Contentstack vs. ExpressionEngine

Contentstack has flexible functionality which opens up a lot of possibilities for businesses with proactive web development teams to create their own website builder app to compete with 3rd party agencies. This is especially useful in a large enterprise where non-technical teams often turn to expensive outside agencies which cost more in the long run than an up-front investment into an in-house application.

Incentivized

For someone with a limited budget, it's hard to recommend ExpressionEngine simply because of the cost of the license and any add-ons just to get up and running. As a developer, the budget needs to be a certain amount before I can even consider ExpressionEngine - no matter how appropriate it is for the site. Besides that, I recommend ExpressionEngine for those who have a lot of content, have a need for a certain level of flexibility, or who have special feature requests. There are a number of ExpressionEngine add-on developers who are willing to help build (for a fee) custom add-ons to fulfill that need.

Incentivized

• The user interface is intuitive and cleanly designed.
• The functionality is flexible which allows us to build our own application behind the CMS that meets business needs without being restricted by limitations in the CMS.
• The service we get from our Account Manager and Technical contacts is excellent.

Incentivized

• ExpressionEngine has no preconceived ideas about how your content should look or what code is generated.
• A robust template engine makes integrating designs and content a breeze.
• The control panel can be customized to control what content managers have access to.

Incentivized

• In my opinion it's not very intuitive. I've found its difficult to understand how to best structure entries, especially if they are related
• In my experience, entries can get difficult to understand if weren't the creator. It would be helpful to have some meta data around the entry itself and the fields within them in my opinion.
• Integration with an A/B testing platform would be nice.

Incentivized

• Can be too cumbersome for smaller projects, takes time to pair down the built in functionality so our clients have to sift through unused features
• Large queries take significant processing power, recommended use of a cache module to store this data and speed up page load
• Backend can be overwhelming for clients, lots of things to manage in the control panel
• No way to repeat custom page fields or groups of fields, meaning page layout must be pretty established and not customizable from the control panel

Incentivized

I'm satisfied with the way that my site runs on EE. My primary concern is that support is now a profit center for EE's publisher and so they've consequently gutted their community support boards. However, a good EE community is developing at StackExchange. At this stage, I don't think that EE is a good choice for an individual site owner. WordPress or SquareSpace would be a better choice unless you have a budget for support.

ExpressionEngine is very powerful and flexible. With this flexibility comes a bit of a learning curve. There are some great online resources for getting up to speed with EE, but the control panel can be a bit daunting. A lot of EE's installation process involves settings, configurations and flipping of switches. It is tedious, but well worth it as you ultimately have a very robust, secure and scalable CMS. Also, as of version 2.9.2, the control panel isn't responsive natively. You'll want to have a big enough screen to see the full control panel UI. Personally, I think the control panel would benefit from a major overhaul. It would be nice to see the colors and UI controls "modernized" and be able to more effectively customize the layout. Yes, some of this is built-in, and there are third-party add-ons to help, but maybe we'll see more refinement in future versions.

Never experienced an issue like this with it

Incentivized

The admin section would slow to a crawl the larger the tag section grew. There were many areas where better pagination would've helped improve performance. Nothing complicated, which made the lag so frustrating

Incentivized

They have an in-app chat with their support team, who is always quick to respond and provide helpful answers. I've never walked away from an interaction without my issue being solved quickly and easily. They're also very communicative over email and are sure to follow up after any changes are made to ensure we're seeing the desired result. They are always very professional and easy to work with.

Incentivized

I have personally never found any complications when trying to receive support from EllisLab in regards to ExpressionEngine when using the support plans they offer. I have always been responded to promptly and received satisfactory help with whatever my needs were in an extremely timely manner. This makes rating the support offered an easy job for me

After installing the system a few times, you can see a pattern of things that have to be done to work the way you want them (settings, paths, etc.). By knowing what you want, you can put together some scripts that prepare the file system for installation, adjust post installation configuration settings, and install initial templates.

Contentstack has better international hosting support then Contentful and we found the presales and sales support people were MUCH more responsive than Contentful. The Sitecore sales process was very very slow and overly complex. We felt Sitecore had many features that were not valuable and the cost to benefit ratio was much lower compared to ContentStack

Incentivized

ExpressionEngine outweighs most all of its competitors by being so flexible. If you can imagine it, then you can build it with EE (ExpressionEngine). Most competitors lock you in with certain ways to build your website or use only their tools; ExpresionEngine gives you the freedom to build how you would like and decide how you want your site to run and operate. The ease of use for clients to go in and edit their content is great, and I am able to control the way they edit that content to make it the easiest for them. The feature set and plugins for EE are great, and I am able to provide top service for my clients by using EE.

Incentivized

Maybe it's scale-able from the content user perspective, but it was very limited from the programmers perspective. So many custom hacks were necessary that it reached a point it would be impossible to upgrade to a newer version

Incentivized

• We are able to prepare for large campaigns within a few days which can bel rolled our within a few clicks. This was previously never possible before we moved to Contentstack.
• We now have the tools and ability to architect in a way to take advantage of SEO and drive traffic. Our blog now serves more traffic that the rest of our website. This SEO effort wasn't possible before Contentstack.
• One of our KPI's for moving to headless was a faster website and we now deliver pages under our original target while serving more asset and content rich pages to visitors

Incentivized

• Being able to be recognized as a leader within the ExpressionEngine development community has led to us being sought out by those customers seeking expert guidance.
• We tend to specialize in using ExpressionEngine for our customers, so it has been easier to ramp new resources up on our development process, as well as be able to seek out independent experts to use as sub contractors or freelancers.
• As we have been using ExpressionEngine almost exclusively for a number of years, we have built a reusable repository of proprietary code that makes our development process much more efficient and decreases the effort required for our projects.

Incentivized