Contently vs. Crownpeak CMS

It's helpful for top of marketing funnel writing that we can sometimes lose sight of because we are so ingrained in the product day to day. Contently is also helpful for long written pieces and ebooks that will take a significant amount of employee time to put together. I avoid using Contently for mid to bottom funnel marketing writing because my team will often have greater insight into the product function or use-case or product release, making them more adroit to the tone of the written piece and able to produce the content quickly.

Incentivized

Crownpeak DXM is a great solution if you are looking for a flexible platform that allows engineers to quickly develop while also making it easy for content authors to work especially in scenarios where you need multi-language support. It is also good for scenarios where you want a cloud-based solution and are looking for just one vendor to handle hosting and offer the CMS.

Incentivized

• Consolidating my work in one place to make my work life easier
• Contently is unique from other content marketing organizational tools in one key way. It hands you a network of freelance professionals eager for delegated work.
• You can search through a database of professionals to find the perfect person for your given project. Find individuals in your budget offering the exact skills and experience you need.

Incentivized

• Build & manage digital experiences without dependency on your IT team
• Built-in Digital Quality tool (DQM) tool allows you to check the quality of content and any accessibility issues and immediately flag any issues before publishing.
• Build websites with the component-based technology and spend less effort in creating the best user experience for the end-user

• I have been using it for 3.5 years, and have had no response from potential clients.
• The portfolio section is pretty easy to use, but I don't love the format.
• Since I'm not a client, I don't know just how easy it is for them to find new freelancers or how often it is actually used.
• Probably more suited for some types/concentrations of freelance writers, like finance, tech, or healthcare.

Incentivized

• Crownpeak moved to a web browser admin tool in 2018, which has made the admin experience much better, but there are still a couple of features missing from the browser version that won't arrive until later in 2019.
• Integration with 3rd party digital asset management tools would be great.
• Smoother integration with source control would be nice.

Incentivized

None of our Crownpeak clients are currently thinking about replatforming.

Crownpeak DXM is a flexible easy to use CMS platform speaking to the most challenging localization scenarios. Crownpeak users have the freedom to integrate DXM platform with their existing technology at no cost. Moving from legacy systems to the Saas platform is painless and cost-effective. Extensive targeting and personalization options are something that users will benefit from.

Incentivized

We have never encountered any issues with the availability.

Pages load very fast on production (assuming you develop with basic SEO practices in place) due to Crownpeak's publishing architecture. The slide downside is that publishing can be a bit slow at times.

I'm giving them a 10, but honestly, I've never reached out to them. I do see them putting out regular content on social media, so they might be responsive to questions there as well as regular customer support. In their posts and communication, they do seem to value their community, so hopefully, they have good customer support. And I've seen them asking for pitches from their community to publish well-paid articles during this stressful coronavirus time, and I really appreciate that.

Incentivized

Crownpeak DXM's service and support are outstanding. We have immediate access to both the tech support team and the software engineering team. We can get a support person on the phone whenever needed, and we can schedule impromptu training sessions at any time. Best support I have ever received from a platform provider in 20 years of software and application development.

Incentivized

We received on-site training from Crownpeak, the trainer had touched upon every possible scenario and provided great insights about the product & ease of implementation.

My team left training with a solid understanding of how to use the product and the developer training ended with a test to ensure the ability to properly develop was learned properly. Recently, Crownpeak has added a self-paced training option which makes it extremely flexible to on-board new developers.

SaaS model is perfect for us to avoid slow and costly version updates to get access to new features and functions. Crownpeak is a true SaaS model, so we get all the good new stuff without the need to invest in effort, time or money. this frees our teams to focus on content creation and deployment, which is pretty fast because the DXM publishes straight to html through the headless model.

I also opened an account with Skyword in 2019, which is a similar service. The person that recommended it was a travel writer, and since I've done that as well, I thought it might be a better fit. To this point, I've received no work from it either, and don't hold out a lot of hope. As previously mentioned, where I think Contently does well is by giving you an online portfolio, additional resources like a blog for learning, and a rates database for publications.

Incentivized

I was not at this team within my organization during the evaluation period of Crownpeak. However, my previous team used Sitecore. Crownpeak is a bit easier to use from a UI perspective and has more creative options within the tool. Sitecore's clunky UI also was a reason I found out later why we ended up using Crownpeak as our DXM.

Incentivized

In some recent projects we have delivered to our clients, we were able to roll out sites in shorter time period due the scalability of the Crownpeak's DXM solution.

• Contently contributors have produced some great inbound marking posts and creative materials saving our marketing team significant time allowing them to focus on more strategic plans for the business.
• The amount of time Contently has saved our internal creative writing staff has more than paid for itself!

Incentivized

• I'm pretty sure it raises our back-end development costs by making the development process (of creating input forms and producing outputs from the content) more complicated and painful than it needs to be.
• It helps lock our clients in to us because not a whole lot of agencies have Crownpeak expertise.
• It helps our clients not have to deal with their own IT teams, which they tend to dislike working with.

Incentivized