Contentful vs. HCL Digital Experience

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Contentful
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Contentful is a cloud based CMS solution that provides the ability to manage content across multiple platforms.The editing interface allows for managing content interactively and provides developers the ability to deliver the content with the programming language and template framework of their choice.
$489
HCL Digital Experience
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
HCL Digital Experience is based on the former IBM Web Content Manager and IBM WebSphere Portal products, acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018. The product allows the user to create, manage and deliver engaging omnichannel digital experiences to audiences with responsive content, targeted offers, seamlessly integrated applications and consistent branding across channels (web, mobile, and hybrid mobile/web applications and more).N/A
Pricing
ContentfulHCL Digital Experience
Editions & Modules
Team
489/month
Community
Free
Enterprise
Custom
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ContentfulHCL Digital Experience
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Features
ContentfulHCL Digital Experience
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Contentful
8.0
9 Ratings
0% below category average
HCL Digital Experience
5.0
5 Ratings
46% below category average
Role-based user permissions8.09 Ratings5.05 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Contentful
8.1
10 Ratings
5% above category average
HCL Digital Experience
4.1
5 Ratings
65% below category average
API8.79 Ratings4.14 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language7.57 Ratings4.15 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Contentful
8.0
11 Ratings
5% above category average
HCL Digital Experience
2.9
5 Ratings
89% below category average
WYSIWYG editor7.34 Ratings7.04 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness9.07 Ratings3.15 Ratings
Admin section8.79 Ratings3.15 Ratings
Page templates7.64 Ratings1.15 Ratings
Library of website themes7.52 Ratings1.15 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design8.26 Ratings4.04 Ratings
Publishing workflow8.510 Ratings1.14 Ratings
Form generator7.01 Ratings3.02 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Contentful
8.3
10 Ratings
12% above category average
HCL Digital Experience
1.9
5 Ratings
115% below category average
Content taxonomy8.59 Ratings1.15 Ratings
SEO support7.78 Ratings2.15 Ratings
Bulk management7.76 Ratings2.13 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions8.77 Ratings2.14 Ratings
Community / comment management9.01 Ratings2.13 Ratings
Best Alternatives
ContentfulHCL Digital Experience
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Divi
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Score 9.8 out of 10
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Score 7.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Image Relay
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Score 9.5 out of 10
Tridion
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Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Tridion
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
ContentfulHCL Digital Experience
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(11 ratings)
9.0
(11 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
5.7
(6 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
ContentfulHCL Digital Experience
Likelihood to Recommend
Contentful
Well suited for our needs of multiple images for auto auctions from a variety of sellers. Pointing them to one platform is easier than attempting to use a variety of platforms as we were doing before (email, slack, Dropbox and Google Drive would randomly be used by a variety of employees )
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HCL Technologies
HCL DX does really well at managing and maintaining the site. It allows the business to basically maintain the site while IT spent time developing new and enhanced functions. The main issue I currently have with HCL DX is not directly with the product but it does play a role. It is difficult finding skilled resources to support HCL DX in my experience.
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Pros
Contentful
  • Flexible. This CMS can be easily extended and provide access to dynamic content
  • Simple. The WYSWG is very easy to work with and identifying pages and content in the system is fairly easy
  • Clean Interface. The interface is clean and uncluttered keeping focus on the content and not other factors.
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HCL Technologies
  • With Version 8.5, IBM Web Content Manager introduced in place editing capabilities which allow authors to make content edits on sections of the page instead of going to the content itself. This feature allows authors to make changes in context of the page and preview changes within the actual look and feel of a live page.
  • Projects provide a collaborative atmosphere for the author community so that authors can interact and work as a team to manage inter-dependent content changes under one project and publish all changes at once, instead of working separately on individual content changes. This brings awareness across authors in an organization and easy knowledge share.
  • IBM Digital Data Connector is a cool feature that allows [users] to integrate external content sources onto the portal using IBM Web Content Manager presentation components. This allows UI/UX designers to present integrated external data in any manner they want, manage UI changes with an underlying approval process and leverage syndication to push changes live immediately.
  • IBM Web Content Manager offers a targeted content feature that allows business users to deliver personalized content to customers based on customer demographic information, browsing history and other transaction related information. Any rules created follow the publishing process thereby making it just a configurable item resulting in less turn around to turn on the feature on a website.
  • IBM Web Content Manager offers 'multi lingual solution' out of the box which allows content creation for almost all popular languages.
  • Syndication feature has improved a lot and it now provides a detailed views comprising of 'failed items', 'items that have syndicated successfully, 'items in queue'. Failed items view provides detailed and clear cut information of what resulted in failure helping IT to troubleshoot problems easily.
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Cons
Contentful
  • Contentful uses "references" to allow you to build very modular content. If I have a "slider" content type, I can create a "slide" content type which references a "button" content type, and so forth. This works well, but I occasionally wish there was a better solution for one-off content, like a settings page. Currently, this is done for creating an entire content type called "settings" with a single entry. Not a big deal, but not ideal, either.
  • There are a few quirks with GatsbyJS integration, etc, but these issues are being fixed and improved upon very quickly.
  • A minor gripe, but Contentful does not have a way to organize fields within an entry. Entries with many fields are somewhat tiresome to scroll through.
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HCL Technologies
  • IBM Web Content Manager should provide some easily usable connectors through a GUI to connect to bring content from custom data sources including connecting to Salesforce and custom databases.
  • Should further optimize and enhance creation of rich and responsive content driven UIs on various digital channels.
  • Should further optimize and enhance content personalization features.
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Likelihood to Renew
Contentful
No answers on this topic
HCL Technologies
IBM products always moves forward to adapt to new requirements and technologies. I have used versions 6, 6.1, 7 and 8 of IBM WCM, and I know IBM is ready to revamp the tool based on emerging needs, and still provide the capabilities to migrate your old system to the newer versions.
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Usability
Contentful
No answers on this topic
HCL Technologies
New versions has increased user experience facilitating usability.
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Support Rating
Contentful
No answers on this topic
HCL Technologies
We had some issues related with performing and the support was suitable and sucessful.
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Implementation Rating
Contentful
No answers on this topic
HCL Technologies
Implementation was successful due to Websphere application server used.
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Alternatives Considered
Contentful
In the past we've used WordPress to manage documentation content. WordPress was more flexible than Contentful but also prone to inconsistencies and we ended having a lot of hacks to accomplish various WordPress tricks. With Contentful there's less ambiguity so content producers are less likely to go astray. We also have our own in-house programmatic template solution for managing content, but this was a previous pain point when we needed to get the dev team to do a deploy for every content change.
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HCL Technologies
Magento and Prestashop are E-commerce CMS platforms. They are used in a different scale of application than WCM.
Concerning Joomla, it's a useful CMS forsmaller website. Once again this is an other scale of application than WCM Liveray can compete WCM 7 concerning the : ¤ specific development ¤ security ¤ responsive
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Return on Investment
Contentful
  • Positive - new hires are able to get onboarded quicker with us using Contentful
  • Positive - we can customize the journey of what modules/material the user sees after a course/video/article
  • Positive - it's been an overall game changer when hiring external candidates who need extensive training
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HCL Technologies
  • Negative: Very complex architecture for on-premise deployments (too many servers to installed)
  • Positive: Easy customization
  • Negative: Architecture limited to cloud solutions
  • WCM is an old product and needs an update
  • Blog, and community are not integrated in Digital Manager for discussion
  • Templates are not available to integrate basic services (FileNet, more complex BPM , e-commerce)
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ScreenShots

Contentful Screenshots

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