is neither arbitrary nor inconsistent – and once learned provides a powerful environment within which we can develop robust sites that are beautiful and powerful, yet easy for our content editors to manage. Andrew Bauserman Senior Web Architect Read full review
Reliability and Availability	Hannon Hill Amazing customer service and VERY customizable. Incentivized Graham Lewis Webmaster Read full review
Performance	Hannon Hill Does a great job. Incentivized Collan Davidson Web Administrator Read full review
Support Rating	Hannon Hill They have always regarded any question or problem we encountered as very important. We have never felt that they ignore or downplay any issue and not once has anything been left unresolved. They also hold an annual conference where users are invited to attend and share their experiences and wisdom with the entire Cascade community. And with the care and support the provide, we all feel a part of that community. David Van Wie Manager, Campus Web Technology Read full review
In-Person Training	Hannon Hill Training was helpful. Incentivized Collan Davidson Web Administrator Read full review
Online Training	Hannon Hill Still needed that physical help Incentivized Collan Davidson Web Administrator Read full review
Implementation Rating	Hannon Hill The key to any CMS implementation is PLAN, PLAN, PLAN. Proper planning with Cascade can increase your satisfaction exponentially once the site migration/creation is complete. When all is said and done, your implementation can make your site run like a Yugo or Maserati. Be smart and deliberate in your decisions. Drive the Maserati. It is already paid for. Incentivized William White Marketing Manager Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Hannon Hill We selected Cascade server seven years ago, and the CMS environment at the time was clearly different than it is today. We decided to go with a vendor solution rather than a free solution because the long term cost in hosting a free solution is not, in fact, free; we've found Cascade to have been an excellent choice for us. Incentivized Verified User Read full review
Scalability	Hannon Hill I used it only a few times. Incentivized Collan Davidson Web Administrator Read full review
Return on Investment	Hannon Hill Initially, ROI was positive - because we completely redesigned the website when we implemented Cascade. Over time, the inability to keep up with the latest interactive tools has reduced visitors time on site. Also over time, the difficulty of use has led to less buy-in by backend users, leading to outdated pages, little timely information, and lower visitors. Incentivized Verified User Read full review
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